Aki and I walk a route through Downtown Juneau. Because it offers rich opportunities to check pee mail as well as good chances to grab a goody dropped by a tourist onto the sidewalk, it is one of the little dog’s favorite walks.
This morning we moved down Gold Street and then up Gastineau, passing the ruins of the old A.J. Mine. Forty years ago Aki would have seen many feral cats. They lived in the relatively warm mine tunnels and scavenged meals in Juneau Cold Storage. But that intuition burned down and parvo virus wiped out the cat population. Tourist shops and homeless have replaced them on the downtown streets of Juneau.
While climbing backup to Chicken Ridge, we stop to study the new statute of William Seward. While Secretary of State Seward engineered the purchase of Alaska from Russia. This mads him one our patron political saints. After the purchase, Seward visited the Alaska panhandle, including the Tlingit village of Saxman. The village residents feasted Seward and gave him valuable, hand made gifts. Unaware of Tlingit cultural rules, he never reciprocated with gifts of his own. After a reasonable time had passed, the Saxman people erected shaming totem pole with an unflattering effigy of Seward at the top. If Seward had satisfied his cultural obligation they would have lowered to pole. But, it stood like a public dunning notice until this summer when, after being attacked by carpenter ants, the section of the pole carved in Seward’s image had to be removed.
In a few weeks, scoters and ducks will work the waters just offshore from the beach. But now the sea is empty and only a brace of gulls walk the beach. Aki keeps her nose down, hunting for sign. But we only meet one dog on the walk.
Around False Outer Point and across Gastineau Channel a remnant of Lemon Glacier hangs above Costco and the state jail. On most days it looks no more remarkable than a snowfield. But there is something about today’s light that turns its ice a pastel blue. In the Alps or even the Canadian Rockies, there would be a good trail leading to the hanging glacier. But here, its just another sign of the warming earth.
On this walk over the moraine Aki and I have already seen evidence of the wild world’s give and take: mushrooms ripping their way through the trailside moss, bones and berries in bear scat, cottonwood trees fallen by beavers, and moss slowing reducing trees in the troll woods to soil
That will have to do little dog, we don’t want to keep the bears from their lunch. Aki and I climb over an exposed headland and drop onto the beach occupied by a landed raft of mergansers and their three-gull escort. Between the ducks and the woods are fresh tracks of a black bear. Aki follows the tracks into the forest and disappears. But when I catch up she isn’t growling, just smelling the scent left behind by the bear.
Walking with Aki 