This morning's walk down our road held an unexpected surprise--something with ginormous cloven hooves had run down our twisty road not that far ahead of me.

Using my years of woods experience, I immediately deduced it was either a moose or Satan.

(As a matter of scale, that's my foot on the right and I wear a woman's size ten or men's size eight shoe. Oh, be quiet. I'm 5'10" and tall trees need good roots. Any resemblance between my feet and gunboats is PURELY coincidental, eh.)

There's lots of reasons why this could be a moose. Moose are so plentiful just south of us in Vermont that they've opened a hunting season for them. I live less than two miles north of the border, so it's not a big hike for a horse-sized critter to end up in our woods.

There's also the fact that our woods are relatively young, holding lots of delicious moosie treats.

Sadly, there are a few reasons why this could be Satan. I pretended the boo boo from the blister on my hand hurt too much for me to wash dishes and I sucked the spousal unit into doing them.

There was the little incident yesterday where I fibbed about eating the last few yogourt covered peanuts.

And hey, even The Prince of Darkness needs the occasional vacation and maybe he's a mountain loving kind of Beastmaster, you know?

One thing for sure, I don't want to catch either of them on our road unawares.

Moose don't see well and because of their size their first instinct is to charge anything they think might be threatening them and stomp it into a red, pulpy mass of moose toe jam. I really don't want the concept of red, pulpy mass of moose toe jam associated with my name.

And as for Beelzebub, I think the words "fire and brimstone" pretty much cover my aversion to startling him as he goes for a spring jaunt.

Hmmmm. I guess that starting tomorrow I'd better take a small radio with me on my walks so I make a little noise, eh?

--Marn