Entre chien et loup

In an earlier blip three months ago I attempted to address the nuances of nightfall and  how I had discovered that twilight was measured in three formal stages: civil, nautical and astronomical, according to the degree to which the sun had dropped below the horizon.

A much more poetic, if less exact, image of the boundary of day and night is provided by the French expression entre chien et loup  'between dog and wolf' meaning the period when you can't tell one from the other. 

This evening I went to the end of the garden about 15 minutes after sunset to marvel once again at the spectacle of the rosy sky above the pearly sea . And as I gazed across the new mown field  a distant canine shape appeared briskly trotting, pausing, turning, sniffing and moving on again. Was it a dog or a wolf? Well, neither as the extra image reveals but for a moment or two I could not be sure.

 As the light leaches away from the  known landscape so we find ourselves in an unfamiliar territory where nothing is what it seems and danger may lurk in the shadows. However precisely it is named, twilight is the threshold to the unknown.