Usually, I have some trouble with Pepper nipping at Daphne, especially when Daphne tries to bully the larger dogs around, but lately, I've found bites on Arnie, the sled dog.  When John takes him along to see his sister, her dog is "playful" and spends all of the time harrassing and biting Arnie.  Usually going for the legs and eyes, I've found bites on Arnie's legs lately, that have worried me.  That dog is becoming more than just a nuisance, and one of the bites has swollen up quite a bit.  I put some ointment on it the other day, but this morning it is worse, so it's possibly infected; Arnie whimpered and seems sad.  The other day, I also gave him some garlic in his liver sausage treat, but that hasn't helped this time.  I'll have to keep an eye on it. 

The Packers won!  Played rather well, I thought.  I love Donald Driver, my favorite player, and Brett Favre, of course.  A lot of the newer players show a lot of promise, too.

The weather has continued warm and I went for 2 walks with Pepper yesterday, one walk on the road and one walk down to and around the lake.  She found some poop on a log, which she ate, probably a muskrat dropping.  Mmmm, Poop-on-a-Log, her favorite treat.  It was truly spectacular down by the lake, the sun hanging there in a clear blue sky, radiating intense joy.  And in the woods, the sky was such a deep, clear blue, like butterfly wings.  There were holes in the ice where muskrats or beavers come up to breathe; I managed to restrain myself and not try to walk on the ice - stayed on shore.

I noticed that the forest is changing, and rather dramatically.  When I first came here in 1974, the woods was so dense, it was nearly impossible to walk through it.  There were many fallen aspens, or "popple" as they are called here, with birch, red river maple and oak.  Only a small clump of white pines down by the lake.  These have spread very well, and now cover the hillside.  Almost all of the aspens have disappeared; the beaver toothmarks are on their old stumps.  All the dead oaks have long since been taken for firewood and the birch trees have almost all fallen down.  But new birch trees have sprung up everywhere.  They start out as red, slender babies, and gradually thicken, their bark peels away, and slowly, they get whiter and whiter.  My thought is that the original forest here was mostly white pines, huge ones, that the lumberjacks took, clear-cutting the land.  Early pictures of this area show devastation that cannot be imagined.  So I'm thinking that it takes 100 years for a forest to begin to restructure itself - the aspen, birches, even blackberries spring up, grab the nutrients, die, rot and feed the soil; then the original white pines come back.  I could be wrong about this, but that's the feeling I got yesterday.  And I did hug a tree, by the way.  You can hear things going on in there, if you put your ear next to a tree and listen.

When I looked at my old camping place down by the lake, I could hardly recognize the place where my "vision quest" took place by the campfire.  I had been camping out, sleeping on the ground for 10 days, and had several out-of-body experiences and lucid dreams.  But that night was different, and it was an experience I'll never forget.  It would take a chapter just to tell about it.  And the information conveyed to me that night was personal and somber.