Category Archives: Poodle

Frisbee—Aki’s Mobile Device

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Aki may not suffer distractions from a mobile device like many of the humans we pass on trails. By plugging their ears with buds, they take hearing out of their toolbox for experiencing nature. They might even miss the shadow of a bald eagle flying over the smart phone they clutch in a hand. Today I learned that her Frisbee has a similar impact on Aki.

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We are walking along the edge of Mendenhall River where it enters Fritz Cove. The incoming tide has flooded much of the beach. As usual, a half-a-dozen bald eagles are roosting in riverside spruce. Each watches us pass, perhaps eying Aki as a possible meal. Normally, the little dog hugs the forest edge when eagles take up stations in the tall spruce. Today, as if advertizing poodle meat, while chasing down her Frisbee, she dashes out to the water’s edge and springs like Tigger in the windblown grass.

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What do the seals make of Aki?

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The mouth of the Mendenhall River narrows and widens with the tide. Today, the tide ebbs, shrinking the river’s width and opening a trail around the tip of Mendenhall Peninsula. Unseen to the little dog and I, chum salmon are finning their way up the river to their spawning grounds in Montana Creek. We smell the rotting corpses of the early arriving salmon that floated down river after a violent spell of mating.

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The dead chums keep the interest of a half-a-dozen eagles roosting above us in spruce trees. After hearing the first one scream, Aki takes up a defensive position near my heels. But, the birds are not interested in ten pounds of poodle. They wait for the tide to serve up the dead.

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I am not so sure about the harbor seals. Two of them float in the current just off shore. I assume that they are there for the salmon but appear to look longingly at Aki in her yellow fleece coat. Maybe they are just curious as to what creature walks on four legs but wears clothes. As long as we keep moving down the trail, the seals swim towards us. When I stop for more than the time it takes to focus the camera, they slip under the water.

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Cheated

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I feel cheated out of three weeks of summer. Just barely one week into August and already the devil’s club leaves yellow and chlorophyll drains out of skunk cabbage. We don’t even have sun to enrich the autumn colors. A soft, steady rain drenches Aki and I as we climb up the Dan Moller Trail. The rain does not distract the dog from the abundant number of pee-mail messages left on the trailside brush. It’s a different story when we reach the first open meadow and cross it on a deteriorating wood plank trail. Here she shakes off what rain she can and stares at the fool who actually wants to continue up the trail. I know how this story will end but want to prolong the meadow visit long enough to sample the low bush blueberries. They too confirm the departure of summer. While some bushes wear fall colors most are still green. Even so, most have already dropped their berries. The few blues I harvest are bitter.

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The Black and the White of It

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Ravens and gulls are the black and white of it this morning. Aki ignores both. She doesn’t notice how the birds feed on spent dog salmon carcasses or wait for the ebbing tide to reveal more. She has no time for sights or sounds this morning but uses all her energy to study pockets of smells that dot the trail. Each one seems just out of her reach when I stop to photograph a bird. She manages to jerk forward just as I hit the shutter button on my old camera. This frustrates both of us but produces one little blessing in the form of a raven’s portrait captured in flight.

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A Blink of Sunshine

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After days of heavy rain, Aki and I finding ourselves squinting into sunshine. We just left the flume trail that links the Juneau Highlands to Perseverance trail, knocking accumulated rain water off elderberry plants that crowd the trail. I probably shouldn’t have chosen this trail because it is flooded at by charged streams that plunge down the side of Mt. Juneau to Gold Creek.

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Even the humble salmonberry leaves sparkle in the sunshine, which also turns the normally dull devil’s club berries into bright red globes. When the sun moves back behind the marine layer colors fade and we return to the world of muted greens that typifies the rain forest.

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Whale or Squirrel

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Today I planned on writing about the rain after Aki and I returned from walking a circuit around Outer Point Trail. A hard storm had hammered the forest just before we arrived, leaving behind beads of water that clung to berries and mushrooms. These water beads captured all the surrounding light and then shined like globes of hope until destroyed by wind. Globes of hope are compelling subjects, more interesting than politics or street violence. But a whale trumped them when it surfaced and exhaled a one hundreds meters from the little dog, swam through its own mist cloud and disappeared. Aki, who finds squirrels the most compelling things, turned away from the whale while I fiddled with the lens cap on my camera. But she waited we me, without complaint, for the whale to resurface. When it did, all but its spume hidden by the Shaman Island spit, she led me back into the forest toward the chitterling squirrel.

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Waiting Game

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The eagles play a waiting game on the Fish Creek Delta. They wait perched on spruce limbs where they could spot the arrival of food or a rival. They wait for the tide to recede. They long for the day king salmon enter the creek. The delta crows also wait for low tide and the salmon. But I can hear their young calling out for their mid-morning feed. The adults must long for the day their hatchlings fledge.

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The impatient Aki rushes down a trail lined with blooming wild roses and cow parsnips. She has many scents to sample and cover with pee. The little dog doesn’t notice a formation of barn swallows dive on out matched mosquitoes. I feel like Aki and I are heavy bombers being escorted over enemy territory.

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Perhaps because it landed so near a nest or because the crow is tired of the waiting game, it flies into an immature bald eagle to force it off it perch. The larger bird screeches out a warning but doesn’t move. In seconds the crow takes up station just above the eagle and lets out a string of sounds that could be curses. The eagle looks up at the diminutive crow, cocks its head, confused, rather than angry. Below, the swallows, their waiting game over, hunt prey.

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Gathering Moss

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On wet days like this, when the wind whips up waves on the channel and the trees of Treadwell drip steady on the little dog and I, the forest seem to be eating the ruins of the old mining town. Water glistening on an old iron rail directs attention to the way it curves and then dives into a live spruce tree. Rain soaked moss fills the crevices of vents and covers concrete walls. Better keep moving little poodle-mix, before the woods claim you.

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Garden Gnomes

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Aki chases after her Frisbee through a forest of lupine, tall grass, and buttercups that form road a verge along the North Douglas Highway. After she disappears I can track her progress by the twitching of flower stalks she shoulders during her passage. Now thickened with flowers, those lupines not disturbed by the little dog stand like garden gnomes on a lawn badly in need of a mow.

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Earlier, she had chased her Frisbee on a nearby gravel beach, empty except for one crow that strutted along the water line like a rich man leaving the funeral of an enemy.

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Dispelling Ghosts

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Does Aki see ghosts? We are on the sandy bight that arcs past the old Auk village site to Point Louisa. The little dog hops and squirms, her body an uncoiling spring. She could be playing with the ghosts of dogs that once watched their masters pull toward shore in canoes formed from the trunk of a giant cedar. More likely, she is reacting to the new crop of mosquitoes that buzz around her eyes.

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I strain to spot orcas in Lynn Canal, or closer in, the wakes of diminutive Dahl porpoises as they skim just below the surface of the bay. Memory ghosts of orcas and their smaller cousins float over the water. I try to give them some substance with my imagination, but fail. I also fail to see the reclining bodies of Stellar sea lions on a nearby island, growling like gluttons. This allows me to envision them as waist-coated gentlemen, spayed out in comfortable chairs after an enormous meal.

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Among the flowering lupines at Point Louisa, Aki and I stumble on a blooming Rugosa rose. Someone must have planted it here, perhaps to commemorate the death of shipwreck victims. In 1918 the 343 passengers on the Princess Sofia drowned after the ship stuck nearby Vanderbilt Reef. Only a dog survived. As if to dispel the ghosts, a bumblebee flies down the throat of one of the rose blossoms. While it gets to work, Aki and head back to the car, passing a focused sapsucker climbing a spruce tree. The woodpecker pounds a bug out of the tree and flies off. He has no time for ghosts.

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