This is a work trip for me. The little dog makes the first part of our adventure a working one by volunteering to keep guard while I collect seaweed on a Douglas Island beach. Wind worked tide left long ropes of severed rockweed from which I quickly fill six buckets. The fractured shell of an abalone sparkled from beneath a covering of seaweed. Nearby Aki cautiously sniffs the thick section of a deer’s vertebrae that has been stripped of flesh by the ocean’s bone cleaners.

After loading the seaweed into the car we drive to a snow covered meadow. Aki tears out of the car and runs up and down the trail. I’m here to indulge her love of snow. She loves it even as large balls of the stuff form on her legs and chest.

The meadow sits in a “V” shaped mountain valley that sees little sun this close to the winter solstice. This morning it floats just above one of the mountain ridges. A gauzy cloud layer had changed it into the moon.