We were talking politics when I slipped on shale and cut my hand (discussing politics with a human friend, not Aki). That was the second mistake. The first was attempting to round False Outer Point after the incoming tide had already covered the easy beach path.

The point provides us with a windbreak and no rain falls from the sky. But otherwise, the walk offers little but low-level risk and enough crows to satisfy Alfred Hitchcock.

I don’t realize I’m bleeding until three crimson drops hit Aki’s yellow wrap. I elevate my injured hand and squeeze it closed to slow the flow. Overhead two bald eagles fly out over the channel and return to their spruce roosts. Crows darken the beach just ahead of us. When we cross their privacy line, they explode into the air. Are we invading the privacy they have come to expect each time the tide rises high enough to block human access to their beach? Maybe because my little dog looks so much like a stuffed animal I wonder if we have stumbled on the equivalent of a teddy bears’ picnic.

Aki and I just rounded the spit that forms the western jaw of Fish Creek’s mouth. In five minutes the path will be closed by the incoming tide. A strong wind blows down the creek, appearing to come from a break in the clouds hanging over the Douglas Island ridge. For the brief moments that the break will last, sunlight reaches the glacier and the lower flanks of the mountains that surround it.

A slim, white eagle feather spirals down, distracting me long enough for me to miss the flight of a mature bald eagle over our heads and into a screen of spruce trees. Ducks, spooked by the eagle fly off before I can photograph them against the face of the glacier. Bad timing, little dog. She gives me what looks like a “think it through dummy” stare. She probably just wants to escape the wind but my brief anthropomorphic moment makes me wonder whether opportunities to witness the wonderful or beautiful in nature is controlled more by luck than timing.

It was in part good timing that placed us here during the brief storm break illuminating the glacier. Such things tend to happen just as the sun first reaches mountain peaks. Knowledge of tide tables allowed us to sneak past the headland just before being cut off by the flooding tide. But the rest was a matter of uncontrollable luck.