Back from Sitka, Aki’s other human and I take the little dog exploring on the glacial moraine. The wind that has hammered downtown Juneau since our return can’t reach us here. We have sun, lots of snow, and a temperature just below freezing.

We want Aki to enjoy this adventure because when it is over she is to be taken to the veterinarian for injections, teeth cleaning, and nail clipping. She dashes over a series of terraced beaver ponds while I muse over the good and bad provided by the industrious rodents. Beavers killed these trees and transformed their beauty from a living celebration to one created by blistered forms. Their dam works create habitat for young silver salmon, some that might be swimming under the ice beneath our boots. But when the temperature rises, the backup from their ever expanding ponds will flood our access trails to the troll woods and berry patches.

Finding myself neutral on beaver beauty, I concentrate on a cottonwood leaf that has spent the winter trapped by the cold. Like the beaver, the dead brown leaf transforms the moraine, using the heat from spring sunshine to carve Itself a steep walled sanctuary in translucent ice.