June 22: Who is calling at 4 in the morning on Sarah's Birthday?

As the phone woke me up, I was thinking, "It's 4 in the morning, I don't need to answer that." And as the sleep left my head, my thinking revised to, "It's 4 in the morning, and the phone is ringing! Something is wrong and I'd better find out what." Sage apparently wanted to find out what was wrong too, because she got up with me. It looked like she just needed to go out, so I opened the cabin door and the porch door... and she shot out, surprising me and the two young bears that had settled into my garbage, about 15' from my front door. They ran off, not far, or for long. I called Sage back in. She had the element of surprise in the first charge, but I think if she got into it with the bears, she would lose.

That's when I registered all the noise coming from the other cabins. The crew was out banging together pots and pans, trying (without success) to run off the bears that David first noticed on a late night trip outside. They didn't go far and I looked for something to throw and could come up with only a couple of tubs. The crew moved closer, taking advantage of the bears' temporary distance and keeping up the noise while I picked up the garbage to bring it inside. (No time for photos, dang it!) The bears had already worked their way through the garbage outside the crew cabin and AJ was picking that up. This is very early for the bears to be here. It's time to improve our garbage management strategies.

At about midnight, before all the bear excitement, David called me out to see the juvenile eagle perched on my sister's outhouse. Knowing that those outhouse walls are 8' tall, it might be possible to understand why David, as a 12 year old, hunched over his younger brother on the four-wheeler for fear an eagle would swoop down and carry him off. This photo also shows how light it is at midnight on the solstice around here.

The rest of the day was devoted to listening for a fishing announcement (we were told to listen again at 3 pm on Monday), plan what to do with any downtime (we have many projects), clean the cabins (an ongoing, full time job), and prepare Sarah's birthday dinner!! We planned to have Indian food so Rohan made channa masala and aloo gobi with dal rice. Mmmmm. I made the dessert: pear halves buried under vanilla custard and finished with whipped cream, toasted slivered almonds, shaved chocolate, and kahlua. But we were didn't have whipped cream. David and Sarah went to town for it, but got there minutes too late and the store was closed. How about the cannery store? Closed till 8. How about the store in King Salmon? Closed. How about the messhall? They were out and waiting for a shipment themselves. Substitution time. Note: trying to work backwards by beating together milk and butter does not create cream. So we made a little sauce thing out of the failed whipped cream substitute and were happy with the outcome.