Last night the remnants of a Pacific typhoon dumped rain on our Alaska panhandle. Aki and are trying to sneak in a forest/beach visit during a lull in the storm. The little dog dashes up and down the trail, apparently inspired by fresh pee mail. I’m relieved not to have to keep the bill of my ball cap down, happy to be able to point my camera up toward the canopy without having it smeared with rain drops.
Everything is fresh washed and glistening by moisture delivered by the typhoon. Drops of runoff have collected along the base of bear-bread fungus, making it look like an alligator’s jaw. Others make the reddening blue berry leaves sparkle in the gray light. While somewhere in the Lower 48 States, people wearing cartoon dark glasses watch the moon extinguishing the sun, I stare up at the underside of broad devil’s club leaves that collect storm light.
We find a fern, delicate as Queen Anne’s lace, shiver in a tiny breeze. Giving up on summer, the fern and its clan are already ghosting to white. Soon they will dry to dark-brown and then be crumbled by the first hard frost. In minutes we are back at the car. I have to coax Aki into it. We didn’t see anyone during the walk. Is she disappointed by the lack of dog company, or does the wise little thing know how to read fern sign?
On this walk over the moraine Aki and I have already seen evidence of the wild world’s give and take: mushrooms ripping their way through the trailside moss, bones and berries in bear scat, cottonwood trees fallen by beavers, and moss slowing reducing trees in the troll woods to soil
That will have to do little dog, we don’t want to keep the bears from their lunch. Aki and I climb over an exposed headland and drop onto the beach occupied by a landed raft of mergansers and their three-gull escort. Between the ducks and the woods are fresh tracks of a black bear. Aki follows the tracks into the forest and disappears. But when I catch up she isn’t growling, just smelling the scent left behind by the bear.
Fifty feet ahead an immature bald eagle rises from the creek, a twelve–inch-long fish dangling from its talon. The fish drops as the bird wings skyward. I know the scene took only seconds but when I play it back in my head, the bird and prey moved in slow motion, like I could have dashed over and caught the fish before it hit the meadow grass.
Aki clung to my side during the walk. She was spooked by the sound of 10-20 pound king salmon splashing in the creek pond and the off-key symphony performed by ravens and crows in the creek side alders. I was spooked too by the angry sounding splashes and the smell of dead salmon, both of which draw bears.
It was low tide when we reached the creek delta. Clutches of six or more eagles loitered on the exposed wetlands. One burst out of the tree just above my head when I stopped to count its cousins. Any peace the eagles and gulls had reached was broken when an immature eagle flew over a gull-feeding zone. The little white birds dived bombed the eagles and drove them into a nearby spruce forest.
Walking with Aki 