Honeymoon tales 1 - Smoking Gun

The day before yesterday kicked off with breakfast burritos, which had come to mind whilst I was day-dreaming about a Coffee Shop in the Jordaan district of Amsterdam, which I frequented a decade ago. Large mugs of coffee and a smoke to start the day, followed by huge veggie breakfast burritos. It was heaven. Don't know why I'm daydreaming about Amsterdam....mmm well, maybe I do..... it must be the rain. What else do you do on a day like this, eh?

Anyway, what WE do on a day like this, is get our wet weather gear on and go for a short hike. Well, more of a walk really as I'm resting my (slightly) sprained ankle, got whilst attempting to copy Louis' athletic 4-legged leap over a stream (ankle twisted on crappy landing and I ended up collapsed in the mud). Four legs good, two legs bad in this case. Plus he's younger than me. And a dog. Which is probably the crucial bit of information that my over-stimulated brain failed to register when I impulsively followed him.

So we went for wet walk around Crno Jezero (Black Lake) which, though tame for a Montenegrin walk, was still beautiful with the cloud occasionally giving way to a mountain view and mists rising from the pine forests. There was a few minutes of adrenalin when I thought I'd seen a big, black/grey, dog-like animal in the woods and Mollie had legged off in its direction. The previous evening we'd had dinner and lots of booze around the house of a local man, Mina, and his family. During the journey to his house, he stopped off to buy a crate of beer and whilst putting it in the back of his aging Volvo, he asked Tim to budge up as he happened to be sitting on his rifle. Amongst other things that Mina "needed his rifle for", were killing foxes and wolves. We'd seen wolf icons on our Durmitor map but assumed they were as out of date as the cartography - but apparently not. This shored up my suspected wolf-kill find last week, where I disturbed a gang of huge ravens gorging on what had been a sheep, only identifiable by the bloody horns lying on the path and a hairy hoof. The rest of its body had been ripped to shreds, pulled apart and strewn about in what looked like a violent attack. This was quite a shocking sight and slightly unnerving as I was alone, on my way into town to get some bread, which involved walking through part of the forest. The city dweller element in me cannot help but find forests eerie, dark places full of mysterious, watching eyes darting behind trees when you look too hard. It is all part of the fun, of course.

Anyhow, back to the original tale. After a few nervous minutes of rounding up our uber-independent hounds, I had managed to talk myself out of seeing anything at all. Then, from the trees ran a large, black/grey dog-like thing which…..wait for it…..was, in fact, a dog. We did see a pretty cool eagle the other day though.