Funny, how ancient can always dawn again brand new in thought; almost dream-like, these shadows …

I recall memories of an Alaskan sun’s tints — the baby blues and pinks — how they rest on snow, draped over majestic peaks. I am looking for Mount Susitna or “Sleeping Lady.” Her curves and snow-filled wrinkles cut and worn by glaciation; she has not awoken yet.

It’s a 767-mile flight from Anchorage to Saint Paul Island. Small plane, loud engine, traces of icy frost forming on my window, and tips of noses looking a bit chilly. In the past I vowed quickly never to take the views from above the Bering Sea for granted — even during one or two white-knuckled trips when I kept my eyes closed.

I am not there yet, but like some primitive second sight, I can just tell, even perhaps as it has been told.

Cutting winds are now sweeping the tundra where wild celery shrivels, and gusts are blasting and clearing the cliffs of the season’s last kittiwake and thick-billed murre colonies — those that have persevered and nested.

And the thousands of seals, the summer cacophony of bellowing beside the wavering cries of pups, will have, by now, stilled a bit.

The air will be thick too, with the reek of their rookeries — where the constant roar of crashing waves scours away months of feeding, mating, birthing, warring and sometimes dying.

Fishermen of the Aleut Community of Saint Paul Island steer into harbor before night’s earlier darkness to off-load the last of their halibut quotas (right).

And the ever dense, ancient fog is truly palpable for it hides and keeps us together.

Justine Kibbe is the island naturalist for the Fishers Island Conservancy. A lifelong environmentalist, Kibbe spent six years on Alaska’s Island of Saint Paul among the native Unungan people to study fur seals. Now a Fishers Island resident, Kibbe offers weekly wildlife snapshots from her observations on the island and now from a return trip to Alaska. You can reach her at bjkibbe@gmail.com.