These stories are great - but Jess had me teared up at the end there.

Many years ago, I used to visit friends who had a camp way out in a Maple Bush, and sometimes I borrowed their camp and stayed there alone. And sometimes they left their three dogs with me for companionship and because the dogs loved the camp so much.

They had three Irish Setters, one of them a comically oversized and big-nosed male, and his mom and pop, more normal sized setters. The female was very 'girly' and delicate-boned. I love dogs, and I think my own dog was tremendously pretty, but for sheer Norman Rockwell beauty, I doubt any creatures could match three red Irish Setters running through snow-bound maple trees, their colour only matched by the occasional red or yellow leaf left clinging to bare grey branches.

Those guys loved to run, and the area around the camp was a maze of abandoned wood roads. I used to hike with those guys for hours. The first time out, I was worried about losing them, but I soon found out they had no intention of losing me. They would take off and disappear ahead, once in a while one would circle back briefly and I'd hear him/her rustling around not far away, then s/he'd be off again. But whenever I arrived at a fork in the road, all three of them would be standing at ease, waiting for me to choose a direction.

One day they surprised me by completely altering their behaviour. We started up a road in the morning, stopped for sandwich, coffee and dog treats around noon, and set off again. Now, though, all three of them gathered around me and stayed well within eye range. Two would stay right by me while the third made a quick, short run ahead and off in the trees. It was well into winter, so bears weren't a concern, and I wondered what had them so worried. A little further on the puzzle was solved. The snow on the trail was criss-crossed evrywhere with fresh Moose tracks and steaming fresh droppings.

I wish I'd been brave or foolish enough to go on, because there were enough tracks to suspect not far away a lot of Moose were yarded up, and I'd like to have seen that. Prudence won the day, though, and to the obvious relief of the setters, we turned tail and walked back the way we came.