The View Hasn't Changed

But in the last twenty four hours two inches of new snow has piled up on the ground and a thick layer of ice crystals has coated the forest.



The thick cold fog may have ebbed now and again. Mostly it just kept flowing through.



Creating some mighty painful looking frost.



One would think such poor conditions would have kept everyone and everything safely tucked in their burrows. Apparently not. All foot traffic signs in the newly fallen snow pointed to a major event having occurred in the dark fog of the night.



The creatures have been stirring all over this mountain. All I can do is read the signs.



It is much better to focus my attention on activities where I can cause some impact.



The tongue and groove ceiling is slowly creeping towards the top.



While hounds and varmints creep, scurry and run around in the night.



There were major tracks and trails along the resident gardeners drive going both to the ridge top garden, down to the sunny utility valley and all the way down to my place and beyond. My new tracking skills let me know these were hound dogs. The bigger paw print, more meandering path and a four footed outline said this was a dog. Dogs unlike coyotes do not put their rear foot in the same place as the front paw. The rear foot shows up as a separate print. Their were two dogs at least roaming the grounds last night.



It is my understanding that hunting is illegal on Sundays and that the last time for making a kill is something like half an hour after dusk. Is was definitely very late Saturday night, Sunday morning in a foggy falling snow. What were these hounds doing running all over the property then? Why didn't I hear the commotion? The luxury basement accommodations really are pretty sound proof being half buried in the ground.

One pickup truck with a flat tire was parked at the turnout just inside the Kingdom of Madison this morning.



I strolled through the ridge top garden on my way back to the house to follow the other line of dog tracks. They might as well have come and knocked on the front door for the distance they were keeping from the house.

The sad part was there was another set of tracks of some small critter going back and forth and round and round through the ridge top garden. The dog trails and critter trails intersected quite often. My tracking skills are not yet good enough to decipher what the small critter might be. It did not look like the raccoon tacks, but the ones I saw before were an amble not a run. Maybe it was a possum.

I just have trouble wrapping my mind around the thought of chasing hound dogs in pickup trucks on icy roads that are chasing a possum in falling snow with fog so thick you can't see more than twenty feet in front of you, with temperatures in the low twenties. I don't see where the enjoyment part enters this scenario.