Relative Something

There is no getting around the fact that we are at that time of year when the weather can flip from enticingly spring-like to “as winter as ever” in a single day. It can be a tough blow at the end of a harsh winter to be walloped by storms that give the impression the weather is headed in the wrong direction. Today is expected to be one of those tough blows, but it is not clear what the precise position of the storm will be. We are on the edge of a suspected path which could swing either to freezing rain or heavy, wet snow.

For the time being, I’m going to enjoy this image of our paddock from Saturday, when the snow had been cleared off the ground and the clouds were gone from the sky. We’ll have more of this type of enjoyment in the days ahead. We just need to tolerate a small setback to a winter storm for a few days.

That’s Dezirea munching hay, with Legacy standing by, on watch.

A couple of days later and it looked like this (although, in fairness, this one was taken with my phone looking through a dirty window from inside our sunroom):

At Delilah’s desperate urging, I let her outside to chase a squirrel, or squirrels, which had been tugging mercilessly at her predator instincts while she was trapped indoors. I followed her with my eyes as she sprinted deep into the neighbor’s woods to our north, much farther than she normally explores. The unconscious chase left her in new territory, and I would have been surprised if she just turned around and came back into our yard.

She disappeared for quite a while. When Delilah finally reappeared outside our windows, it wasn’t a squirrel she had as a prize, but the bottom portion of a deer leg. It is most likely that she happened upon a carcass that was left by some other predator(s), but she looked so much like a wolf out there, gnawing on that limb in the heavy falling snow, I felt a renewed appreciation for why our cats appear so wary of her.

She’s just doing what comes natural, but it can be almost scary seeing how incredibly proficient she is about it.

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