Category Archives: Aki

What do the seals make of Aki?

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The mouth of the Mendenhall River narrows and widens with the tide. Today, the tide ebbs, shrinking the river’s width and opening a trail around the tip of Mendenhall Peninsula. Unseen to the little dog and I, chum salmon are finning their way up the river to their spawning grounds in Montana Creek. We smell the rotting corpses of the early arriving salmon that floated down river after a violent spell of mating.

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The dead chums keep the interest of a half-a-dozen eagles roosting above us in spruce trees. After hearing the first one scream, Aki takes up a defensive position near my heels. But, the birds are not interested in ten pounds of poodle. They wait for the tide to serve up the dead.

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I am not so sure about the harbor seals. Two of them float in the current just off shore. I assume that they are there for the salmon but appear to look longingly at Aki in her yellow fleece coat. Maybe they are just curious as to what creature walks on four legs but wears clothes. As long as we keep moving down the trail, the seals swim towards us. When I stop for more than the time it takes to focus the camera, they slip under the water.

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Twichy Birds

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It’s early morning on the Treadwell ruins. Aki and I head over to the Glory Hole to check out the kingfishers. The forecasted heavy rain has yet to appear but clouds hang low over the channel. Eagles and gulls mew from the beach but we can’t see anything through the thick hardwood forest that has taken over the ruins.

Red “Xs” mark a dozen of the alder and cottonwoods that grow close to the old power plant building. While Aki sniffs for sign, I read a sign affixed to the largest of the marked trees. It lets the reader know that all the marked trees will soon be cut down to protect the ruin. “How odd,” I think that the city officials feel the need to notify people of the logging project. How strange, that they want to cut down the things that make this peaceful place even during a storm.

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On the beach, I spot one of the kingfishers apparently asleep on a jagged-topped piling. The flooding tide has created a moot of channel water around him. The bird lets me reach the edge of its moat before flying off. I take as many pictures of it as I can before it flies off. A minute later the bird settles in another piling several hundred meters off away. I feel a little guilty for disturbing its sleep.

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Down the beach, on top of the old mine’s ventilation shaft, a bald eagle squats. A surrounding murder of crows imprisons the eagle. Something startles the crows into the air after another eagle takes a roost on a nearby snag.

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A Little Early

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We arrive at the false outer point trail before the mist burns off and the tourist guide buses. It’s not too early for the Stellar jay who squats near the trail, ready to curse our passing. Aki feints a charge at the bird and it flies up to low branch. Both probably consider theirs a job done well.

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I lead Aki out of the woods and onto a rough beach trail, surprised at the how much algae now grows on the rocks. The green stuff seems to be creeping north as our climate warms. It makes the rocks too slick for walking so I have to find a work-around in the rockweed. A bald eagle that had been waiting on the beach for the tide to ebb flies off and lands on a stranded glacier erratic a hundred yards away. Its flight temporarily sends a gang of gulls airborne but they are on the beach seconds after the eagle lands. The big bird might make the gulls nervous, but not enough to abandon a chance to chow down on the critters soon to be exposed by the retreating tide.

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Cheated

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I feel cheated out of three weeks of summer. Just barely one week into August and already the devil’s club leaves yellow and chlorophyll drains out of skunk cabbage. We don’t even have sun to enrich the autumn colors. A soft, steady rain drenches Aki and I as we climb up the Dan Moller Trail. The rain does not distract the dog from the abundant number of pee-mail messages left on the trailside brush. It’s a different story when we reach the first open meadow and cross it on a deteriorating wood plank trail. Here she shakes off what rain she can and stares at the fool who actually wants to continue up the trail. I know how this story will end but want to prolong the meadow visit long enough to sample the low bush blueberries. They too confirm the departure of summer. While some bushes wear fall colors most are still green. Even so, most have already dropped their berries. The few blues I harvest are bitter.

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The Stink Eye

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I am here under duress. Even though she already had her walk this morning, Aki gave me an extended stink eye until I slipped her leash into my pocket and grabbed a camera.

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Minutes into this walk on the Outer Point Trail, a group of tourists eye me with caution, like country folk might look at men in gang colors after stumbling into an intercity neighborhood. Aki, an animated stuff animal, can’t have scared the tourists. Maybe I should have shaved this morning.

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It’s quiet in the forest after we pass the timid tourists so we can hear the hammer-like pounding of a woodpecker. Later we will be scolded by a Stellar jay and a red squirrel will swear at my little dog while I look over a scattering of its spruce seeds on the trail. We will hear more woodpeckers and stop to watch a red-breasted sapsucker and later a three-toed woodpecker. I will wonder if their presence in such high numbers is the result of the mild winter we had last year, which allowed tree pests to survive in high numbers.

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Literate Snails

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As the crow squawks curses at the little dog, I wonder whether the designs made by snail slime on False Outer Point rocks is a communication from God. Aki gives no push back to the idea so I turn it over in mind like this noisy crow might play with a mussel shell after his chicks fledge. After all, the snail tracks do loop like cursive written by a steady hand. Our God of miracles is fully capable of the attempt. But do we have the smarts to translate?

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The crows dominate the high ground on our walk except for the last little headland we have to round to reach the Rainforest Trail. There, a stuffy looking bald eagle roosts higher than a crow, which appears to skulk in the lower branches of a hemlock. Below, years worth of eagle’s scat have fertilized Bluebells of Scotland and Columbine plants. The flowers of both give some color to this gray day.

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The Helicopter, Not the Dragonfly

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This walk is about the helicopter, not the dragonfly even though the machine can’t match the insect’s flying skills. As Aki crouches as if held in place by blade noise, I try to watch the dragonfly, hoping to see it hover and then land on a single clump of arctic cotton. That would bring together two of my favorite things—the fly’s iridescent wings and cotton washed clean by recent rain. But the dragonfly disappears over the muskeg as the helicopter lifts off with a compact-car-sized satchel of gravel.

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I never see the dragonfly again but the helicopter is a near constant presence, ferrying gravel to a section of the Treadwell Ditch trail near Mt. Jumbo. Even though I might ski over the delivered gravel next winter, I left myself wonder how the helicopter would fair if it became trapped by this carnivorous sundew plant after being shrunk to the size of a mosquito.

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In Their Own World

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Aki and I are on a mission. Now that the best sea-level berry patches are past prime, we are in the mountains looking for bushes with ripe, blue fruit. The dog, who has been known to sample blueberries from one of our hands, doesn’t pick her own. She conducts a search, one that only she can understand; only she can evaluate.

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My search is also shrouded in secrecy. There are only so many berries on the slopes and we pass whole families of berry pickers heading up the mountain when we descend. I am sworn not to help them.

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Some of the berries grow along the shores of tiny lakes that dot the muskeg. Each are full of skating water bugs that seem to levitate on the water’s surface. In their tiny world, they are as impressive as the bubble-feeding whales I watched yesterday in the North Pass.

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At Least We Have the Whales

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Aki is not on the boat. We can’t afford to have a dog on the boat for this, our first attempt of the summer to catch silver salmon. The guys at the Sand Bar will tell you that targeting silvers this early in the season is foolish. Call us fools but here we are in the North Pass between Shelter and Lincoln Island, trolling for salmon.

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At least we have whales, I think as four humpback whales bubble feed near the shore of Shelter Island. They swim around a school of herring, building a net of bubbles that force the school into a tight ball. Then one swims underneath it, opening its huge jaws to capture them all.

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We will see many whales today. One will surface fifty feet front our boat, swim under it, and reappear on the other side. Others will bubble feed near the spot where we actually catch two silver-bright silver salmon. We will butcher them with the care that wild things deserve and freeze the filets, eat the backbones fresh with kale from the garden. Aki will enjoy salmon skins for breakfast tomorrow.

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The Black and the White of It

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Ravens and gulls are the black and white of it this morning. Aki ignores both. She doesn’t notice how the birds feed on spent dog salmon carcasses or wait for the ebbing tide to reveal more. She has no time for sights or sounds this morning but uses all her energy to study pockets of smells that dot the trail. Each one seems just out of her reach when I stop to photograph a bird. She manages to jerk forward just as I hit the shutter button on my old camera. This frustrates both of us but produces one little blessing in the form of a raven’s portrait captured in flight.

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