In this deep forest on a dry gray day we look for small islands of beauty. In the film camera days I’d have loaded my old Nikon FM2 with a roll of black and white. As we climb up the Auk Nu Trail toward tree line the small watercourses begin to trickle. Frozen to silence by recent days of hard frost they now ooze water over the board walk trail to make transit tricky.

Aki prances over the ice covered boards but doesn’t show impatience while I slowly find ways to skirt the worst spots. I’d hoped to climb to the John Muir Cabin and enjoy the connected series of terraced mini-ponds in the nearby muskeg.  In high summer they provide music, form and color to distract backpackers resting before the final push to the cabin. I am not sure what to expect today.

Glaciated ice covers more and more of the trail as we climb through a series of snow covered meadows. I am head down most of the time, trying to avoid the fall I deserve for taking this risky trail without ice cleats. Several meadows from the cabin I turn us around and begin a slow descent to tree line. Force by conditions to watch the ground I find my pockets of beauty in the ice. Bundles of slender ice pillars force their way through softening mud and water trickling over slender berry bush limbs form frozen candles.

We find the image of a Chihuahua trapped in the surface ice of a pocket pond, its eye a perfect set of concentric circles— iris floating up as if pleading for its owner’s freedom.  Given this power to form art out of circumstance I’d have fashioned a wolf in profile not this icon of the dry Mexican plains but I see the humor in the gesture.

Apparently bruised by a week of hard frost, these huckleberry bushes glow in maroon tones. You really notice it on the bushes growing on downed hemlock trunks covered with electric green moss. The high bush cranberries put on a similar subtle show but in reddish brown. Aki flies down the forest trail past all this beauty. She only has eyes and nose for the noisy squirrels that taunt her from the safety of high spruce branches.

Even in this flat gray light the forest is a place of contrasts—islands of brittle ice in muddy paths, evergreen moss sprinkled with dead brown leaves, a single raven croaking to  break the silence. We find a sheet of stream ice weathered into the shape of a tree fog and along the river an inch deep black bear track, frozen and half  full of snow.

Reaching the riverine meadow Aki is startled by a raft of bufflehead ducks sheltering against our near bank. One must have nerves of steel or an attention disorder for it is feeding, feathery rear in the air when the others break into a low flight of escape.   Another seems to be water skiing on one leg, the other tucked away for flight.

Aki and I are on a jail break. My weeklong illness kept us off the trails until this morning. She bounces around the car cabin, fuzzy tail a metronome, little pink tongue curling around her chin, emitting annoying yips of excitement. These emotional shows grow as we approach the Peninsula trailhead.

Here we find still yellow maple leaves trying to get on with fall—a task made almost impossible by the recent hard cold snap when braver skaters transited new ice on protected sloughs. I also  find a single white eagle’s feather enmeshed in the forest duff. In this dark place the feather, almost 1/3 fluffy down, shines like a ferry light.  If Aki were a child we’d cobble together a history of this feather with shared imagination and local knowledge of the big birds.

Tumbling down a trail defined more by tree roots and topography than man’s spades we reach the beach, today a very gray place except for the Mendenhall Glacier ice giving off a dim blue white light. We turn down river toward a beach usually rich with birds. Aki trots ahead with confidence until the first shot gun blast sounds from across the river. Down goes her tail and head, which she turns to me to show a look of controlled fear.

She recovers after a few soft words and walks along, this time slightly behind me, toward our goal.  Two deeper blasts from a goose gun ring over the water to drive Aki into the tall beach grass until flushed into the forest by a third gun discharge.

Hoping the hunters are done for the day I walk further down the beach to where the beach side cliffs give way enough to permit a view of the rich beach. Aki stays with me like she did when I was bed bound. Head low, tail wrapped protectively around her privates she walks carefully by me side. “Okay little dog,” we can turn back.

Just before leaving the beach we fine a line of transparent jelly fish bodies spread out on the tide crushed beach grass. Most make circular corpses but one forms a three pointed shield melding into the straw colored grass beneath. In the night a single blade pierced the jelly fish then wrapped itself around the ghostly body in a parody of love.