This is Fur Rondies Flying Ace, call name Gunther. He is a pointed orange sable, and while he is a gorgeous clown, he is a big goof ball! I love his personality, how kind he is to the rest of the poms, and especially how much spunk he has!

Gunther

Winters on the island are long, cold and dark, and Spring tarries in the southern hemisphere. Just when I think that I will never again be warm, I notice the thick, red tips of tulips working their way through the cracked, dry earth. I am always so happy when that last dumping of wet snow comes; it keeps my emerging bulbs warm and moist while we shiver under the last blast of frigid arctic air. I used to worry so over the snowfall, but 15 years on the island have proven to me that snow makes a mighty fine mulch; free, and no shoveling involved!

Next come the crocus, a paradoxical flower. It has no stem to speak of, and its petals are so delicate that a brush from a careless hand will bruise them. If picked they simply turn into mush, seemingly instantaneously. Yet they are the first in my garden to flower, and they endure bitter winds, pelting rains, and they glow in deep yet muted colors under the overcast skies. The skies are staying lighter longer as each day passes. Spring is in the air, the snowline recedes ever closer to the mountain tops, and a random drive out the road gives a blessing of a lone willow shrub covered with soft silver catkins.

Then, within the span of a week, Spring arrives. As each day passes I look out the open window, (marveling that I can have a window open without risking hypothermia) and notice the swelling buds on the alder and the salmonberry bushes, and see, with some surprise, the jonquils have sent up their leaves, snaking up from the dried willowherb stalks and cowslip stems. Day by day I take heed of their progress, until one sunny day I watch the jonquil buds fatten and lighten in color, until that same evening I look out in the waning light and find that several have opened fully.

A long weekend later and I find that the salmonberry bushes have begun to add their rosy blossoms to the show, and the alder's buds have unfurled into tiny, shiny, bright green leaves. Suddenly Kodiak's edges are softened by a fur of green. Winter's icy hold once again loosens, and then slips free, and Life is new and fresh again.

As someone who has spent her entire life within the reach of the scent of the sea, the opportunity to take an Outsider, a Flatlander, out on the water is especially sweet. This is a tale of one such outing.

It was a fine, clear autumn afternoon, the sea reflecting a deep blue sky and the trees just beginning to show a bit of silver tracings on the edges of their leaves as they rustled in the lightest of breezes. Moses, my husband, borrowed the skiff, and we brought it around from the dock to pick up my friend. Jeannie was standing on the rock pile across the road from the church, perched rather precariously on the wet rocks as Moses maneuvered the skiff in close enough for her to jump in. She did a good job of it, and her husband hurried back across the road as we tried to lure him into coming along. However, Mr. Workaholic declined our pleas with a laugh, and we pushed off.

The air was like velvet as it brushed by our cheeks, with a texture, scent, and taste that is uniquely “Kodiak”. We skimmed the tops of gentle swells, and soon found ourselves in the midst of a huge flotilla of seabirds. As the skiff nosed forward, the raft of birds split, as if a veil rent, which then magically repaired itself as we looked back and saw them settle in again as if we had never disturbed their evening social.

I had a hand jig set up and was trying to tickle a halibut, while Moses and my friend tried to tempt a sockeye. After a while of catching nothing but Irish Lords, Moses noticed some whales feeding close to our location, so we hauled in our lines and headed out toward the blows.

As we neared the whales we recognized them as humpbacks, one adult and two juveniles, probably two year olds. They were feeding in the gentle groundswell under the waning daylight, so we killed the kicker several yards away from them and watched. They lazed onto their side, slapping a flipper down every now and then. They moved closer and one blew next to us. Jeannie accused one of us of having “had a bit of flatulence” but no, it was the whale’s breath! It truly does smell nasty, but how cool to be this close to a humpback.

We noticed that they had stopped feeding and were moving in closer. The largest of the three raised the side of her head out of the water and viewed us with an amazingly intelligent brown eye. Feeling honored by their inquisitiveness and the uniqueness of this situation, we were also extremely aware of their incredible bulk sliding through the sea around us. We were in real danger of being flipped, intentionally or not, into the frigid water of the Shelikov Strait. Moses fired up the kicker and we moved cautiously out of range of whale tails and flippers. As we retreated we enthused over the special time just spent with the humpbacks. We returned and re-commenced trying to hook up some fresh fish for supper.

We drifted with the tide as the sun lowered to rest on the tops of the mountains, only half our minds paying any attention to our fishing, the other half consumed with the intoxicating twilight on the sea.

Suddenly I noticed three gray swells to our stern, and realized that they were the whales we had earlier observed, submerging about 100 yards away, and due to come up again pretty much where we were sitting. Quickly we hauled in our fishing lines so as not to hook a whale, Moses got the kicker running and gave it the gas!

We moved off to the side of their path while they circled back around, and for several minutes three humpbacks took long looks at us, strange creatures sitting in a floating bowl. It was an emotionally charged moment in time, and even though the thought of hitting that icy water tinged the encounter with fear, the aura of benevolent intelligent inquisitiveness was calming.

The whales glided past us several times before moving off a ways, no more than the length of a football field, where they began to roll and slap the water with tails and flippers, breaching occasionally and then slipping silently beneath the surface of the silvered water. They continued this playful behavior for several minutes before sliding below the surface and away.

We returned that night under the dusky twilit skies, watching the phosphorescence trailing from our fingertips, empty handed but with hearts full of the memories of this time spent with each other as we shared an uncommon moment with the giants of the deep.