We had already collected the alder and the cedar but neither Pop nor I had a brown bear tibia on hand from which to carve the bone barbs, nor did we have the spruce roots to bind the arms of the hooks together.  The butcher at 20th Century Grocery Store on the corner of Seward and Front Streets solved the first problem by coming up with the same bone element, a tibia, albeit from a cow.  So once we had spruce roots for lashings, the hooks could be completed.  Pop said we had to find spruces growing “in the open, so the roots go straight, not mix up with others”.  We knew of such a place at the mouth of Eagle River, twenty-five miles north of Juneau along the coast.  Here several copses of Sitka spruce stood removed some distance from the greater forest on a grassy point formed of glacial silt deposited by Eagle River. We could drive out the road almost to its end as far as Amalga Harbor and, to save a hike through the woods, paddle the remaining two miles along the coast in my canoe

It happened that I had an Island in Amalga Harbor and had been asking Pop about its Tlingit name and history.   Pop said, “We ask yo’ uncle, Tsee Xwaa. He know.” Johnny Fawcett, Tsee Xwaa, of the Woosh-ke-taan clan was older than Pop by five or ten years. Pop respected him and esteemed his knowledge. He was one of a few people to whom Pop deferred in this area. Moreover, the Woosh-ke-taans had a history in Berner’s Bay, a large bay and river estuary some miles north of Amalga Harbor. Even better, the Woosh-ke-taans claimed the halibut as a clan crest.  If anyone knew about the island, Tsee Xwaa would know.  He was living in the Native Village, a group of tribal houses in line on both sides of a single road in a section of Juneau that a hundred years ago had been on the waterfront.  Now the old beach was buried with fill and development leaving the Village land-locked and a block or so from the sea.   I think Tsee Xwaa, up in years, and sometimes a little befuddled, was not completely sure why he got dragged out on an expedition that morning.  Pop went into the Thunderbird House and emerged a moment later gripping the old man by one arm.   Tsee Xwaa, jacket half on, clutched his cane in the other hand while trying to straighten his fur hat as he got hustled out and loaded into my pick-up truck.   Once aboard, he smiled at me blankly, whistled tuneless notes through pursed lips and stared straight ahead as though this sort of thing happened all the time.

In due time we arrived at Amalga Harbor and I launched the canoe while Pop found a crab apple tree and cut a forked limb for use as root digging tool.  Two natural features here vie for place in my mind as ​

​Then there was the Salt Chuck, a short walk along the shore to the north.  Salt chucks, or tidal lakes, are periodically breached by high tides, so their waters are brackish. This one, separated from the sea by a narrow rocky isthmus, collected the dark waters of Peterson Creek draining the mountain valley immediately inland.  Most hours of the day and night the creek tumbled over the isthmus into Lynn Fjord, but the highest tides reversed the flow, replenishing the lake with charges of seawater.  It was, and is, a beauty. Steelhead trout ascend the creek as far as a waterfall a mile or so inland.  One can count on a great blue heron stalking its green margins, and sometimes a flotilla of mergansers, trim and racy, their faces submerged like snorkelers as they paddle along scanning underwater for prey. And there are always black bears.

The island about which I had questions is the main geographic feature sheltering the cove from the seaward side.   Entirely forested, with a mostly sheer margin that drops directly into the sea, it lies less than a quarter mile from the mainland, with a beach of fractured blue mussel shells on the inshore side, the only good landing place.  The outer side of the island drops immediately into deep water, deep enough that whales steam by within a pebble’s toss. Each year at least one, sometimes two, nesting pairs of bald eagles make their home on it.  A couple times each year, on extremely low tides, minus five footers, much of the harbor bottom directly inshore of the island lies exposed and strewn about with starfish of many colors, sea anemones, and, sometimes, hundreds of baby king crabs, perfect little miniatures of their giant parents.

This morning we were on an average low tide with lots of water in the harbor and since the sunny, windless weather promised an easy paddle to Eagle River I took time to circumnavigate  the island with the two elders. Pop translated the questions I had about the island to Tsee Xwaa.  “They call that island  “Kaan xat’ a gook“, Tsee Xwaa said in Tlingit.”  He added two stories one of which I recount here briefly, paraphrasing:  Before white people, Tlingits from Auke Bay had been camped at this spot and were very hungry, even starving.  A shark killed a halibut in the cove, thrashing about and chopping out big bites and when the tide went out exposing the bottom, people salvaged the large chunks of the fish left behind.  The second story I heard years later when Pop retold it in a somewhat disjointed way in the office of an opthomologist.  The story was somewhat similar in that it had to do with a rescue of people, but this time by a killer whale which drove Dall Porpoises up onto the sandy beach, possibly behind my island or possibly onto the sandy beach at Eagle River toward which we were now bound.  I’ve recorded what I have of it as a footnote at the end of this story. **

Tsee Xwaa did not say what time of year these events took place or why people were starving.

Paddling around the shadowed side of the five-acre island and coming out into the sun I looked up to see a mature bald eagle perched on a high snag, a bleached and twisted spire that leaned out over the sea, its tip maybe two hundred feet above us.  Resplendent in the morning sunshine cresting the island, white head and tail shining, the eagle preened itself, throwing tufts of downy white feathers into the air, one after another into a cloud of little diadems that glinted around her briefly and floated down like dandelion fluff.  I had stopped paddling and Pop, in the bow twisted around to see why.  On spotting the eagle he remarked,  “Your Uncle taking his bath”  (“Uncle” meaning the eagle and signifying a kinship relation in Tlingit social structure between the bird and me.) One of the down feathers wafted over the canoe and without thinking about it, I reached out and plucked it from the air.   Pop witnessed this. “Now sometin’ going to happen!”  he said.  “Put in your pocket, don’t say anything.”  Pop was thinking about Gowakaans, Peace Dancers, and the significance of taking eagle down from the air.  But that’s another story.  Just now, we’re on our way to Eagle Beach.

The wide sandy beaches of the Eagle River delta, rising from a mill-pond calm sea, simmered brightly in the light.  Flounders, startled from their half-buried hiding places on the bottom by the shadow of the canoe passing over them, rocketed away through the clear shallows leaving little contrails of sand behind them.  A black oystercatcher let loose a spiky-voiced protest at our arrival, stared for a moment with yellow, unflinching eyes, then flew off down the beach. The oystercatcher, called in Tlingit  tloo gun’ (fire nose) referring to its fiery red-orange beak, had no grounds for complaint, anyway.  I knew it didn’t belong here because it had a nest on a rocky island half mile away. As we glided to the beach, the bow crunched softly on the bottom.  No worry about rocks and barnacles lacerating the canvas canoe here.  Canoe-friendly beaches like this being a rarity in Southeast, I took pleasure in the easy landing and disembarking.

Pop and Tsee Xwaa, both about the same height and stature and each with a cane hooked over an arm, stood like twins looking up the slope of the wide beach to the goose tongue and grassy cover above the intertidal.   Tsee Xwaa wore his fur hat and Pop his ever-present short-brimmed fedora.   We had arrived on a low tide and so had a gentle climb of sixteen or eighteen feet over the expanse of sloping beach to the grasslands above. Mindful of my friend Amos Burg’s admonition to tie down your canoe even if its in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, I carried the canoe and stashed it out of the reach of the flooding tide hitching the bowline around a driftwood root, not that we expected to be here that long.  From the top of the beach we could look out ​​​across the level grassy plain to the dark islands of spruce ​a hundred yards or so distant. ​

Song sparrows and Lincoln sparrows flushed in short, low altitude flights fluttering back into the waist-high verdure ahead only to take flight again as we waded through. Pop, in the lead used his cane machete-fashion every once in a while to slash a wild celery plant, ee yana aet, from our path.   We’d not gone very far before the warming day started to exact a toll, reminding us to stop and remove jackets.

Reaching the first spruce copse and ducking into the shade was like entering the shadowed chill of a stone cathedral.  Tsee Xwaa found a comfortable depression on the mossy ground and stretched out, using a spruce bole for a backrest. Whistling without sound he began picking up twigs, cones and needles, rearranging the forest floor within his reach.   

Pop pulled his root digger, now stripped of bark and sharpened, out of the pack and began work.  The crab apple had been cut just below a forking branch and again above the crook so that the long part could be used as a handle with the crook angling back, something like a hoe or an adz. This would be the ‘hook’ and was cut eight or ten inches long, its end sharpened to a point.  Pop chose a spot near the edge of the copse and chopped the hook of his digger into the earth three or four paces from the tree, snagging and drawing up a root about 3/8 inch thick from a few inches under the surface.  

As he pulled on this root in the direction away from the tree it came free of the earth with a ripping, popping sound, breaking through lesser roots above it. Pop had exposed about 10 feet of its length when it snagged under a larger root that crossed over it. In the forest proper, this kind of entanglement would make it difficult to extract roots at all, much less the long straight kind desired for lashings.  Pop cut the larger root with an axe and continued drawing up the prize until it forked and diminished to less than ​​¼ inch in diameter.  Cutting it free at both ends he had a mostly straight run of root about 25 feet long which he coiled neatly and tied off.  We repeated this effort until we’d filled the backpack with roots.  Mom Dalton would later soak them in water, strip away the outer sheath, and split the roots in half lengthwise. ​

Carol Wergin ​

​White pelicans are related to brown pelicans, a species that inhabits both Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Brown pelicans are well-known for their spectacular air to sea missile dives after fish.  White pelicans prefer fresh water.  White pelicans are not quite as much fun to watch as they don’t engage in such showy aeronautics, instead catching fish while swimming along on the surface and plunging their heads underwater to snatch them in their long bills.  Sometimes they do this cooperatively, paddling along line abreast, concentrating fish ahead of them, or cornering them against a shoreline, whereupon they all jab into the school. 

​Still, white pelicans are good flyers and, with their nine foot wing spans can be seen soaring along in formations, their black primaries and secondaries contrasting sharply with their white bodies, making them easy to identify, in flight, even from a distance.

When their wings are folded the black feathers are not visible and they appear to be all white. A stately group of six of them flew over the house at 1222 So 15th Street a couple days ago, something I’ve never seen before in this place. For Wisconsinites these birds are a fairly new phenomenon.   

​​How will the addition of thousands of pelicans feeding up and down the waters of   Door County all the way to Manitowoc and who knows how far south, affect the ecosystems of the lakeshore?  Trout, salmon, and other fish, and other birds, such as gulls and terns and cormorants also feed on the same fish.  Maybe alewives are just as good in the bellies of pelicans as laying dead by the millions in windrows along the beaches.​

So when Bob Armstrong, Juneau author, photographer and naturalist sent this picture of an eagle perched on top of my whale sculpture, I was not as charmed as some of my friends.  They were thinking of the interesting spectacle. I was envisioning the corrosive deposits that would result soon enough if eagles made a habit of perching there. Nor did the workmen preparing the whale site offer any comfort. They mentioned that the eagle had been there off and on for a week, seemingly unconcerned about heavy equipment moving about below it.  That got me thinking of ways to encourage eagles to go elsewhere. ​

Eagles insist on a lookout over a body of water, whether lake or river or sea, from which to keep watch for passing fish, To illustrate this, the shape and outline of hundred-mile long Admiralty Island, just west of Juneau, is easily described by a plot of eagle nests along its shores. ​

I should have foreseen the problem of eagles perching on the bronze whale.   Years ago I set an eagle perch pole into the beach in front of our house on Douglas Island, which is situated immediately across the fjord from Juneau. The pole is an old piling supplied by my friend Henry Tiffany, three or four decades ago.  With one end buried in the beach it stands, with a slight lean, at low tide, 12 or 14 feet high.   Its ‘freeboard” depends on the stage of the tide.  At high tide only a few feet project above the surface.   It is the only convenient perch for long distances up and down the beach.  True, there is the forest above the beach with lots of perches, but given the option, eagles, like airplanes, prefer unimpeded approaches and departures.  Why contend with intervening branches when there’s a pole out in the open?  So my out-in-the-open, easy on, easy off perch pole is popular with eagles, ravens, great blue herons, and belted kingfishers. Eagles use if frequently most days, and Lynn and I often have the pleasure of their presence.  Sometimes one arrives with a salmon, and stands on the pole to tear into it, ignoring pesky crow and raven hangers-on hoping for a share.  Sometimes one is perched there for hours, head bowed, enduring wind and rain, to spread its wings to dry when the storm abates.  After years in the intertidal, the venerable pole wears barnacles around its base and is topped with moss and an alder seedling. ​