No one would write a homesick song about the Eagle River meadows today. Rain, wind and current provide the only moment before the little dog and I start down an icy trail. I stop where we once watch mergansers and golden eye ducks rotate around an eddy, peer where harbor seals spy-hopped to get a better look at Aki, search the meadow where we found occupied by grumbling geese. The little dog manages to attract the negative attention of a squirrel, but, maybe made grumpy by the rain, it soon loses interest in us.

The tide if out so we can see sand bars at the river’s mouth. Two eagles lift off the sand and fly into a nearby spruce tree. When we pass it on the way to the beach, the big birds fly over our heads and out to tide’s edge. One settles onto a driftwood perch. The other dives on him. The first eagle holds on to its perch as now the incoming tidal flow surrounds it and the other one manages to find a similar perch fifty feet away. Both ignore a third eagle’s attempt to drive them off. Surrounded by a cloud of gulls, they hunch in the rain and wait for the tide to deliver dinner.