We rain forest dwellers have many words to describe rain. There’s snain (mixed rain and snow), drizzle, mist, downpour, monsoon (long periods of washout rain), and showers. According to the weather service, Aki and I are experiencing a shower. I can’t argue. Rain streams from the sky like water from a showerhead. Even though we walk under the big cottonwood trees of the Treadwell ruins, drops hammer my parka and soak Aki’s fur, turning both dark gray.
As she tends to do when displeased, Aki uses mind control tactics to turn me back to the car. She plants herself and stares at my back as I move further into the woods. Only when I stretch to the emotional breaking point the invisible rubber band that connects us does she start to trot after me. Near the beach, the little dog relaxes and starts to check the pee mail. It provides her with more distractions than I can find on the beach.
Across Gastineau Channel, a salmon seiner moves toward Taku Inlet. Near the collapsed glory hole two gulls complain about the weather. They don’t even bother with three plump dog salmon that washed up during last night’s flood tide. I can’t even enjoy the drama of heavy raindrops slamming into the channel because the shower has become a drizzle. We return to the forested ruins and amidst its monopoly of summer green and decay-brown a recent wound on an alder tree mimics the golden orange of autumn maple leaves.
The roar of Nugget Falls blends with the complaints of gulls that appear to yell at us from nurseries formed on rock recently revealed by the retreating glacier. We have no problem finding a landing place near the glacier’s face—another sign of the retreat. A well-trod gravel path leads to the mouth of an ice cave. Last winter we needed ice cleats to walk on the cave floor. Today, it is ice-free gravel. Last winter we could wander down at least two tunnels. Today, one has collapsed and we have to duck under a low roof in the main chamber.
Fifty feet ahead an immature bald eagle rises from the creek, a twelve–inch-long fish dangling from its talon. The fish drops as the bird wings skyward. I know the scene took only seconds but when I play it back in my head, the bird and prey moved in slow motion, like I could have dashed over and caught the fish before it hit the meadow grass.
Aki clung to my side during the walk. She was spooked by the sound of 10-20 pound king salmon splashing in the creek pond and the off-key symphony performed by ravens and crows in the creek side alders. I was spooked too by the angry sounding splashes and the smell of dead salmon, both of which draw bears.
It was low tide when we reached the creek delta. Clutches of six or more eagles loitered on the exposed wetlands. One burst out of the tree just above my head when I stopped to count its cousins. Any peace the eagles and gulls had reached was broken when an immature eagle flew over a gull-feeding zone. The little white birds dived bombed the eagles and drove them into a nearby spruce forest.
It’s low tide. Just off the mouth of Peterson Creek pink salmon leap out of the water and then drop back to join a school of their kind killing time until the flood tide arrives to carry them to their spawning grounds. The crows and gulls sound impatient for the fish to die.
Walking with Aki 