Category Archives: Poodle

Change Day?

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Aki stands on the north side of the fish creek bridge, which surprises me because normally I have to carry her across it. The sound of turbulent water usually  keeps her planted at the edge of the south side.  The blade of grass she gripped between her teeth surprises me more. The little dog likes to like moisture off of grass blade but I’ve never seen her chew on one.

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We have worked our way to here by crossing a mountain meadow using a decrepit corduroy road. The name is a disservice to roads and to corduroy cloth. The “road” is just a muddy wound that meanders through the meadow. To make it passable, someone has dropped bark-less rounds of Douglass pine into the mud. As I danced down the meadow from half-sunken log to half-sunken log, Aki trotted easily on a thin, grassy verge.

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As we walked, a morning wind blew away clouds that had hidden the surrounding mountains.  It also disturbed the calm of the meadow ponds, causing water skaters to move toward wind-protected water, and ruining the reflections of yellow pond lilies.  Even though the corduroy road is rarely used, Aki manages to find some exciting smells. She doesn’t seem to mind me stopping for pictures or to listen to the lark-like song of an unseen bird.

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Giving In

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While Aki sniffs at a spot back up the trail, I watch drops of water fall onto the surface of a beaver pond. Minutes ago, before the rising wind shook droplets from an overhanging tree, the pond surface was still. Grey clouds clogged the sky. Rain fell. The forest showed only muted earth colors. But the sun broke through as the wind started to shake loose the raindrops.

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If not for the working songs of birds and the creaking of wind-animated trees, I could hear the spat of drops hitting the pond. It’s too early in the day for the start up of the industrial tourism machinery. Aki and I are alone on the trail.

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I should be at Tai Chi class. But Aki gave me a hard look each time I tried to explain the need to postpone this morning’s walk. She held the moral high ground. I had gone fishing for salmon yesterday rather than take her for a walk. In order to shift things to a more equal footing, I reminded her of how, last night, she had enjoyed eating the crisp skin of one of the salmons that I had caught while she stayed home. I wasn’t surprised when she rejected the argument. The little poodle-mix tends to remember her disappointments better than her happy moments.

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What started as an enterprise driven by guilt turned into one of wonderment after the sun broke through the clouds. Aki, who never seems to raise her noise more than three inches above the ground during our walks, probably doesn’t even recognize the power of the sun to turn rain soaked leaves into jewelry as it is doing this morning on the False Outer Point Trail.

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The Usual Posse

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The heavy rain that started Saturday continues to rinse Juneau’s streets clean. Aki and I are seeking shelter from it in the Treadwell Ruins’ forest. Wrapped as I am in waterproof clothing, I can enjoy the rain as long as it isn’t accompanied by wind to whip drops into my face. Aki has only her curly fur and a water resistant wrap. Rain darkens her fur and soaks her wrap but she doesn’t seem to mind.

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Out on the beach, the usual posse of eagles and ravens monitor for suspicious activity. The ravens do this with style, strutting about as if they ordered the weather.

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One of the eagles clutches the metal ridgeline of the old ventilator shaft. It looks like is about to say, “What’s all this then?” The other roosts on the top of a rusting anchor. Both watch Aki run circle around a Bernese mountain dog that has just galumphed over for a visit.

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Bastille Day on the Moraine

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Even though she was born in Missouri of mix parentage, Aki looks like a French Poodle. I am tempted to wish her “Happy Bastille Day.” But we are out on the glacial moraine under gray, rain-filled clouds. She demands, not a parade, but for her humans to send her Frisbee spinning down the trail. While chasing the flying disk she growls like a wolf chasing down prey. She is no one’s poodle.

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While the little dog is content with chasing her Frisbee, I am looking to pick enough blue berries for next Saturday’s pancakes. We recently used up last summer’s berries. Domestic blue berries for the store don’t work. They are overpowered by the sourdough pancake batter.

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Water from the Mendenhall River is all but covering the trail and we have to press up against a hedge of alders in order to skirt a flooded out section. Aki dashes through the detour and waits for her two humans, Frisbee in her mouth.  Later she will wait for us to pick a pint of blues and then walk back to the car in the rain.

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Giving and Taking

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The sun gives and it takes beauty this morning on Gastineau Meadows. It backlights the plain Jane alder leaves, making they sparkle it costume jewelry. It creates patterns of shadows and light on already mottled alder bark and makes the bones of dead pine trees glow. But under the sun’s harsh glare, south facing mountains on the other side of Gastineau Channel lose definition. Only Mt. Juneau holds it beauty in the morning light.

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Last winter I had to cajole Aki into crossing through an area of the meadow frequented by coyotes. Today she trots over the trails of her wild cousins, more interested in a spot of dog urine than their whereabouts. I again marvel at the capacity of the little dog to forget the unpleasant details of her recent past.

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Aki remembers the important things like the approaches to our favorite trailheads and the scent signature of dog friends. She can never forget her feeding schedule or the sound of cheese being sliced on a cutting board. But thankfully, the warning ghosts of her past never appear to trouble her.

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Having Her Way

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Any dog trainer watching Aki and I this morning would be shaking her head in disgust. Rather than exerting dominance over the little poodle-mix, I let her set the pace. A dog whisperer of kind words rather than commands I even yield to her choice of direction. When I put up a fuss, she lets me drag her across Gastineau Avenue so I can take a picture of today’s collection of cruise ships. Otherwise I follower her zigzagging pee trail.

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Yielding responsibility to the ten-pound dog frees up my mind for wandering. I’m daydreaming about the cats that use to live in the nearby ruins of the old stamp mill when two deer does spring out from behind a screen of salmon berry bushes and hop down Gastineau like kangaroos. They sprong past a low-income apartment complex and up the hillside.

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Aki, so intent on cataloguing scent, never sees the deer. She leads me down to the docks and then up Lower Franklin Street past the Red Dog Saloon, Pilipino Hall, and the homeless shelter. She drags me away from a young man rapping out a poem. We climb up toward Chicken Ridge and into Capital School Park. A bronze chair in the park commemorates the forced internment of the high school valedictorian just before graduation just because his grandparents came to Alaska from Japan. Rain beads up on the bronze chair and a small string of origami cranes formed, out of necessity in the rain forest, with waterproof materials. Aki waits for me photograph them.

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Summer Famine

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There are many reasons why we don’t visit Fish Creek this time of year. All of them are linked to salmon. In a normal year, hundreds of king salmon would be splashing in the creek’s pond. These draw crowds of fishermen trying to snag the big fish with weighted hooks. Chum and pink salmon should be holding in the creek, ready to move upstream to their spawning grounds.  They bring the attention of bears. But today, perhaps because of the disappointing salmon returns, there are no cars or bear scat in the trailhead parking. These absences, plus the fact that the low-gas-warning icon lit up five miles ago cause me to pull into in the empty lot.

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Two ravens guard the footbridge over Fish Creek, hopping slowly down the railing as Aki and I start across the bridge.  I look down at a gravel bar for the expected dog-salmon carcasses and find none.  The ravens must be here to attack a garbage bag that hangs partway out of a waste bin. Above the ravens, an eagle screams.

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A king salmon, already robbed of its silver color by time in fresh water, rises on the pond surface, drawing the attention of an airborne eagle. Nearer to us, two other eagles perch on pond-side spruce trees.  The one with the chestnut and dun feathers of an immature bird appears to take interest in Aki. I think about putting the little poodle-mix on her lead but in a minute we will be back in the trees where she will presumably be safe from eagles.

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A minute later, while we walk down a forested path, the immature eagle flies low over our heads and lands clumsily thirty feet up a nearby spruce. We watch each other for a while and then I follow Aki away from the pond toward the creek’s mouth.  This eagle will follow us to the mouth and back to the pond—with the purposeful casualness of a spy, not the focused intensity of a mugger. After the third eagle flyby I clip Aki’s leash to her collar as the immature eagle settles onto another spruce branch.

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Shattering the Calm

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Because it is beautiful and there are only 5000 cruise ship tourists in town, Aki and I are visiting the glacier this morning. As a sign above the visitor center’s urinal reminded me, over 550,000 people visit the glacial moraine every year. Most arrive on buses. We have to pass a row of the idling transports to reach the trailhead.

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Most of the cruisers keep to a small viewing area near the visitor’s center. But many chatty tourists join us on the trail to Nugget Falls. Even after we leave the trail for a lightly used side path, we are not alone.  There is still enough space for Aki to chase after her orange Frisbee. When her toy picks up too much sand and grit the little dog drops it into Mendenhall Lake for a wash.

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We turn back before reaching the smallish gravel bar at the base of Nugget Falls. A faux Native-American canoe is just landing a group of tourists on the gravel bar to join the hundred or so other people already there.

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The wind rose while we approached the falls, rippling the lake surface and that of all but the most protected bays. I’m admiring one of the remaining quiet places before using a bridge of stepping-stones to cross it. It’s one of the rare times on the walk when I can’t hear other human voices. Then Aki’s other human tosses the Frisbee across the water where it hits the surface and sends out a series of concentric ripples.  Even before the Frisbee strikes the water, Aki is charging across the stepping-stones. She snatches up her toy just as the circle of expanding ripples shatters the remaining calm.

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Hilda Meadows

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Aki slouches along behind as I climb up toward Hilda Meadows. I’m hot and wish I’d brought a water bottle. Each time I stop to check on the little dog she is motionless except for her panting tongue.  It’s a weather change day, cooler than yesterday and with clouds that the sun uses to cast shadows onto the surrounding mountains. But the little dog still needs water. I push on to where a cold stream drains the meadows.

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When we began this hike, the mountain caretaker met us at the trailhead to say that we were the first ones to start up the trail. “No one has gone before you to disturb the wolves and bears.” I wasn’t too worried then, knowing that we would be passing through the kind of open country avoided during the day by wild predators. Now, hot and sweaty from the climb to the mountain’s shoulder, I am less worried about beasties. They all must be resting during the heat of this still warm day.

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When we reach the stream, I stop and point to an easy trail down the water. Aki looks in the other direction. She can sniff in derision without me seeing the gesture. A minute later, she muscles her way through thick grass to reach a pond but gives up before she can quench her thirst.  I carry her to another fork of the stream and drop her onto the beach. She wades into the water and laps some up and then turns back towards the trailhead.

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I lift her to the opposite stream bank and walk into one of the meadows which has dried out during our three day heat wave. taking care not to step on colonies of the carnivorous sundew plants and other low growing flowers. Easier to avoid are the aging collections of shooting stars and freshly flowered orchids called lady tresses. With mountain views all around and a stream providing background music I want to linger. Aki has other ideas and starts back toward the trail to home.

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The little dog is now the one looking back in frustration as she trots ahead. She doesn’t even stop to sniff at a patch of shooting star flowers crushed by the black bear that slept there until this morning’s light broke over Mt. Troy.

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Like Madrid

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We are early to the woods this morning. Taking advantage of a solstice sunrise, the little dog and I start down the Outer Point Trail just as the forest awakes. I’m reminded of a trip to Madrid, when thanks to jet lag, Aki’s other human and I were able to walk onto Puerta del Sol just as the sun stirred a small camp of homeless awake. Soon men with brooms began cleaning away the debris of the previous day. No opera singer tested her voice but a man strummed a guitar as the sun warmed his stiff fingers.  This morning, Aki I hear neither the operatic thrush nor the happy robin. Only the harsh songs of working birds and scolding squirrels break the forest’s silence.

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When we reach the beach, an eagle stirs from its spruce roost and flies lazily over Peterson Creek, like a vagrant rousted by a cop. All the drama is provided by low angle sunlight that makes the orange and rust colored rockweed glow on the exposed beach.

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