Rice, smoked salmon and ripe avocado rolled up in nori (dried seaweed)— comfort  food in our Southeast Alaska home especially when taken with dark Swedish coffee. Aki watches me eat it from her perch on the sofa arm. She doesn’t mind. She had her smoked salmon for breakfast before our passage through the Troll Woods.  

The morning sun made a surprise appearance on the moraine trail leading to the woods. We see blue sky reflected in calm lake waters and sunlight gathered on the rain soak plants growing along the trail. Wanting solitude more than sun this morning I take Aki into the Troll Woods, which is still as cold as the previous night. We move down the moss covered trail in silence and peace until Aki stops to inspect a scene of small devastation. Shattered pieces of Broomrape lay on the trail, its roots dug from the ground by a passing bear.  We find more dig sites further up the trail. Aki takes it all calmly so I know the bear isn’t near.  Our relationship is like that. She relies on me to pick the right path while I expect her to warn of danger. Each have expectations for the other and most are fulfilled.

I take out the camera while approaching the young beaver’s lake in hope of a photo of him near the shore. That plan is shattered by the splash of a large bird dog and the loud voices of it’s owners. We wait at the edge of the woods for them to move on. They do but the beaver does not reappear.

We take a seldom used side trail to the flooded beaver lands but high water cuts off the path. Aki barks a greeting to a noisy gang of dog walkers moving along a parallel path.  I want to tell her not to reveal our location to the enemy. It’s time to back track to the car.

We could secure solitude by taking the Troll Woods path but now sunshine floods the open moraine trail so I forgo silence for light. Aki should be pleases as it increases her chances of running into other dogs. One does appear — a black lab plunges into one of the beaver lakes. Aki must have heard the commotion but stays quietly at my side. Together we walk in the sun to the car.   

It’s day two of sun. Tomorrow they forecast rain so Aki are crossing through the troll woods with plans to skirt around the flooded beaver lands while they are still in high summer.

A sad and desperate call dominates the woods when we pass beyond reach of the road noise. The simple song could be sung by a loon but it lacks the erie complexity of their music. Again and again the bird calls out as if keening his dead — a jarring contrast to warming sun on my face and the happy work songs of their other birds.

There is no one to ask about the sorrowful bird song. We are alone on this windless morning. Something crashes out of the water just as we reach the shore of one of the moraine lakes. It’s the noisy beaver we watched cruise back and forth across the lake a few weeks ago. There is a small causeway, maybe half a meter across, that we must cross to get to the main trail. It separates the lake from a small outlet stream. The beaver stops on the causeway long enough for me to realize he is small and maybe only a year old. Then he slips into the water to begin his swim back and forth across the narrow foot of the lake. Like the last time on each lap he slaps his tail and dives just before reaching the lake shore. 

After watching the beaver for a bit Aki and return to the causeway to figure out the deal. The beaver has been busy hauling mud from the lake to a small dam he has started on the outlet stream. The dam is not needed to maintain the lake level. Maybe the beaver doesn’t know that. Maybe he needs the damn to mark this as his territory.  That would explain all the overt swimming and tail slapping behavior, which could be designed to keep away other beavers looking for territory. Whatever the reason, the beaver’s dam building is a dangerous activity for this section of the trail gets heavy use by dog walkers, some accompanied by beasts big enough to do in the beaver.

Not wishing to cause the beaver more stress we move down trail to where an old beaver dam offers access to high ground surrounding Norton Lake. It’s our only option as beavers have flooded out the main trail. Here we find newly hatched dragon flies glittering in the sun. I love the electric blue ones that some call darning needles. Mine might be the last generation to know what inspired the nickname. Out of the lake ducks drift without much effort. I find an oddly passive huddle of ducks in some nearby reeds. 

At first I think the stationary ducks are someone’s decoys that ended up tangled together in the reeds. Then I noticed that they were covered with tuffs of white down, which along with the piercing gaze of one of the ducks suggests they are alive but molting. Later I checked some reference books and realized that they must be escaped decoys.

After circumnavigating the lake on the beaver’s logging trails we return to the Troll  Woods for the trip home. The wind is up now, erasing all the beautiful reflections I enjoyed on the Troll Wood lakes. We pass a little pocket lake — the one where I can only find one drake duck. We saw him this morning and I wondered if he sang the keening song we heard at the beginning of the hike.  On this return trip we find he has no cause to cry. A hen with 7 or 8 chicks swims on his lake. 

I didn’t expect beauty on this dull grey day. We walk through an older section of moraine forest. The glacier retreated from it 100 years ago. Since then a series of plant pioneers filled the open gravely space. First came the alders and willows, God’s Band-Aids. Slower growing majesties like the Sitka Spruce eventually forced them out after enough shed willow and alder leaves had built up a soil like medium for growth. Man threw nature a monkey wrench by mining the area for gravel. They left behind shallow lakes that attracted beavers and scared land for more willows and alders to grow. Now we have a wonderful mix of lakes, hardwood plains, and moss covered spruce forests.

Back to unexpected beauty. It shows mostly in reflections — some in the lakes and others in the parts of trails flooded by beavers. My favorite reflections may be those in tense rain spheres holding on the tops of spreading ferns.

The area borders a bedroom neighborhood and Aki soon has many opportunities to make new dog friends. A brace of basset hounds and a husky mix answer her barking call and charge down the trail to us. Aki ducks behind me but is soon chasing about with the bigger dogs. If they get too rough she is back between my legs. One of the basset hounds plants his front paws on my chest and smiles like a used car salesman.

Hoping for a little more solitude I lead us away from the main trail and onto a barely used one that follows the undulates of a rise of gravel that snakes through the forest between two beaver ponds. It’s quiet enough for me to think of the morning bike ride in the rain. Even though I took a road that runs along Gasteneau Channel for miles, the ride was for exercise, not beauty. Then I saw the Orcas (Killer Whales).

Five or six whales formed a pod moving up channel toward town. They must be hunting the king salmon now returning to the hatchery. By rubbing my glasses free of rain I just make them out. A mature male, with a massive dorsal fin was the easiest to follow as he rolled to the surface, exhaled and then immediately dipped below the water. Soon I saw the others, their dorsal fins moving up out the water and then down like so many saw blade teeth. Earlier in the ride someone told me about the whales. I figured that I had ridden right by them on the way out of town and wouldn’t see them on my return trip. Did it matter? The amazement should come from the whales’ presence in my home waters. It should be enough to know that they are there but it is not. I found that out when I saw them. That’s when you get the connection, the affirmation that they are swimming in local waters and breathing the same air as you.