Today we drove out the road through serious rain.  It’s honest stuff falling hard and straight to earth — a Ketchikan rain. The storm water it produces would drain harmlessly into Ketchikan’s Tongass Narrows but here it overwhelms Juneau’s northern forest. The downpour causes heavy erosion in our tidal creeks and rivers to turn clear waters the color of tea whitened with milk. Now Gasteneau Channel looks like the open drain of an English giant’s tea shop.

The storm must be keeping people in town for we only share this forest trail with birds and the animals drawn here by the tail end of the chum salmon run. Feet from the car Aki steps on a large pile of fresh bear dung, the color and texture of corn mash. I search but find no bones or fresh, just cow parsnip seeds which must taste better to this bear then spawned out salmon. A few crossings of the flooded trail washes Aki’s paw clean. The large leaf devil’s club lining the trail bounce up and down in response to the pounding rain. Aki acts like its a day in high summer, submerging her head in a rodent’s hole then dashing down the trail to sniff out animal sign. I walk without haste behind her like a man comfortable in his rain gear.

Just this side of a muskeg meadow, fast-moving water, this time the color of coffee, floods the trail and soaks my boots and Aki’s fur. Over the meadow fifty or so crows fly in a silent cloud. I look for an eagle or raven among them for crows will unite to drive off bigger birds. Only crows fill the sky, not fighting as I first thought but dancing on gentle airs. It’s complicated choreography but I can make out a few of the steps. Two or three birds climb in a gentle arc. One peals off while the remaining two drop into a shallow dive. The last one to enter the dive catches and then passes the other and then climbs again. On the edge of the meadow Aki finds salmon viscera and the scat of a wolf well fed on salmon. We cross the road and head for the river trail. Two ravens greet us at the trail head, apparently frustrated that we can’t understand their simple directions. They follow us up the trail, stopping every fifty feet to instruct us again. Finally they stop at the door of a new park cabin and stand like dogs waiting to be let in out of the rain. Their house?

On the river a soaked eagle perches on the roots of an upturned drift log. He looks at me as if I brought the rain, spreads his wings then drops them as if too dispirited to fly.