It’s Valentine’s Day but Aki isn’t finding romance or even friendship on the Sheep Creek delta. I can’t figure out why we are alone. There is cloud cover but no rain or wind. The sun is a silver disk seen easily through the gray overcast. Racing the incoming tide, we walk out to the channel then take a normally flooded path around two pothole lakes. Each reflects Mount Jumbo, today looking like a mother of the bride in her cloud shawl, white top, and silver-sun tiara.

Aki disappears into the beach grass and comes back with a tail-wagging husky dog. My little poodle-mix gives out a series of high-pitched yelps and runs tight circles in the damp beach sand. Her new friend stands, looking a little confused. But, he follows us back to the car. Aki and he pee on the same patch of grass (a symbolic act?) and part.

No one would write a homesick song about the Eagle River meadows today. Rain, wind and current provide the only moment before the little dog and I start down an icy trail. I stop where we once watch mergansers and golden eye ducks rotate around an eddy, peer where harbor seals spy-hopped to get a better look at Aki, search the meadow where we found occupied by grumbling geese. The little dog manages to attract the negative attention of a squirrel, but, maybe made grumpy by the rain, it soon loses interest in us.

The tide if out so we can see sand bars at the river’s mouth. Two eagles lift off the sand and fly into a nearby spruce tree. When we pass it on the way to the beach, the big birds fly over our heads and out to tide’s edge. One settles onto a driftwood perch. The other dives on him. The first eagle holds on to its perch as now the incoming tidal flow surrounds it and the other one manages to find a similar perch fifty feet away. Both ignore a third eagle’s attempt to drive them off. Surrounded by a cloud of gulls, they hunch in the rain and wait for the tide to deliver dinner.