With boots finally dried from the beaver pond dunking and the sun finally shinning like civilized people come to expect in summer, we returned to the mountain meadows. I bring little expectation of wildflowers since they hadn’t showned themselves during last week’s visit.  The almost cartoon yellow skunk cabbage still hold a monopoly on color in the highest meadow but we find tiny magenta treasures—the poisonous bog rosemary and something I call, “wild rhododendron” (see photo)  on the second. Here also blooms the cloudberry and bog blueberry.

Rather than continue to the lowest meadow we leave the path in search of the insect eating sundews. I found them here before but being blinded and made lazy by the sun we pass without a discovery. Aki really doesn’t care. She’s found the last patch of snow where she played chase the chunks of snow flying off somebody’s boot game. It’s a dog thing.

Six days of dry, sunny days in the northern rainforest can throw off my internal clock. Experiencing  it dog sitting at a friend’s beach house compounds the problem. Here at water’s edge, I feel my sleep patterns slipping as we stay up with the daylight of each lengthening day., seduced by how it deepens shadows on surrounding mountains while appearing to set alight their remaining snow. (My word selection is also affected).

Aki and her dog buddy seem unaffected. Yesterday, or was it the day before, we took them up a forest trail, crossing several small streams with the careful asymmetry of a Japanese garden, until reaching a pocket meadow dotted with stunted pines. For the dogs we could have been on any trail frequented by other dogs that leave behind signature smells. I hoped to find the magenta flowers of a Shooting Star. Even this long stretch of good weather couldn’t force that miracle in May.

Last evening, Memorial Day in the USA,  we found a patch of the flowers in full bloom in a beachside meadow. We had ridden there on bicycles, Aki riding in a handlebar basket.  While we ate a late picnic dinner at meadow’s edge the air filled with geese and gulls disturbed by others there to enjoy the convergence of sun, warmth, and the holiday that marks the beginning of our summer. A bald eagle, securely placed mid-river on a protruding drift log root, appeared to ignore the cloud of gleaming white gulls and scattering Canada Geese.

Except for the odd eagle, bear or deer, we see few animal stars on Chicken Ridge. (There was that Bohemian Waxwing caught eating fermenting berries in our diminutive Mt. Ash tree—yellow accents brighter than red berries partially covered with fresh snow.) Aki and I must walk to places that draw the marmot, whale, or sea ducks. This morning the little poodle sleeps in a beach house out–the-road where we are house sitting. Two heron fish on the beach, close enough for watching over morning coffee.

One arrives first, gliding on its great wide wings, hovering for an instant, then planting feet without a splash in shallow waters.  He forms a statute of patience, gray body almost disappearing against gray water until morning light strikes the white head feathers. Like Dr. Who’s deadly statutes, the heron changes positions each time I look away but never attempts a catch of fish. The second heron, gliding to a stop 10 feet away from the first, has better luck. In seconds he moves his beak within inches of the water, strikes down until head is submerged , rises up then whips rapidly from side to side.  This happens many times while the first, apparently myopic heron remains upright.

The second heron’s success attracts local scavengers: gulls and an aggressive crow. In minutes both herons move off down the beach.

Now, just offshore a lone Barrow Golden Eye duck swims about the side of a brightly stripped anchor buoy. The bird acts like its sheltering in the lee of the buoy during a gale but the sea is flat calm.  With more knowledge of people than animals I want to assign a human justification for the things I watched this morning.  Is the duck smitten with the pretty buoy?  Did heron number 1 become angry when number 2 arrived uninvited and like a rude guest  nosily catch fish while a hungry number 1 pretends to look away?

Aki and I return to the mountains, this time with a reinforcement, with plans to climb to Cropley Lake. The Scots would call it a corrie; in France its a cirque— a pothole lake left by the retreating the glacier after carving out the surrounding mountain amphitheater.  It’s a steep climb up, made more difficult today by the soft wet snow on which we snow shoe.

The series of bowls and meadows we cross offer great sport for Aki as she dashes between myself and her other housemate. As I climb a particularly steep bowl, the little dog stands by my partner as she exchanges text messages with our traveling child. They stand in a pocket of reception in mountains without cell coverage until I reach Aki’s limit of 50 meters of separation. She charges up the mountain snow until reaching my side then flies down to her other human. Up and down she goes as we move toward the lake.

A scattering of hard done spruce trees occupy the next meadow we cross.  What first must have seemed like a perfect place for sprucelings to grow (easy light and abundant water) the meadow offered paradise for the young trees until they grew tall enough to attract attention from the wind and blowing snow. Those forces first shaped the trees into tough twisted survivors, then stripped them of green and eventually life. The old dead ones only offer tall perches for hunting birds and signposts for us.

We find the lake still covered deep snow while avalanche tracks mark the surrounding mountain bowls. Above one the sun shines surrounded by a circular rainbow cut by vapor trails of passing jets.