A few days ago, I spoke to a photographer who was waiting for a bear. He stood on a walkway that crossed a sockeye spawning steam. The photographer assured me that he had the patience to wait for hours for a bear, even though it was raining. I doubted if his patience would pay off because no salmon were fighting their way up stream. Without them, there was nothing to draw in a bear. I looked down the stream, which wandered through a meadow to Mendenhall Lake. On an August day during a normal salmon year, they would be birds and bears. Today, nothing. 

            Before I left him to his vigil, the photographer told me that the dog salmon have finally arrived at Sheep Creek. “Bears never fish there, but there are always eagles.” This morning Aki and I confirmed that he was right.

            Decaying salmon bodies littered Sheep Creek Delta. Others, listless after spawning,  let the water carry them back towards Gastineau Channel. Freshly arrived dog salmon muscled each other for spawning space in the creek. More than a dozen bald eagles sulked or fed on the creek’s gravel bars. Crows and gulls hung around the feeders, waiting for a chance to finish what the big birds started. 

            Bothered by the loud gull screams, Aki refused to approach the creek. I retreated and then followed  her to a quieter section of the delta.  Even here, we weren’t free of drama. After fighting over a scrap of salmon, two adult bald eagles left the stream. One chased the other. The one being chased flew low over the beach grass and right at the little dog and I. It passed within three meters of us before gaining enough altitude to clear the beach side cottonwoods. 

Aki is excited to walk with an old friend this morning. She doesn’t mind that he is wearing a pandemic mask. Not understanding the need for social distancing, the little dog tries to keep us close together as we walk through the rain forest to the sea. Her two charges talk loudly through their masks, catching each other up with happenings since our last walk. When we stop for a moment, the little dog can hear the sound of swollen streams and rain drops bouncing off of devil’s club leaves.

            An eagle flies close overhead when we reach the beach. It cruises over to a little bay, circles and then drops with claws extended. After rising skyward with empty talons, it sets down on a rocky point, scattering a dozen gulls that had been lingering there. Eagles in groups of threes fly out to Shaman Island. Others find perches on recently exposed rocks. A raft of ducks fly between us and the island, over the head of two hunting seals. The salmon must be back. 

A short waterfall connects Peterson Lake with salt water. That makes the lake a salt chuck. This morning Aki and I watched dog salmon power their way up the waterfall’s cascades and into the chuck. Two eagles and a handful of crows watched as well. One of the eagles had just feasted on a salmon not quite up to the climb. 

            Later we move to where a stream enters the lake. Soon the salmon we watched in the waterfall will swim across the lake and up the stream to their spawning grounds. It will be a one way trip. There will be more eagles and corvids there, as well as wading black bears. We take a casual trail that leads down the stream and hopefully away from the bears.

          We drop down onto a tidal meadow covered with six-foot-high grass. Neither Aki nor I can see over the grass but are able to follow a faint path that ends at a bear’s sleeping area. I would have taken another path if I had known where it would lead. The bears have crushed flat a section of meadow grass large enough for a small office. An eagle feather lays on one edge of the bear bed. 

            I should be worried that the bears will come back or that we may startled one of them when we walk further into the meadow. But Aki doesn’t act like she does when she smells bears. A half-a-dozen electric-blue dragon flies, called “darning needles” fly around the bear bed. Wouldn’t it be cool, little dog, if one of the darning needles landed on the eagle feather? As Aki gives me her, “you have got to be kidding stare” a darning needle alights on the feather just long enough for me to take its picture.