| Full Moon's orange highlights seem almost cheeky in the vast gray spaces. We find our way to Goose Group in the early evening; I go ashore on Goose Island at a fairly low tide for a walk, but (dammit!) neglect to bring the camera with me. So I have no photographs of that desolate, windswept shore -- an end-of-the-world place, perched on the edge of the Pacific. The tide is falling and I walk on extensive sandbars; on one beach I find the tracks of a running deer crisscrossed with those of a wolf, and following the trail I find a chaos of wolf tracks of various sizes, and places where the cubs have rolled and played in the sand -- since the last high tide. Humans rarely visit this island and wolves are shy; they may have melted away into the trees at the sound of our engine. The forest here is dwarfish, twisted, and dark; the forest floor is not "earth" as we commonly think of it, but a jackstraw pile of fallen and rotting logs, propped up on occasional boulders, covered with a thin eiderdown of duff, rot, and mycelium. "Paths" are sometimes deer trails and sometimes just coincidental smooth spots in the logpile; the "ground" is soft and incautious feet may easily stumble into deep holes. I venture a little way into the gloom but, like a hobbit emerging from Mirkwood, am glad to regain the light and open space of the beach. I return to Full Moon in twilight and tell Jon about the wolf tracks; we're both delighted. Tomorrow we'll push on North to Weeteeam Bay on Aristazabal Island. |
