We slip off Chicken Ridge before the trash truck arrives, before the guys at the Capital building start chipping bricks off its façade. Aki and I drive out to the Fish Creek Delta because it is sunny and perhaps early enough to catch some animals in their relaxed, post-dawn state.

Just after leaving the car I spot a young, male Sitka blacktail deer feeding on new grass along the creek. The sound of rushing water must have masked from it the sound of our old Subaru bumping into the parking lot. Aki, busy checking all her pee-mail messages doesn’t notice how the deer’s long black tail bisects its tawny haunches. It jerks slightly each time a car passes over the creek bridge. We won’t see the deer on the return trip.

The purple lupine flowers are peaking beside shooting stars with fading magenta petals. Frost covers lupine leaves in areas of the meadow yet to feel the morning’s sun. Our presence discomforts the resident mallards and surprises to flight a lone, red-breasted merganser. But the song sparrows seem more interested than frightened as they settle on the tops of nearby trees and bushes to sing.

It’s once again low tide so the eagles are out on the exposed flats, bickering at their children like human parents do before the coffee kicks. We walk through columns of mosquitoes without getting bit. Instead of feeding, they form and reform abstract ghosts at the edge of the alder forests. With the rising heat of the day, they will switch from artists to vampires. The little dog and I will be long gone before their transformation.

Aki and head out early this morning to see the Sheep Creek delta in low angle sun. Well, that is why I dragged the poodle-mix from her bed. She settles in quickly once we leave the car. We are four hours from low tide so the wetland feeders—crows, gulls, ravens, and one eagle—are hunkered down near the water. Only the eagle is animated. It bursts from a spot along the creek after being attacked by gulls. Three or four of them chase the eagle in an aerial dogfight twenty feet above the ground. In minutes, the bald eagle is back its spot along the creek. Minutes later the gulls, bright as angels in the early morning light, finally drive it off. Raven, shinny black in full sun, watches with apparent detachment. I wonder who he roots for.

At least two score of bald eagles lounge on exposed tidelands. More watch from perches in the spruce trees we pass under. Most of the mature birds, the ones with white heads and tails, chill. The immature ones fly out and back from the trees, sometimes getting into a tussle with other young birds. They are all waiting for the hatchery truck to finish the transfer of young king salmon from truck to an enclosed pen that now floats on the waters of Fish Creek Pond. It’s as unnatural as humans in character costumes standing in line for days before the opening of a Star Wars movie.

The released salmon smolt that survive eagles and predator fish will swim into the Gulf of Alaska. Six years later, maybe thirty pounds heavier, they will return to the pond, circling it until caught by a sport fisherman or they die of natural causes. A few will follow the pink and dog salmon up Fish Creek to spawn but nothing will come of their effort on the unsuitable gravel.

Those birds not looking for an easy meal, like green winged teal and sand pipers work the estuary waters. I surprise a northern goshawk while it eats a shrew. It bursts into the air and over the heads of some eagles roosting near the top of a spruce tree. The goshawk is ignored by the eagles but not a crow, who chases the bigger bird from its sky.

I try not to write about the weather, about the wind-whipped rain that soaks the beach sand and forest duff. But all is weather-related. Swollen creeks have already eroded strips of the beach down to rock and gravel. Wind and waves have driven off the waterfowl residents. Only the smallest, the biggest, and the grouchiest birds remain. Aki ignores them all. She doesn’t acknowledge the tiny sparrow that settles briefly on a pilling stump. The little dog sniffs while the kingfisher scolds from an alder limb. She does slip back into the woods when the eagle appears, but if you asked her, she would deny that she saw it.

From under the Egan Highway bridge over Lemon Creek, Aki and I watch more than 30 bald eagles occupy an island in the creek. I know they landed there to sulk after having just been chased away from the dump. But because one eagle has situated itself on a piece of driftwood above the others, I image her a preacher and the rest, the congregation.

Bald Eagles should be seen soaring all rugged mountain ridges, not hunkered together between city dump and high-speed highway. But, as the locals know, city dumps and streambeds littered with dead salmon are the best places to see the carrion eaters.

The eagle preacher lowers her beak as the more restless members of her congregation fly to trees on the other side of the creek. Others follow and the church reforms on a meadow dotted with the cement bases of WWII era radio antennas.

Aki and head cross back under the bridge and walk onto the wetlands, now dominated by ravens. In the distance, an immature bald eagle rests on a driftwood root-wad perch, holding its wings out to dry. A mature eagle with white head and tail feathers shares the same root wad. Now I imagine a counseling session that breaks up when the little dog and I approach.

Years ago, when living in Ketchikan, I asked two Tlingit elders the names of some trees that smelled in Spring like church incense. “Balm of Gilead trees,” they answered. The memory seems fresh as new growth as Aki and I walk through the Treadwell ruins, now dominated by balsam poplar incense and the songs of American robins. Any residual sadness a person brought to this forest would surely ebb away before reaching the site of the mine collapse. I wonder if someone in the Ketchikan Tlingit community gave the poplars that descriptive name after hearing the old Balm of Gilead spiritual:

There is a balm in Gilead,

To make the wounded whole;

There is power enough in heaven,

To cure a sin-sick soul.