The Logging Road Cyclist took his dogs out for a long walk on Sunday. The perfect Fall weather was impossible to resist, so the three headed up McCulloch Peak. At a stop on a landing out in the new clearcut, TLRC basked in the brilliant sun and looked over the broad expanse of Valley and Coast Range spread out to the south while the dogs wallowed in a convenient mud hole.

Traversing the Peak, they headed home. Just down from the top, TLRC heard a swooshing sound. Thinking it was the legs of his Carharts, he ignored it the first couple if times, but after it persisted, he really stopped to listen, and finally spotted the raven that was swooping through the forest alongside him and his dogs. The raven would let them pass and get ahead, and then he would glide through the forest and get alongside or a bit ahead of them and perch in a tree, watching them walk along. This was repeated over and over. The raven seemed most interested in the dogs, in particular Devil Puppy. TLRC started to feel like Tippi Hendren.

Now this wouldn’t be much of a story, except this went on all the way down to the bench on the road between the starts of Uproute and Innuendo, quite a distance, probably a mile and half?

Were TLRC a supersticious sort, or given to finding omens, this might have been one, just of what, he couldn’t say. But he had an inkling of what it might have felt like to be a forest dweller in an earlier time when such things were understood to signify more than just a curious bird.