Ruby-red berries lay like abandoned marbles on soaked moss, the thin vines that nourished them before freeze up now invisible. Their now absent neighbors, the blueberries, free formed into plump balloons, but the cranberries are all spheres. Aki, who enjoys sweet berries, ignores them. Hoping to taste some summer on this wet mountain meadow, I plop one into my mouth. After I break its skin with a bite, the berry flesh slowly releases flavors that illustrate the meadow in early winter, not summer. Bitterness comes with the bite, as bitter as the rain-soaked wind that makes my little dog shiver. Then I taste the mushroom like flavor of muskeg meadow, now bare after winter rain washed away the snow cove; favor of fruit from a plant that wraps its roots in decay. Muskeg fades away so I can taste the almost neutral flavor of ice melt like I would if I dipped a cup into the water that floats over the milky-white pond ice.

Like an impressionist painting, we need some distance from today’s beauty to appreciate it. Aki and I walk on a beach shadowed by Douglas Island’s mountainous spine. In the extended dusk even the party colored plumage of harlequin ducks looks dull. Across Lynn Canal cold smoke fog tatters and reforms over the sun lit Chilkat Mountains. The mountains that rise behind Smugglers Cove stand in full sun when not blocked by the nervous fog. Aki and I are a bit nervous too. I blame the canine keening we heard while still in the forest. Nothing sounds as sad as the call of a dog in pain. I think of turning back but push on in case someone’s pet is caught in a leg hold trap. Aki wags her tail at my decision but is soon whining when someone hunkered down on the beach fires a shotgun. A murder of crows, at the time hidden among rocks in the tidal zone, erupts into flight. Red headed mergansers, mallards, harlequin ducks also take to the air. The little dog looks as sad as a new widow so we turn our backs on the dancing fog for the quiet of the forest.

There is little to like about today. With its 38 degrees F. temperature and persistent rain, it invites depression. Yesterday was better; colder with no rain. We skied along Montana Creek, perhaps for the last time until winter returns. Only lack of food or friends depresses Aki. She enjoys this walk through Downtown Juneau. We pass the hostel, now housing the residents of the Glory Hole because a burst pipe made the homeless shelter uninhabitable. A man in the warm clothes of the street sits on the porch swing, talking on a cell phone.

            I drag Aki up 5^th Street. She resists this diversion from our normal route until a dog calls out from his yard up the street. The street climbs up to the forest, now partially hidden by fog. I’m thankful for the guy who painted his house such a beautiful blue and the person who parked the bright red Mini Cooper on the street. Even the blue-lidded recycle bin brings some life to the gray scene. Later we walk by gulls that stand motionless on the Steamship dock supports. They ignore the little dog as they shower in the rain.