Other than for a few areas of the forest that are relatively open, even on a sunny day like yesterday the forest interior tends to have a dusky appearance. Light is slightly muted at most times, and the effect seems to highlight the stark contrast between the accumulated snow layers comprising the snowpack on the forest floor and the tree trunks that rise from that floor in shades of darkness; black, charcoal greys and the occasional buff ivory of birches. There is also the slight contrast in the landscape of small clusters of immature beech and ironwood, reluctant to give up their fall leaves, providing small blotches of orange-brown for colour-contrast.

Ambling along the forest trails, looking ahead and skyward, against the blue sky the towering height of large old trees at the highest point of the forest canopy appear illuminated by the setting sun, a blaze of fiery light in contrast to their neighbours whose height fails to catch the sun's setting rays that reach so far and wide.

We'd set out a little later than usual in the day yesterday afternoon causing us to miss the spectacular visions of sun hovering low enough on the horizon, yet high enough to dangle through the treeline in a blaze of glorious light, sunrays fanning out to embrace a wider spectrum of naked deciduous branches and green conifers alike.


After last week's spate of icy temperatures we're now once again in a spell of milder weather. We've watched over the past several days as the gathering of ice over the ravine's stream has gradually melted, fully opening the creek once again, facilitating its normal flow with the addition of a modest snow-melt.

We're a little slower now, mounting the hillsides to approach the higher ridges, so Jackie and Jillie kindly lend themselves to our progress, straining to pull us laggards uphill when their patience ebbs at our inability to grasp the snow as they do with their four paws, while we struggle to gain traction, slipping backward now and again, carried by the snow slippage.

People haven't bothered leashing their larger-breed dogs in fear of coming across coyotes unexpectedly, figuring, one imagines, that they'll have no problem controlling any situation that might arise. Some companion dogs are only just slightly larger than our two, and they are permitted to run about freely even now, their humans seemingly unconcerned. They have never, after all, like ourselves, run into such a situation. So it's hard to imagine it occurring, much less what the outcome might conceivably be.

Everyone figures that large dogs can look after themselves. And that's our impression as well. This, without taking into account the very real fact that dogs have their own personalities and they are as different from one to another as are those of humans; some are assertive, ready to react at any time, while others are decidedly timid and uncertain, and every other personality across the entire spectrum between and beyond. And then there's the reality that one of the dogs attacked in the ravine and requiring surgery was a large-breed dog. As was the dog that was killed, over on the west side of Ottawa.

Before we finished up our walk yesterday we were treated to an exhibition of pure unadulterated exhilaration when we briefly met up with a family hiking the trails with their large, loose-limbed, Apricot Poodle mix which ran back and forth in a continual dizzy between us and Jackie and Jillie and its approaching family. Its sheer zest for life and adventure was so communicable, so celebratory, it would be hard not to admire and applaud such overt manifestations of creature delight in life.

Earlier, we'd also caught up with others, several people we've long been acquainted with as fellow ravine-walkers and their dogs; where their dogs, one a black Lab the other a miniature Apricot Poodle, had a whale of a time racing one another uphill and down, swerving back and forth in the pure joy of motion in a landscape so much to their preference over the sterile presence of the concrete jungle above the ravine.