A week shy of August and it’s time to gather food before the fall. Aki and her humans head into a wood thick with blue berry brush. While the little dog chases her Frisbee, her humans range around the woods but find very few berries to harvest. Our search leads us to the edge of a stream that should contain spawning silver salmon. But like the blue berries, the salmon are hard to find.

We leave the forest to search another, crossing on the way an open muskeg meadow. Cloudberries the color of birch or maple leaves in fall dot the wet ground. I pluck a ripe one up, pleased that it tastes like the salmon berries we once harvested on the tundra of Southwest Alaska. Like its tundra cousin, this muskeg cloudberry (hjortron) tastes sweet and sour with a bitterness that you’d expect from something grown in ground dominated by winter.