Out with Stephanie L. on a very windy Sunday after two days of 50-70 mph winds that brought down many trees.
As we eased down a hedgerow, a horse trailer pulled into the parking lot across the field; a mounted hunt with hounds was arriving.
This is American fox hunting, which is to say dress-up with a very good chance that no fox at all will even be seen.Two red coats posted near us for a very short while to make sure that the hounds did not circle around and interfere with whatever we were doing. In truth we neither saw or heard the hounds, and when we saw the mounted folks again, it was while we were loading back in. They said they had seen no fox. I was not surprised -- the wind would have them to ground, with or without the hounds. The one old fox sette that I knew of on this part of the farm, and which is occupied about one year out of every three, was empty this year.
Moxie found a possum in a short and shallow pipe. It was tailed out without almost any digging at all and released up a tree unharmed. Lots of groundhog holes, but with the tremendous wind most of the wildlife had tucked in and plugged their holes. Nothing had moved for days.
The weather has been very odd this year. Virtually no snow, and not much cold, but a lot of rain for the last three weeks. Are we going to slide into winter without any snow or ice at all? It's still too early to say, but the geese will begin to lay in a month, and the shad will start running up the river as well. Time for a real winter is quickly slipping through the glass.
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