I walk through a striking meadow of green, yellow and red grasses.  It will soon be midnight, but the meadow’s million blossoms are far from closing.  Fierce black clouds rush in over the mountains to the east, darkening the landscape.  I retreat to the Jeep and the world turns dark and rain comes down and the road turns to mud.

The storm moves on, black and gray followed by rainbows over the Bering Sea. I retrace my steps in the grass, and in a few miles I come to a beach riddled with the world’s driftwood.  I walk on the beach and perch myself on a dune.  I open my bottle of rum and watch the storm race to Russia.

I am surprised by what I see when I sit.  Above me, a slender black and white bird with a long trailing tail beats its wings in suspended animation, like a floating helicopter.  This bird is a long-tailed jaeger, a predatory seabird, scoping for lemmings along the shore.

The bird will spend a few more days here in Northern Alaska.  But time and climates will send him south on an amazing pelagic journey to the South Pacific, where he will summer somewhere between the coasts of  Peru and Argentina and the islands of the deep ocean.  On the rocks, I see a northern wheatear too, a small bird dressed with yellow.  His migration is even more incredible.  In a few days, he will begin flight to Africa.