Category Archives: Dan Branch

People of the Salmon

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I could be in downtown, watching members of the three Tribal nations of Southeast Alaska—Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian—sing, dance, and drum down Egan to Centennial Hall. But Aki and I are walking a trail through the gravelly ground left behind by a retreating glacier. The parade is the first major event of Celebration 2016 I’ve missed since Wednesday evening’s opening parade.

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We can’t hear dance drums echoing off the moraine’s pocket lakes and heavy cloud cover has grounded the tourist helicopters so there’s silence for reflection. I doubt that Aki reflects on anything more complex than animal scents and the pile of beaver scat that she rolls in while I enjoy the reverse image of tree-covered mountain flanks half-hidden by cloud.

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Raven’s song bounces through my brain—the one performed as an encore last night by the Git-Hoan dancers. The name means, “People of the Salmon” in Tsimshian. It’s an inclusive term because of the importance of salmon to everyone in the Alaskan rainforest, especially the Native residents. Earlier in the perform Git-Hoan released three man-ravens into the crowd, dancers with large wooden raven mask with articulated jaws. Knowing the ways of the wickedly smart birds, the people of the salmon saw the dancers transform into ravens.

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There are no ravens on the moraine today. Only sparrows and one, apparently grumpy robin appear. In a month or two, silver salmon will move through the waters we now walk along. Eagles and ravens will perch above the trail, waiting for their opportunity to feed. The Native people now in Juneau attending Celebration will be on their own salmon streams. Here, trout and char will stalk the spawning beds. The cruise ship tourists will be home in their suburbs. In the early mornings of spawning days, black bears will slap the silvers out of the water. Aki and I will be home on Chicken Ridge, eating fresh salmon,

Articulating

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Aki and I are way out the road, visiting a riverside forest for the first time in months. It’s sunny, hot, and windy. The sun brings drama to the poor cousins of the woods, illuminating with back light spruce-bough moss and spotlighting a flowering twisted stalk. Wind articulates the broad, thorny leaves of devil’s club in slow movements of the Bon Odori.

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Unfortunately, the wind doesn’t cool Aki, who pants as she trots through the old growth.

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Waiting for an Overdue Bus

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For the first time in a month, the false outer point parking lot is almost empty. We pull in near the only other car and spot its owner fishing for king salmon on the point. Two crows stand on either side of the fisherman, waiting for him to clean a fish. Between the fisherman and us, an immature bald eagle stands erect on a rock near the tide line, surrounded by a small murder of crows. Duffer, not a scientist, I imagine the eagle is preaching or teaching to the crows. But they are more likely the bigger bird’s guards.

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The crows scatter when Aki walks onto the beach but the eagle stays. I wonder if it is waiting for the tide to ebb enough to reveal something to eat. When several of the crows fly low passes over the eagle, it flies a few yards down the beach. After this happens several times, I realize that the eagle just wants some peace. Our presence and its effect on his tormentors is giving him a little.

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It’s worst for the eagles perched in the spruce trees above the point. Squawking crows take turns diving on them. Some eagles hold their ground or try to place spruce boughs with their sharp-tipped needles between themselves and the little corvids. The crows drive off two who fly around the point to a crow free zone where they bicker over a perch that offers a good view of the expanding tide lands. When the sounds of crow and eagle complaints die away, I can hear sea lions grumbling. They are all waiting for the ebbing tide—eagles, crows and sea lions—as unhappy as commuters waiting for an overdue bus.

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It’s About the Cheese

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Aki and I have spent sometime together almost every day since she arrived on Chicken Ridge. That was nine years ago. Still, I don’t understand her complicated ways. I know that she lacks the focus of a sled dog. Aki would never be content to trot at ten miles an hour as the tail of a teammate swishes before her face. She is capable of love but on her terms. The little poodle-mix never shows the blind affection of a Labrador retriever.

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This morning she refused my invitation to take a walk. Only after I left the house did she dash from her nest on the couch arm to cry at the door. When we arrived at the Gastineau meadows trail, Aki shot of the car and showed her usual interest in animal signs. But near the edge of the first meadow, where Mt. Juneau and the Sheep Mountain ridge seem to curl like a giant’s fingers around us, she stopped. Cocking her head in apparent amazement that I wanted to continue up the trail, she refused to move. As she expected, I soon joined her on a quick trip to the car.

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Aki whined as the old Subaru struggled up Main Street and turned onto the ridge. She wriggled in my arms as I carried her to the house and burst through the door when it opened. I found her in the kitchen where the scent of tea and toasted rye bread lingered, where a plate with smörgås scraps rested on the counter. Aki stared at the woman who ate the open-faced sandwich and now held up a tiny piece of goat’s cheese. The dog walked toward the cheese on her rear legs. The little genius knew that while she kept me company on Gastineau meadows, someone at home was eating cheese. Rule number one for understanding Aki. It is always all about the cheese.

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Under the Fog

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I see this mountain valley every morning. Now it is filled with fog. Aki and head out to find out what hides beneath. After climbing up a gravel trail busted through the forest by a snow machine club, the little dog and I walked along the Treadwell Ditch, busted through the same forest a hundred years ago by Chinese immigrants to bring water to the Treadwell mines. We pass by the usual forest characters—shy maiden flowers, skunk cabbages, sorrel, and delicate blossoms that will soon set famine berries.

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When the trail leads us onto an open meadow, we get into mountain flowers—shooting stars, wild rhodendrens, and the remains of bog rosemary. In the flat light, the shooting stars have a violet cast. A Sitka blacktail deer breaks from cover to dash across the meadow to the safety of the bordering old growth forest.

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Waiting Game

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The eagles play a waiting game on the Fish Creek Delta. They wait perched on spruce limbs where they could spot the arrival of food or a rival. They wait for the tide to recede. They long for the day king salmon enter the creek. The delta crows also wait for low tide and the salmon. But I can hear their young calling out for their mid-morning feed. The adults must long for the day their hatchlings fledge.

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The impatient Aki rushes down a trail lined with blooming wild roses and cow parsnips. She has many scents to sample and cover with pee. The little dog doesn’t notice a formation of barn swallows dive on out matched mosquitoes. I feel like Aki and I are heavy bombers being escorted over enemy territory.

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Perhaps because it landed so near a nest or because the crow is tired of the waiting game, it flies into an immature bald eagle to force it off it perch. The larger bird screeches out a warning but doesn’t move. In seconds the crow takes up station just above the eagle and lets out a string of sounds that could be curses. The eagle looks up at the diminutive crow, cocks its head, confused, rather than angry. Below, the swallows, their waiting game over, hunt prey.

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Muting the Robin’s Song

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The eagles are testy today. During an early morning hunt for king salmon at Tee Harbor the captain and I watched two mature bald eagles throw down over a baitfish. One hovered ten feet about the water. Using the strong north wind, it gently lowered its talons onto a herring. Getting only its tail feathers wet, it rose up with the fish and headed toward the beach. Another eagle snatched for the fish. The two birds locked talons and twirled in a ball just above the harbor waters. Whether because of centrifugal force or a loss of nerve, the attacker released and fell backwards into the water. I was about to suggest that we motor over and lift its stunned body out of danger with the net when it stirred. By slapping its wings onto the water it managed to lift itself into the air.

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Now Aki and I walk through a soaked forest to the beach. Weak storm light hits the early-summer growth on the understory plants. The illuminated green growth sparkles with beaded rainwater. Robin and thrush songs further brighten the mood until an eagle gives out a shrill lament. Aki, who has gained a sensible caution around the bid birds, moves next to me the trail. The first line of a poem someone should write pops into my head: Grief mutes the robin’s song.

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Raven Cabal

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I sense tension in the raven community. Aki picks up on it. On Gastineau Avenue, they burst from beneath a salmon berry patch when we approach. One appears to act as a lookout from a perch that provides an unobstructed view of the MV Zaandam’s bow ropes. Ripe salmon berries, some red, others a milky orange distract me away from the ravens. But, like the ravens’ moods, they are sour.

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The little dog and I descend the Ewing Way steps to Lower Franklin Street and then walk past Tracy’s Crab Shack to the cruise ship dock. The disembodied voice of the Zaandam’s cruise ship director lets his passengers know that it is now safe to disembark. Early risers waddle down the Zaandam’s gangplank, pose for a picture with a crewman dressed as an eagle, and move into a swarm of land-tour hawkers. Aki powers past the false eagle and toward a gang of ravens shredding the ropes that secure the Zaandam to the dock. One, apparently the local lookout, watches us pass. Aki doesn’t even bark.

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Gathering Moss

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On wet days like this, when the wind whips up waves on the channel and the trees of Treadwell drip steady on the little dog and I, the forest seem to be eating the ruins of the old mining town. Water glistening on an old iron rail directs attention to the way it curves and then dives into a live spruce tree. Rain soaked moss fills the crevices of vents and covers concrete walls. Better keep moving little poodle-mix, before the woods claim you.

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Bear Signs

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As if to encourage thoughts of our well-loved dead, clouds have jammed themselves tight against the channel-side mountains to diminish our view-shed. The same mass of grey now drops heavy rain onto picnic tables and popular beaches. The clouds haven’t spared Salmon Creek Trail where Aki, my now-soaked poodle-mix trots up a steep slope. Her enthusiasm wanes after she sniffs the severed trunk of a cow parsnip plant. She reacts as if the trunk were a half eaten salmon lying next to a spawning stream in August.

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A bear chewed off the root structure and upper portion of the parsnip remnant before tossing it on the path. Other bear discards form a wavy line on the trail ahead, like shoes and bits of clothes dropped from front door to bed by a drunk. The last segment of torn leaf lies next to a thick patch of cow parsnip plants with swollen flower pods. I imagine the bear, 100 pounds, black fur shinny with rain, waddling down the trail, a three-foot-long chunk of cow parsnip crushed in its teeth, stopping every few seconds for another bite. He drops the last bit on the trail and heads down to Salmon Creek to see if the chum salmon have come home from the sea.

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