Nose to the Wind

We are having the front edge of our first big storm of the season right now. My home is in a sort of low spot, so I didn't realize until I drove out to run errands just how windy it was. Cancel the mentally proposed trip to the beach, which is windy on a calm day. Instead, Nestle and I took a walk around a pond. Even though it's a bit protected, the wind was stiff, and stopped us in our tracks once or twice.
I have a terrible sense of smell. One reason is I'm allergic to dogs yet choose to live intimately with them. But I do try from time to time to get some sense of how it is for a creature who lives through their sense of smell. So I did my best to face into the wind and breathe in what it was bringing me.
The maple leaves (the big leaf maples are in almost full autumn color) didn't seem to smell like anything. But the small pine branches that were down smelled distinctly of pine, of course, but also sometimes something more. My sense isn't nearly sharp enough to quantify whatever it was, but Nestle found it fascinationg, so I conjecture that it is animal in nature. Eagles, hawks, and herons all hang out regularly around the pond, so perhaps that was it.
I got some dust from the gravel pit operation on a hillside facing the pond some distance away. . . something I'd never noticed via smell before. I got spurts of whiffs of livestock down the hill. It was an interesting experiment.
Can you imagine what life would be like if we had half the scenting power of our dogs?