Rain turns the world glassy, on the edge of shattering. Roadside ferns shiver, rain pinging and popping off fronds below and leaves above. It plunk-plunk-plunks on the top of my hard-shell like a woodpecker knocking, the sound echoing inside my hood. I don’t mind. Never complain about moisture in a dry land, I’d told people who grumbled about snow coming early, or staying late, in the western high country, and though I’m not in a dry country now, in my mind the wisdom holds. I’m in a rainforest, the air sometimes briny with breezes off the Pacific, and sometimes smelling like hard winter-frozen carcasses. My boots crunch the mirror-black stone of the gravel road as I walk. I have nowhere to be, but even so I walk too fast, a habit grown out of years of trying to make miles in the backcountry.

The road ends in a boat ramp slumping down into the Salmon River. A floating dock on the left side of the ramp protrudes thirty feet into the water over seal-gray mud and green algae, and beyond this, a corridor of reedy wetlands backed up to thick forest. To the right, the bank rears sharply up a hillside of fern and brush climbing up to a wall of woods. The skeleton of a huge spruce slices down the hillside into the water, its crown submerged. The bark has long since sloughed off, leaving the wood naked and sleek and stained. Barren limbs stick out in all directions like sea urchin spines. I sit down at the end of the dock, pull my knees to my chest, look over the water undulating like mercury, black and silver and impenetrable. A hundred feet across the river, the far bank is stacked layers of sand, beach grasses, and black conifers, all running together like watercolor. A small, abandoned boat lies with its belly exposed to the sky, its sharp triangular keel peaked like two hands praying. Just out of sight beyond the trees the Pacific breathes in and out, the only sound other than the occasional calling of gulls. I’m tired. Not contented, but unsure of what I have to be sad about except the slow slipping away of wildness from the world—over a million species at risk of extinction, many billions of lives that will disappear in my lifetime, along with the wilderness that holds them—but I can’t afford the space it would take to give this grief a home in me, so, I’m tired.

Something splashes, but by the time I turn my head to look, the surface is once again unbroken. The gray ribbon of river meets the gray sky at a vanishing point miles away; the black trees turn ghostly, specters of old growth. A movement in the air like a shudder, and when I look back there is a great blue heron perched on a branch of the dead spruce where its trunk meets the water. “Oh,” I breathe, more gasp than word. We watch each other. I can see his dagger-like head twisting to keep me in his ancient yellow eye. He doesn’t want me here. His dinosaur claws clench the branch, talons twitching, while his eye tracks me. Suddenly self-conscious, I look away, thinking maybe my rapt, wide-eyed stare is justifiably disconcerting to him. A shore bird through the trees cries out three ascending calls, its screams breaking the ocean’s steady susurration for a moment. The sheets of rain thicken. The surface of the water roils and ripples, a murmuration of black starlings. Every edge softens, streaks in the wetness, but the heron and me. I realize I’m looking at him again, my weary eyes drifted back to his outline, the gleaming knife of his beak, the strong, straight wires of his legs. It comforts me to look at him—the sharp relief of his body cuts through my weariness, makes me hopeful.

He takes a tentative step up the branch away from me. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, “I didn’t mean to—” but he flaps his enormous wings, lifting straight up into the air, and then he’s gliding over the river away from me, his wing tips piercing the black water with every downstroke. He lands in the shallows along the far bank. I chide myself as if I have just struck out on a speed date. Why did I try to talk to him? He shouldn’t like me, he’s wild, his existence alien from my own. Across the river his silhouette looks like a dinosaur’s—a primordial Other. The world balances upon the knife edge of his outline. I can’t look away. He still watches me from across the water; I can feel his gaze.

You watch the woman slowly stand. The motion is awkward, an elk heaving to its feet. Such a large movement, you can’t look away. She pulls down her hood, tips her face up to the rain like she’s going to fly away, but she just stands there, of course, salmon-flesh face getting wet. Behind you, the ocean birds are singing the retreating tide. Gulls bray on the shore like disconsolate donkeys. Swallows chirr their own eating songs. Two seals bark far away, the voices of a female and her pup. The woman casts a look down into the water, the movement pulling you away from the ocean, back across the river. She can’t see the sweet fishes swimming there, or the crabs and shrimp mucking around in the silty bottom. She can barely see or hear or feel anything beyond her own noisy shell in the rain, her armored feet, her strange calls. She is disquiet. You see fish moving in the water, pulled close to the surface by insects that are themselves pushed to the surface by rain. Water below and above, a duet of river and rain—a good hunting song—you hear it inside you, an ancient hum in the copper blade of your beak. Now you can hear the flutter and suck of their little spear-able gills, and the sound the silt makes when it is pushed around by crabs and currents, or scraped by seaweed or wood, like the crackle and ruffle of your feathers when you preen—a good sound. You can feel on your legs the weak updrafts fish make as they struggle against the sea-going currents, the whoosh of bigger fish swimming madcap through their lives, the tickle of crabs crawling over you.

The woman goes now, clonking up the floating land and onto the rocks. The gulls close in to investigate where she was, but fly away complaining. Her shape disappears into the water above, and the thrum starts again, louder. This hum and holler runs through you, a single outlet to the sea; the river’s mouth sings your blue to the sea’s endless water. You wade deeper into the current; above the mirror black water, the world becomes you: a feather-gray sky, scaled-bark forests, night-deep water, and the swell and surge of song.