Any dog trainer watching Aki and I this morning would be shaking her head in disgust. Rather than exerting dominance over the little poodle-mix, I let her set the pace. A dog whisperer of kind words rather than commands I even yield to her choice of direction. When I put up a fuss, she lets me drag her across Gastineau Avenue so I can take a picture of today’s collection of cruise ships. Otherwise I follower her zigzagging pee trail.

Yielding responsibility to the ten-pound dog frees up my mind for wandering. I’m daydreaming about the cats that use to live in the nearby ruins of the old stamp mill when two deer does spring out from behind a screen of salmon berry bushes and hop down Gastineau like kangaroos. They sprong past a low-income apartment complex and up the hillside.

Aki, so intent on cataloguing scent, never sees the deer. She leads me down to the docks and then up Lower Franklin Street past the Red Dog Saloon, Pilipino Hall, and the homeless shelter. She drags me away from a young man rapping out a poem. We climb up toward Chicken Ridge and into Capital School Park. A bronze chair in the park commemorates the forced internment of the high school valedictorian just before graduation just because his grandparents came to Alaska from Japan. Rain beads up on the bronze chair and a small string of origami cranes formed, out of necessity in the rain forest, with waterproof materials. Aki waits for me photograph them.