October snows drive some Alaskans south to the sun belt. Others retrieve their skis from storage. Either way, these first snows have power and if you believe, magic. Aki acts like a believer. This morning she patrols the Sheep Creek delta during a shower of wet October snow.

I should have taken the little dog to a mountain meadow where five inches of white must cover the ground. She loves to slide her face through soft snow, emerging with the same blissful smile she displays while rolling in beaver scent or bear poo. But last night’s high tide has washed the delta clean of snow. She makes do with scents left on a few patches of high ground by passing dogs.

On a channel marker, a bald eagle stares through the snow at Douglas Island. Behind her a large raft of mallards crowds against the shore while a seal prowls nearby waters. The seal has no chance of duck for breakfast but it still watches for an opportunity. Aki and I walk towards the creek mouth where another raft of ducks hunt for food. When the sky behind us fills with mallards, I look for the dog walker that must have spooked them. But the beach is empty so the seal must have made a play.

Aki, her other human, and I are on a gathering trip. We drive out to False Outer Point beach to fill five gallon buckets with rockweed (Bladder Wrack) for covering our garden’s perennials. The little dog chases her Frisbee as her humans fill the buckets. She should be safe as the beach is off the roadway and far from any bears.

With head down, I grab clumps of the burnt sienna-colored rockweed, shake out any pebbles or sticks, and drop the handfuls into a bucket. Aki interrupts often with demands that I throw her Frisbee. Without looking up I toss it toward the water and return to work. When I take a break to stretch, three bald eagles are flying low over the beach from where, seconds earlier, Aki retrieved her Frisbee. Maybe the big birds dove on a washed-up salmon carcass. Maybe they want to chase the Frisbee. Maybe they want to see how a ten-pound poodle tastes.

We move quickly to fill the remaining buckets and haul them to the car. In minutes we start phase two—lingonberry picking. Many years before Aki, we lived in a tundra town in Western Alaska. Each autumn, we’d pick gallons of lingonberries for jams, bake goods, liqueur, and only once—catsup. The plants grow here in the rainforest but until this year, we have rarely seen them produce berries. Last week I stumbled on this muskeg meadow with clumps of wine-red berries pulling their diminutive plants into meadow moss. The hard little spheres plunk when they hit the bottom of my berry bucket—a cut down, half-gallon soy sauce container. After an hour of picking the plunking stops as berries already in the bucket cushion the newly harvested ones.

Picking the low growing berries keeps out noses near the fragrant ground where we can smell the spicy smell of Labrador tea. Biting into a lingonberry releases the same smell, whether harvested on a rainforest bog meadow or on the tundra. None of the rain forest blue berries taste like a tundra berry. But the lingonberries we harvest today deliver the same flavor and smell as those I remember harvesting from a Kuskokwim River bluff after the first frost.

It’s early morning when we stop to look at Mendenhall Glacier from the North Douglas boat ramp. Pre-dawn sunlight touches the tops of the Mendenhall Towers but not the stream of ice. Across Lynn Canal, the same light hits the Chilkat Mountains with enough strength to wipe out any detail. Usually morning light clarifies rather than obscures landscapes. Has something upset the laws of nature? Aki is no help and the two stellar sea lions practicing synchronized swimming just off shore only growl.

We press on to the Outer Point Trail and take it through an old growth forest to the beach. Only squirrels break the silence until we walk close enough to the shore to hear the complaints of gulls. It’s low tide so all the birds are on the feed except a monstrous murder of crows roosted in the trees on Shaman Island. They mutter like witnesses at an execution.

We could walk to the island on a spit only exposed by the lowest tides. Maybe that’s why the crows complain. But that doesn’t explain why the scooters and mallards panic into the air and circle while the gulls feed. I look for the eagle that we passed under to reach the spit and find it gone.

Three bald eagles fly over the little dog and I as we walk down Sandy Beach. Another one perches on the root of a large driftwood log as the closest, high in a spruce tree, scolds the other four. Across the deep cove formed by a mine tunnel collapse, a fifth eagle watches several mallard families dabble in the water. When the ducks swim past the eagle, it flies low over them and then out, over the channel. Other than the scolding spruce tree eagle, only two belted kingfishers show attitude. They twist and turn around each other over the ducks and eagles like fighter planes above London during the Battle of Britain. Instead of bullets, the kingfishers hurl angry-sounding curses at each other. They drop for a second, over my little dog’s head and I am thankful that God gave such fierce hearts to little dudes rather than eagles with two-meter wing spans.

I came for the fog but am stopped in my tracks by spider webs. Arachnids have cast their sky nets over many of the mountain hemlock and shore pine on this muskeg meadow. A necklace of translucent fog pearls decorates the trunk of a hemlock. Aki attempts to move me along to the beach with a stare. We can both hear gulls bickering, a malcontent eagle and the stage whispers of sea lions. I yield, as she knew I would and we descend into the gray as a foghorn announces the Norwegian Jewel delivering 3500 more customers for the jewelry stores and tee-shirt shops on South Franklin. None will see the spider’s fine work.

Last week’s storms surges dumped a mass of rockweed onto the False Outer Point beaches. Severed from their holdfasts, the rockweed turns from living cadmium orange to the color of iodine. The weed fills the air above the beach with the smell of iodine and my mind with the memory of my mother saying, “you know it is working if it stings,” as she brushes the dark-brown antiseptic on my cut finger.

Aki hunts for interesting smells among the rockweed blankets as fog thickens between the glacier and us. It pours out of the forest, over North Douglas Highway and onto our beach. This is not Carl Sandburg’s fog that comes on little cat feet. This fog slithers onto the water like a snake.

If we were on a boat, I’d be concerned, if not scared. But here on solid ground, with a headland providing a reference point, I can enjoy how the fog snakes around islands and cuts us off from everything with its white wall, carrying the sounds of growling sea lions and scolding eagles.

Even when living in California I preferred a winter beach to one crowded in summer. An empty beach is the best place to calm jangled nerves or indulge a funk. Even one in a mellow mood can appreciate the offered solitude. So, on this gray Sunday morning with rain in the forecast, I head out with Aki to a crescent of gravel near the old Auk Village site.

We drop down steep stairs to a trail that winds through a forest of alders and old growth spruce trees. I can see, through gaps in the trees, that the beach is empty but keep to the forest trail. The large spruce offer the kind of comfort that can only be provided by living things that have withstood storms for over two hundred years.

The beach is still empty when we leave the woods. We have it to ourselves for ten minutes. Then, a family of toddlers and water dogs crash out of the trees barking and giggling and sending a roosting eagle to flight. Another eagle screams when the startled one tries to land in its tree. Soon both are in the air, struggling to master strong gusts of a storm front. We will all be wet soon, the birds, dogs, and toddlers.