If I had more patience on this gray morning, I’ve have a picture of this eagle in flight instead of one showing him skulking on an exposed tidal rock. He must have flown off when the kettle came to boil, gone when I returned with the day’s first cup of coffee. The hunters, eagles, otters, and heron, have moved on with the season, leaving the beach to the professional scavengers—crows, ravens, and gulls. With the movie stars gone, I can appreciate the beauty in a gull’s flight.
This morning Aki and I cross Gasteneau Meadows under high overcast. It’s what we expect in October—subtle gray light of fall, usually illuminating some form of rain. No precipitation falls but it can’t be far off.
The lower portion of the trail leads past a school playground full of happy kids. Give a Juneau kid a rain coat and he will find the same joy in playing outside as one in Southern California. Aki ignores them in a search for dog sign. Many passed this way recently but we won’t see another dog on today’s walk.
A shaft of sunlight would bring out the color of the red in the dying berry bushes and emphasize the tone variations of gold yellow meadow grass. With no hope of that show, I am satisfied with the color contrasting in places where red or yellow plants crowd the barkless flesh of dying pine trees.
On most walks I have to wait for Aki but today she presses ahead, stopping just before disappearing from my vision. The trail leaves the open meadow, moving into the heavy blanket of spruce that covers most of Douglas Island. That’s where I hear the squeaky door song of migrating Sandhill Cranes. They must be far off, flying high and away from congested Juneau. A guy standing on the meadow might see their thin dark lines against the gray sky. I’m suddenly homesick for the tundra of Southwest Alaska, where for a few days each fall I’d listen to cranes forming up then flying south before winter denied them food. How can the memory of migrating cranes’ noisy passage through the delta’s dark blue skies trigger a longing for a place when recollection of more common events can not? Is it the other memories that form a rosary with that of the cranes—sinking into fragrant tundra to watch the birds pass overhead, tasting the last ripe berries as blue as the crane’s eyes, listening to a small child’s giggles as she uses a rolling gait to move across spongy tundra toward the arms of an encouraging mother? 
With the temperature in the high 40’s F., no wind, and the cloud cover persistent but high enough to reveal mountains and glaciers, Aki and I walk Fish Creek to salt water. Our moods are as neutral as the day’s color palette. The little dog seems preoccupied with her bodily eliminations. I’m puzzled by the lack of ducks on the Fish Creek Pond. The complaint of an eagle roosting on a trail-side spruce warns of his approaching cousin. The newcomer, just a speck in my eye, flies high over the pond. You can see him in this picture by using your hunter’s eye.
We all have one, a hunter’s eye, even the pacifist vegan. It’s what draws you to the sudden emergence of a seal’s head, an out of place sandpiper, the expanding ripples of a feeding fish.
After soaking in the intensity of Oahu with its rainbow colored flowers made almost garish by strong sunlight, I hardly notice the moraine’s fall coat. For my first walk with Aki after returning to Juneau, I chose this trail, which crosses glacial moraine before looping through the troll woods. Happy to be on an adventure, Aki bursts down the trail, breaking to investigate an interesting smell here, an unexpected motion there. I’m as calm as this gray, windless day. As far as my little dog is concerned, I’m spending far too much time watching mountains and trees reflecting on dark pond waters.
We enter the beaver war battlefields, finding normally flooded places on the moraine dry enough for walking. Vigilantes have deconstructed several more beaver dams, opening up a path to a duck hunter blind. The recently dead body of a juvenile varied thrust lays on the trail. Aki freezes into a defensive position, wrapping tail between her rear legs just before we hear the oddly beautiful sound made by a 12 gauge shotgun fired over lake waters. The bird’s body seems intact, not torn by shotgun pellets. Bending down, I search unsuccessfully for clues of its death. I want to take it home and puzzle longer over its beauty–the way its spade shaped feathers, gray-white with orange accents, form a breast plate over its swollen chest.
We hear rather than see most of our rain forest birds. The blurred whistle of varied thrust is one my favorite bird songs. Using this rare opportunity to study the singer, I try to feel sadness at its death. It would be easier if I could find sorrow or at least a recognition of terror in its open eye. There is only peace, as if the young bird accepted that its time had come.
The North Shore bike path takes us past some world famous big wave beaches like Sunset and the Pipeline. Path side growth make it a tunnel of green yielding random flashes of blue water and pure sand. Sometimes we ride through a cloud of perfume, richer than White Shoulders warming on the wrist of a beautiful woman. We move under arcs of flowers, some, red with orange accents imitating votive flames that drop to be crushed under bike tires. We are always crushing beautiful flowers on the bike trails of Oahu. 
Before the heat of each day of this Oahu visit, I take an early morning ride around Ewa Beach. Today, after clearing the thick belt of cookie cutter housing developments I’m riding a bike path running between mangrove swamps and a golf course. Occasional bursts of perfumed scent rises from late blooming plants. A man, in ball cap and tee shirt, skin darken by sun, passes on a bike from the opposite direction. He holds a fishing pole across his handlebars, riding slow to conserve energy. We exchange alohas then move in opposite directions-me towards a bay side park, he toward a hard-to-find fishing hole.
Early morning sun bounces off the waters of an arm of Pearl Harbor at the park. I leave the bike and walk out onto a short dock located between two others. On one, an old Asian man stands with a throwing net in his hands. Nothing stirs in the waters around him. Bait fish rile the water around me, driven into tight balls by larger fish. I see the wakes produced by their fins running just beneath the surface. The fisherman sees this too but doesn’t move to my dock. Maybe he knows the fish will move to him or maybe he is put off by a guy in bright spandex standing in the morning sun. Figuring it’s the later I hop back on the bike and ride on.
After the docks, the path runs along a small point. On the opposite side I stop to ask another fishermen for the names of the fish hunting the dock waters. Showing great interest, he only wants confirmation that they were, “on the other side.” I owe an apology to the net fishermen for sending him competition then ride through a small flock of the ever present egrets. 
Today Honolulu’s Bishop Museum lets everyone in for free. It’s a celebration of their recent renovations. It’s also a celebration of the people of the Pacific, some of whom are performing traditional dances on the museum grounds while others offer traditional island foods. Later I’ll eat curry poured into folded fry bread by the women tending the Fuji food tent shelter and watch well done Tahitian dances. Now I’m inside the museum, sketching a wooden Hawaiian god and half listening to two women on the next bench telling story. Perhaps inspired by the Bishop’s collection of royal Hawaiian regalia and other physical evidence of their history on the island, these Aunties tell each other the important things—who did the things that changed their world, how to fish near shore, a job always for the women, anything about their grandchildren.
As in most places on this island, I feel welcome here, perhaps the only person at this celebration incapable of turning brown under the sun.
Aki didn’t make this trip to Oahu, which is just as well. Her thick curly coat would make her uncomfortable in Hawaii’s hot weather. Making an early morning start we ride bikes to the Ewa Beach Zippy’s for coffee and banana andagi (Okinawan style donuts). Next door a pioneer’s cemetery occupies some rolling ground along the busy Fort Weaver Road. Car and truck robs the dead of the quiet they deserve. Seed pods, roughly shaped like fava beans lay on parched ground between the grave markers. Only the acacia trees that dropped them offer any shade.
This desert of severe beauty would provide little solace to the families left behind, so I pray for them and the souls of those buried beneath. Most died more than 80 years ago but some grave stones show signs of recent visitation—a weathered stuffed animal by the grave of a 9 year old who died in 1923, mason jars for holding flowers and water a few grave markers away. A field of drunken crosses spread across the Christian section of the graveyard. Native stone, lightly inscribed on a flat side with kanji, mark the Japanese graves, as if in recognition of how little impact one life can have on the hard rocky ground of Oahu’s dry leeward side.
We are back at the Peterson Creek Salt Chuck, this time under sunny skies. Late arriving silver salmon roll on the chuck’s surface, already positioning themselves for the best spots on their spawning beds. Just a few hundred meters away from the scene of their future lustful, deadly effort to procreate, the new silvers pass the lifeless bodies of an earlier wave of their brothers, now floating down current. Some of the deceased will feed eagles, ravens, and trout. Others will ride back and forth on the tide until pushed by an autumnal flood onto the forest floor as fertilizer. Even now decaying salmon bodies fill the air with the scent of death.
Aki watches the rolling salmon with interest, rear up, tail fanning the air, but agrees to follow me around the lake and into the woods. My clumsy steps through deep grass set a raft of mallards to a low flight. The ducks settle 50 meters up a little slough. To give them a break, I lead Aki into the woods where we join a trail leading to a string of little crescent shaped beaches that should be free of dead salmon and their smell.
At trails end, I rest on sun dried rocks above one of the beaches to scan Favorite Channel and Shelter Island beyond. While watching humpback whale spume rise above the channel I smell death. This is a concern here, away from the salmon waters because death is a perfume favored by bears this time of year. The smell fades as I turn to look into the forest for its source. No bear stares back. This happens several times and I begin to wonder if death, the kind that ends human and animal lives, carries the scent of decay. Is a smelly grim reaper in the neighborhood, enjoying some down time on this soft, sunny day? When Aki approaches from one of her forest recon missions, I pick her up and discover the truth. She is the source of the foul odor. Somewhere the little brat found bear scat or a dead salmon and rolled in it. 
When the sun burned off this morning’s cloud cover Aki’s other human and I decided that we had to go berry picking, Even though it was cold, in the low 40’s, and Friday the 13th, we took the canoe out to the glacial lake for a paddle to a part of the moraine covered with low bush blueberry plants.
This late in the season we only had the right to expect a scattering of berries and even those might explode at our touch. Perhaps driven to arrive before all the berries dropped with overripeness, we left the house without food, water, a knife or matches.
A light breeze coming off glacial ice carried away most of the sun’s warmth so we were glad to reach the berry fields, which are protected from the wind by a screen of willows and cottonwoods. There the sun warmed us and highlighted the reds and yellows of autumn leaves.
While her humans drifted in different directions across the berry patch, Aki dashed back and forth between them. Sometimes she harvested her own blues. At first I concentrated on the hunt, happy to find plenty to pick. As my berry bucket, a cut open half gallon soy sauce container, filled, I went on autopilot and left my mind to its cleaning—-disposing of useless or harmful thoughts. With berries and a rejuvenated mind, I joined Aki and the other paddler on a beach of glacier crushed white sand. Across the lake the glacier wound between mountain peaks it carved in earlier times. Above that it was all blue skies.
Walking with Aki 