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.