Our daughter and granddaughter live out in the country, and they have plenty of exposure to wild animals that share the land with them and their neighbours. They adopted an Anatolian herding dog from a rescue group about a year ago that wasn't yet a year old, and she's been a great companion to them. They now have two other rescue dogs as well, both still puppies, along with an elderly Chihuahua, the last of their first pack of dogs. Two nights ago Lily, the herding dog, decided to leap the deck railing after a skunk. The skunk defended itself and Lily had a face full of outrage.

Pandemonium ensued, our daughter smearing tomato paste into Lily's mouth, over her nose, and Lily leaping about everywhere in distress, gagging, retching, foaming at the mouth, refusing to drink water to diffuse the effect of the spray. Once Lily calmed down, she spent the night fitfully sleeping, while drooling and snuffling. And she smells, of course, pretty awful. So, incidentally, does the house now. If there's a moral to the story it's hard to imagine scolding a dog for choosing to run after the wrong crittur. But she's eating again, and seems fairly normal after her trial of error.

 For us, all is calm. The foccacia I made yesterday turned out well. I had mortar-and-pestled the rosemary rather than use the sprigs, into a finer form to sprinkle over the bread and it was wonderfully fragrant. And this morning I decided to bake a cherry-blueberry pie, since I had leftover cherries and lots of blueberries. It's the season, after all, for fresh fruit pies, with the abundance of all kinds of fruit now in the marketplace.

It's turned out to be an extraordinarily windy day, and a cool one, with a high of 17C, albeit sunny. In fact, a beautiful day. We just needed to wear light cotton jackets against the cool temperature and the cooler wind and off we went in the afternoon for our ramble through the woodland trails. We thought a little excitement for Jackie and Jillie wouldn't be a bad idea, so decided to extend our hike a bit, and go along to an area within the forest that we don't usually visit.

We did once, many years ago, make that part of the ravine an almost daily destination. It looked far different then than it does now. There's an almost parkland-like atmosphere where years ago it was rough and natural; now a kind of meadow area is maintained with grass regularly cut and trails leading around the meadow. Back when we used it familiarly the only trails were those occasional hikers had made over the years.

We used to backpack our now-25-year-old granddaughter every morning over those trail. When she became older we picked wild berries for her fresh off their stalks, just as we do now for Jackie and Jillie. All those canes that were so productive and surrounded by other shrubs and trees are no longer in evidence. And those that are elsewhere in the area appear unproductive. That part of the ravine and the forest is somewhat different from the part we consider 'ours' in the sense that it's so relatively close to home.

Because we were taking a route that was different, that they barely remember, that they've only been to several times in their lives, Jackie and Jillie were excited and enthusiastic, running ahead, chasing each other, looping in and out of the trail to explore underbrush in a landscape different than the one they're accustomed to. A bridge that takes us up to the flats presented a problem. The last time we'd gone that way, last fall, Jillie had refused to tread over the bridge and had to be carried. She stopped at the bridge again, again refusing to run over it and Irving carried her over.

Jackie is heedless of such things; what motivates Jillie is a puzzle to us. Up there we found goldenrod in bloom and along with good healthy plots of yarrow. Pin cherries hung bright red from the trees. Queen Anne's lace, henbane and daisies were everywhere in bloom and stands of fall asters were tall and mature, preparing to burst into flower. It's a much more open area than our part of the ravine, unless one takes trails leading to the bowels of the ravine, as it were. Which we once did, but no longer do; for one thing most of the trails we were familiar with haven't been in use for decades and the forest has closed in on them.

Vitis labrusca grapes hung from great old vines scrambling their way high over trees. When we were first familiar with that area, there was one mature vine; now that original vine is absent and others have taken its place, likely its offspring, elsewhere along the trail, some of them just beginning to put out grape clusters, others in the near-to-ripening stage.

And the piece de resistance, the venerable old pine; we had to visit it. It looks robust and healthy still. It has an immense girth, its main trunk short, with huge lateral limbs pushing out from every side. It easily represents the oldest tree in the forest, and likely when the virgin forest was being cut with foresters looking for tall, straight pines, this one was left because of its outstretched, low-on-the-trunk limbs.