His new motto is 'never without cookies'. He cannot now bear to disappoint all the dogs that have become familiar with his presence in the ravine. They spot him, dash toward him, then docilely sit beside where he stands, on the side closest to where his bag dangles with its cache of cookies. Dogs that were once shy or standoffish all acknowledge his presence.

Jackie and Jillie now associate the presence of other dogs with their opportunity to score more cookies. As it is, the little rascals remember previous spots where we've stopped along the trails briefly to hand out cookies and look expectantly at Irving as though plaintively whining: 'well, you doled them out right here before, what's wrong with right now?'

But they know of a certainty that if other dogs are being indulged with cookies, they will be, too. This morning there were quite a few encounters. Likely people wanting to make up the gap of the last few days when it was iffy finding a brief opening between heavy downpours to get out with their pets, so quite a few were out and about this morning.

Destined to be a mostly sunny day after all that rain, and not particularly hot, but humid again and breezy. The wind kept dislodging excess water off the forest canopy onto the trails below since it hadn't been all that long before that the last of the rain had come down. The cracks in the forest floor that had begun to open and widen reflecting a paucity of moisture in the mostly clay soil are now closing back up again as the clay absorbs the rain and swells with it.

It was too sodden to make our way through the thicket of grasses and wildflowers on the narrowing path that accesses it; not for us particularly, but it would have drenched Jackie and Jillie so we bypassed the meadow this morning. Which meant that I gave extra attention to the area above the ravine colonized by Himalayan orchids; their perky bright pink orchid flowerheads emphasized by their drenched state, the flowers and foliage slicked with the shellacking effect of the rain.

Halfway through our hike on the trails we came across something we'd never before seen. From a bit of a distance we assumed it was a cocoon, but approaching closer it became evident that this cocoon had many legs and was in fact a pure white, fair-sized caterpillar, the first of its kind we'd ever seen. Called a white hickory tussock moth caterpillar, it has a reputation of causing an itchy rash through the liquid it exudes as a self-protective mechanism, through protruding dark hairs.

That's the thing about tramping about in nature; you never know what you're going to come across. We came across in fact, a woman we've seen on previous occasions with her two little poodles. While Irving picks wild apples to share out with Jackie and Jillie, this woman picks them to toss for her little dogs to chase after. Their food function is superseded by their playtime-ball function for those little fellows.

Charming, but for the fact that the woman turned back on the trail to retrace where she had begun tossing the apple/ball, explaining to us that her bracelet had flown off her wrist with one of her tosses. A gift from her late husband, it wasn't something she meant to carelessly lose in the forest. Its colour, she wryly informed Irving, was much the same as the detritus on the forest floor; woody-brown.

She passed us in the opposite direction retracing her steps, her two little dogs faithfully following, and we peered about as we continued our own traipse through the trail, until Irving suddenly bent down and retrieved the lost bracelet, simultaneously shouting out to the woman behind us that it had been found.