Here Juneau, take some sunshine on this September Sunday. Use it to dry out summer things that must be stored before the autumn monsoons or enrich a walk in the woods. American football fans may squander the golden rays watching the first games of the new season. Aki and I head for a familiar mountain meadow. The little dog ignores the yellow deer cabbage and the blood red blue berry leaves, concentrating on smells I cannot discern. Dogs can’t see colors the way we do. So man and dog are going with our strengths.

It’s not even mid-September and the moraine tree leaves have already reached the rich yellow of high fall. We face an October-style week of rain with no hope of sun breaks. This isn’t cause for despair or yearning. Lack of sun on a moist Southeast day, with it soft air and tendrils of clouds tearing themselves on old growth trees, reduces expectations but promotes peace in one willing to walk in the rain. It helps to have the company of a little dog willing to splash after you down flooded trails. A fall colored Frisbee bouncing against her chest.

Aki walks ahead on the forest boardwalk like she has done many times before. Always in the moment, the little dog seemed unaffected by my nine-day absence. I can’t say the same about myself. The forest silence reminds me in a perverse way of the road noise that filled my day on a recently completed bicycle tour in the Pacific Northwest. Log and wood chip trucks downshifted in my ear as I pedaled up steep grades that took me away from the Columbia River or shallow bays of the Pacific Ocean. Huge recreational vehicles, homes on wheels that towed cars and (ironically) hauled braces of bicycles, produced a more refined roar as they eased by on descents that bottomed out in towns dominated by tourism, a pulp mill, or oyster processing plant.

Aki and I see no fish on our walk, only gulls and crows that remain along Peterson Creek to pick over the bones of spawned out salmon. Our fish will come back next summer. Most of the runs that swam the Columbia, killed off by the Grand Coulee and its brother dams and climate change, will not.

We see no bear or deer this rainforest stroll. I spotted deer and elk on my bike ride along the Columbia, but on city streets and farmer’s fields. They have adapted. I hope our wild things won’t have to do the same.

Aki is soaking wet from rainwater that has collected on blue berry bushes. She pounds down a bear trail in the forest moss, leaps over bear scat (berry blue with red high bush cranberry highlights), and scoots under thickets of berry plants. She is chasing her orange Frisbee. Her other human and I hunt and peck for the remainder of the blue berry crop. The blues hang, plump and sweet, from inconveniently placed plants. We have to lean over wet, bare plants to pluck the fruit. I imagine a bear ambling through the berry patch, stomach already full of sockeye salmon, grazing on the easiest-to- reach berries but not bothering to reach inside the patch for the fruit we drop into our buckets.

The low cloud ceiling and rain have given us a rare summer thing—solitude. Aki and I are walking a thin strip of old growth forest that rims a crescent-shaped beach. We have the place to ourselves, which doesn’t make Aki very happy. She loves to meet another dog, squeal in a tiny voice when they meet, crouch in submission, and dash around until she and her new friend tire of each other. Today she can only search for food scraps beneath the picnic tables.

I should be more thrilled with the solitude. We even have silence. The low cloud ceiling has grounded the noisy helicopters and planes that usually fly over here each summer day. But, like Aki, I miss the presence of other animals. No birds float on the water or fly over our heads. No Dall porpoise cut the bay’s surface with their stubby dorsal fins. There is not even squirrel chatter to break the silence.

Yesterday, the sun shone and there was little wind. There were ravenous sea lions, feeding humpback whales, and one harbor seal so bewildered that it swam, apparently unaware of our existence, within feet of my friend’s boat. There were also enough silver salmon in the boat cooler to get us through the winter.

Today, there is no sun, much wind, and pounding rain. Out here on the glacial moraine, there are no whales or sea lions or seals. There is a little dog, wrapped against the rain. Nothing dampens her enthusiasm. We walk along the river, where fog partially obscures a raft full of tourists. I wonder that these folks left their bacchanalian-like cruise ship surroundings to float through fog that blocks the views they paid for of the glacier and its mountain cohorts.

She must have spotted a squirrel. That what I think when Aki brakes from the trail, growls, then raises her wagging tail. She stops suddenly and turns to me with a questioning look on her face. Two feet away, a huge porcupine is burrowed into the trailside grass. The large bald spot on its back is proof of previous dog encounters. Those must have ended with a trip to the veterinarian for quill removal.

Relieved that my little dog has the sense not to tangle with porcupines, I lead her down off the mountain, stopping to pick and hand feed her blue berries. It’s the least I can do for the wise little dog. At the bottom of the hill she breaks away, directly toward another porcupine, acts stunned when I call her back. As the spiny creature waddles under a blue berry bush I am not at all certain whether Aki would have survived without a mouth full of quills if I had not called her back.

I should be in the North Pass making a last try for silver salmon. But a strong low-pressure system moved over the fishing grounds last night bringing high winds that keep the captain’s boat tied up at the dock. This pleases Aki, who trots across the forest floor on a walk that would never have happened if the fishing trip had.

The strong winds have blown a hole in the marine layer so sunlight floods the forest and makes a large devil’s club leaf shine like a sheet of stained glass. The hole lasts until we reach the beach, where gulls, murlets, and mergansers shelter close to shore. I look up Lynn Canal, past a brilliantly lit Shaman Island to places where we would be fishing on a calmer day.

A lot happened on this beach before Aki arrived with her Frisbee. Even as nearsighted detective as I can find the evidence. First, there’s the singing raven, running through his collect of chortles and croaks until he spots my little dog. Then he squawks. There are other signs: rock painted white with eagle scat, several of the big bird’s brown and white feathers scattered nearby, salmon backbone almost picked clean of meat. Over there, a confusion of gull tracks show where they hunkered like hyenas waiting for a lion to abandon its kill. The gulls now float just offshore, beaks pointed toward the beach. But I can’t explain the fresh tracks of a deer that walked up to a salmon carcass and then darted into the woods when we approached. Perhaps it just wanted to see what the raven was singing about.

Aki enjoyed our passage through the woods. She ran ahead, draw by smells and signs. I moved slower, tried not to trip on spruce roots exposed by rain. She turns into a symbol of caution when we reach the beach, walking just behind me as I work through the wet grass still bent down by last night’s flood tide. Maybe she is worried about the eagles.

An immature bald eagle from a beachside spruce, arcs over the Mendenhall River, and flies down the beach. More follow, including one with a missing flight feather. Another, in the white and brown coloring of a mature eagle, remains to sulk. At least that’s what I think because it lets its head droop like a person might who had hoped for sun and received rain.