Mid-November, and it's almost time to haul out the winter gear. It was raining heavily, the last time we took Jackie and Jillie out to the backyard before going up to bed last night. A lone little raccoon was on the porch, delicately selecting choice peanuts under the porch overhang. Neither Jackie nor Jillie paid him much attention, a far cry from their first sight of them many months back when they shrieked the alarum. We've started tucking the puppies up under a fuzzy blanket these cold nights, and they've taken to it. It's always colder on the second floor of the house. 

By morning the rain had frozen while twirling its way down from the clouds, and there was an appreciable gathering of snow in the garden and on the deck. It lasted but a few hours as the temperature rose to 2C, and the steady drip of melting snow off the canopy over the deck made for icy puddles on the deck. Jillie daintily makes her way around them to avoid getting wet, Jackie forges straight ahead, it doesn't bother him one bit.

We decided after cleaning up from breakfast that we'd change our routine to ensure we wouldn't end up entering the forest at dusk as occurred yesterday, given the return of the coyotes to the ravine. By the time I had cleaned up the kitchen, the bathroom and made up our bed it was late morning, so that's when we set off under a heavily clouded sky.

In deference to their size because they get colder quicker than large dogs do, Jackie and Jillie wore waterproof, winter-weight coats, and we layered a few heavy sweaters under our jackets, intermediate, not yet winter-wear. So despite the cold we were comfortable enough, all of us as we negotiated the most slick, sodden trails imaginable.

The conditions of overcast sky casting a dark aspect within the forest interior and the sodden landscape created the kind of atmospheric conditions that made colour stand out and though there was little colour left in the fallen foliage, we found it instead on the bark of trees and on branches of other trees. Fluorescent lichen which one hardly notices under most conditions, seems to come alive with a glow under this morning's conditions of the odd dusky light combined with the extreme wet conditions

The creek was fairly leaping over all the fallen obstacles crossing its width, tossing and tumbling itself under, over and through fallen trees and branches, the turbulence making it froth, the sound carrying up the hill to our ears as we descended. Makes us wonder what happened to the goldfish we had seen a week earlier; likely washed downstream and hopefully into a pool with some depth where they could safely overwinter.

Through the solidly overlapping dark clouds, the sun somehow managed to find a few cracks to enable it from time to time to give us the brief impression of warmth joining with the light that cast its way through the open forest canopy. We were literally sloshing through the trails, so heavily inundated, with the forest floor hosting little ponds of rainwater, too flush with rain to absorb any more.