It is easy to read stories of life and death on this meadow’s snow. Evidence of the rabbit’s death is easy to see—a spot of blood on a patch of trampled snow; coyote tracks leading away into a sparse forest. These things provide proof of a continuing life, of course. The predator eats to live. On the other side of the meadow, where an informal trail leads into a ravine, my snowshoes crush the tracks of a deer. It recently crossed the trail, maybe at the time we found the coyote’s kill site. A slurry of melt water and granular snow expands at the bottom of each track. Now that the hunting season is over, the deer, an adult, may live to breed next fall.

Walking through this dark, dripping forest makes it hard to look forward to New Year’s Eve. Blame the big spruce and alders that joined the other wind fallen during 2014. I walk by their shattered corpses, wonder at the wind that sent them crashing down and remind myself that future forests will feed on their rotting bodies. I pause and honor the past’s year’s human dead and resolve to read the obituaries of people I never knew.

Aki breaks from the frankly morbid woods onto the beach where many dogs have walked in 2014. She ignores the raft of Barrow golden eye ducks working the off shore shallows and can’t see a pod of Dall porpoise hammering herring in deeper water. The back backs of the small cetaceans form a field of rocks that form and disappear until I try to photograph them. Behind, a bald eagle gives what sounds like a derisive cry before the porpoise disappear for good. If the downed trees caused me to reflection on the past, these harvesting animals encourage a hopeful look to the future. They already prepare for 2015.

It’s 10 A.M. on a cold, windless morning. The sun cleared Douglas Island’s mountainous spine a half and hour ago and is moving like a spotlight down the channel toward Juneau. We have a good view of Mt. Juneau but the sun concentrates on Sheep Mountain. Later, Mt. Juneau will sparkle when nothing blocks our view of Sheep Mountain. We walk over a meadow in dusk, tucked against the island’s spine. I walk slowly, waiting for the sun light to make the frost feathers sparkle. Aki is bored and doesn’t appreciate my lingering. Does she know the sun won’t reach this meadow until the New Year? I poke about, run through my Tai Chi exercises then find a tiny pond bordered by a band of pale, magenta plants. I think, “heather” and look for flowers; find frost feathers serving the same purpose. Aki can’t tell me why the plants circled this pond. She is moving down the two opaque ribbons of ice that mark a cross-country ski trail off the meadow.