Monday morning

Monday morning, damp and blowy, with last night's rain clinging to the grass stems. 

In the woods, the sentiero is slick with fallen leaves and small, young chestnuts, dropped too early from the trees, not worth the gathering. The wind still soughs among the treetops and there is a creaking and a clapping of branches among the abandoned coppices. 

The devastation of an army of wild boar is daily greater - grassy meadows turned into mud baths, great granite rocks dislodged from ancient drystone walls, and sticks and twigs driven into heaps by searching snouts, like so much storm-wrack washed up to the water-line on a beach.

And the first snow has appeared overnight on the distant Alps.

Autumn has come to Piemonte.