Today’s 19.6-foot-high tide has flooded the Fish Creek trail and turned the meadow into a small lake. In the lake’s center a dozen mallards shelter from the wind on two tiny islands. Aki whines. She doesn’t like the wind. The little dog and I detour around the flooded trail and slip into sheltering woods. 

            We walk around the pond, stopping to puzzle over a curling line of otter tracks made in the deteriorating pond ice. Three islands of poop mark the beginning of the track line, sitting on pillars of ice four or five centimeters tall. The scat must have sheltered the ice beneath it from eroding rain. Now each piece of otter poop sat atop its own Eddystone rock, marking the otter’s passage.