Aki and I walk the North Douglas Highway—the part that runs along Smuggler Cove and then the more open Lynn Canal. I’m here for the Orcas: a chance to spot the pod that chases homebound king salmon this time of year. They don’t show. Nothing but driftwood and severed seaweed marks the water’s surface. An immature bald eagle makes an appearance, flying circles over water that might contain baitfish. My little dog, hot on this sunny day in her permanent fur coat, pants in the partial shade of a cow parsnip plant. She will wait there, without complaint until I the eagle dives on food or I give up on it. After a few minutes it’s the eagle that gives up, flying back to its roost. We hear its high-pitched complaints, perhaps about fishing going to hell, for a half and hour.

Since she showed me such patience during the eagle watch, I give her all the time she needs to study a patch of goat’s beard. She freezes, forces all her concentration on the spot like a scholar would give to a parchment that could form the cornerstone of her thesis. I spend the wait looking at the accessible beauty of the Mendenhall Glacier splayed out like a sunbather between saw-toothed mountain peaks. Next to Aki, I feel like a guy reading low fiction in a rare books reading room.

During this break in an unbroken streak of rain filled days, the little dog and I choose an open trail along the Mendenhall River. Aki’s other human is here too—the one who tosses a Frisbee for her to chase. When the orange disk drops into deep growth, Aki bounces after it through foot high meadow grass. She flies over Indian paintbrush, lupine, beach peas and shooting stars going to seed.

The trail takes us under the airport flight path so except for the mandated intervals between take offs and landings, we can’t hear bird song. I can see swallows working the wetlands for bugs and song sparrows wrestling each other for food. I can see the glacier, from this distance an ice river curving down along mountain flanks. I must listen to the 10:23 Alaska Airlines flight to Sitka and seemingly one turbo beaver after another taking tourists for brief trips away from their cruise ships. The little dog doesn’t mind and, I guess, I can live with this juxtaposition of wild beauty and industrial noise.

The king salmon are late this year. The lack of fishing boats or orcas in Smuggler Cove screams their absence. Missing also is the sun. It hides behind the wall to ceiling clouds that dome Juneau in gray. In the rainforest, Aki flashes her impatient posture because I stop too often to focus on small beauty—rain drops lined like peas in a folded leaf, green blueberries, and a fireweed flower bud. What does the little dog expect? With the forest crowded with full summer growth, I can’t see the big picture. It’s a day for micro views and listening to the birds.

We walk through clouds of bird song: robin’s relentlessly happy ear worm, an eagles touchy falsetto screech, the disharmony of crow complaints, raven’s sarcastic chant, the jack hammering of a red breasted sap sucker, and a great blue heron’s barnyard squawk. The call of the elegant heron startles out a memory of two of the long legged birds, each with head feathers that formed elegant hats. They moved like ballet dancers through a shallow pool, struck with cobra quickness at sand lances, flipped and swallowed their prey like a juggler of peanuts. “Little dog, what does that graceful bird need with a lovely singing voice?”

This time of year in Juneau, the paths to mountain meadows are lined with blooming goat’s beard (aruncus dioicus) and buttercups. As I gardener, I am expected to hate these flowers. I Honor the code and rip out the fast growing goat’s beard from the snap pea bed before it can bloom. I untangle and destroy buttercup vines when I find them insinuated between carrot tops and broccoli starts.

As a benign user of the wilderness, I should rue the buttercup as an invader that shoulders asides the locals. I should resent it, as I do the non-Alaskan owners of the jewelry stores that have rooted in lower Franklin Street in ground that once supported the City Café and Juneau Cold Storage.

But on the path to this mountain meadow, yellow buttercups dance in the wind with white, delicate tassels’ of the goat’s beard. I tell Aki, “So what,” when we have to climb to higher ground for a view of chocolate lilies and the scented stalks of our lady tresses orchid.

We ran out of blue berries this morning. The low bush berries we picked last summer are gone. Aki and I head to the mountains to survey this year’s crop. It looks strong. Little pink lantern-shaped blossoms hang from almost every diminutive bush. This must be a gift from our mild winter, the sun rich days of May and early June, and rain.

I lead Aki down off the muskeg onto an old growth forest trail that parallels Fish Creek. Aki is looking for the animals that marked the trail with scent. I am after early Salmon berries—a raspberry like fruit that tastes fruit sweet and swamp sour at the same time. The little dog is more successful than me. None of the red or yellow or orange salmonberries hang beneath the canopy.

Some plants in the rainforest are paying a price for their excesses during our recent stint of warm, sunny weather. The devil’s club bushes that expanded their platter-like leaves too fast and too far lay spewed open by yesterday’s windstorm. Three little bags of rain cling to a now horizontal limb. One rain is coalesced around a thorn that has pierced through it without shattering the surface tension. I see the dog and I reflected in another of the sacks.

         The columbines came through the storm without harm. Their flowers must have swayed gently as the surrounding goat’s beard plants absorbed the brunt of the wind. Few drops of rain cling to enhance their beauty. They don’t need more to attract than their pagoda shaped blossoms.

Wind ripped across Chicken Ridge this morning. It carried heavy raindrops that splashed when they hit your face. One gust severed a cluster of purple rhododendron blooms. I brought the cluster inside, tried to prolong its beauty in a water-filled vase, and took Aki out to North Douglas Island to photograph the wind.

You can’t photograph the wind of course, just the evidence of its presence on trees, flowers, ocean water, and one little poodle mix. Aki, often an excellent model, did her best by shaking for the camera every time a gust flapped her ears. But the camera’s high-speed shutter froze leaves, berries and flowers in mid-lean, robbing the wind of drama. I deleted those shots, but kept one of a false lily of covered in debris tossed onto it by the wind.

Aki and I have stumbled into a violent raven argument. Two of the large black birds face each other on a high spruce limb, open beaks just inches apart. Without pausing for air, they launch high volume caws into each other’s face. I think mom and dad are having a fight. Out on the beach a diminutive crow sulks along the water line. I have to tell my imagination that this is not the adopted child of the sparring ravens.

The sun makes a brief appearance when Aki and I stumble on a hedge of Sitka Roses stirring in the onshore breeze. A chubby bumblebee rattles around inside one of the magenta blossoms. The bee takes off after I snap a picture and flies a wandering course above the hedge, almost but never settling on another blossom. Again my imagination wants to lead me astray; wants me to hear the bee muttering to himself, “Been there, been there, been there, maybe here, no, been there.”

Aki showed little enthusiasm for this early morning walk up the Gold Creek valley. Only after I boot up and reach for her harness does she give a half-hearted tag wag. It takes twice as long as usual to walk from Chicken Ridge to the Basin Road trestle bridge. I watch dandelion seed float down like light snow as she nose-surveys big sections of the roadside. I also think about the paper’s weather forecast, which proclaims this the last sunny day before a multiple-day storm. Why then, are we the only ones on this popular trail? Maybe everyone else is worn out by the unprecedented stretch of warm, sunny weather.

While Aki distributes more of her bottomless supply of urine, I decide to focus my camera on illuminated things—flowers and running water beautified by shafts of sunlight. As if reading my mind, the little dog baulks where a little used path leaves the main trail. Taking the lesser used one will mean missing out on dog encounters and for me, mountain views. But we should find sunlit wild flowers along the diminutive trail. I yield, as usual, to her will. We take the smaller path, parts of which started out as a deer track. Hiker boots widened it to its present state—a narrow trail of brown dirt through walls of aggressive green plants. We squeeze between tall thimbleberry bushes that seem to push their white blossoms in my face. In spaces between thimbleberries and the jagged leafed salmon berry bushes, bright red columbine flowers dangle in the morning sun.

Every since we started down the seldom used trail, Aki is the impatient one. She dashes away and returns as I take a picture of dandelion down clinging to a columbine flower. I get the hint and pick up the pace. She pulls me to the front door when we reach the house rather than trot around the back where we hang her harness and store the doggie treats. I solve the mystery when I walk to the back door and see Aki’s other human exiting with a breakfast tray that carries tea and slices of home baked bread topped with cheese and sections of red peppers. Aki is all about the cheese and follows my partner out to the temporary teahouse we erect each summer in the side yard. Perhaps the little dog sensed the coming weather change and knew her other human would want to enjoy one last morning of sunshine drinking tea and eating cheese smörgás. On these occasions, she has come to expect a sharing out of cheese.

Under full sun on this Sunday, Aki, his other human, and I go for a bike ride. The little dog rides in a handlebar basket. In truth she would rather be running along side us but that would not be safe on this road between the Herbert and Eagle Rivers. We ride through a crowded picnic area to a meadow covered in blue lupine, wild flags (iris), yellow Indian paintbrush, and chocolate lilies, stopping where it touches a beach along the Eagle River.

We are not far from a picnic shelter full of people enjoying the weather, view, and each other’s company. Their conversations blend with the complaints of a gang of Canada geese watching the tidal moat that once protected their gravel bar island shrink on the ebb. When a land bridge forms, the geese fly away, shouting out the geese evident of, “There goes the neighborhood.” Aki ignores them.