[Stickeen, etc.], [ca.1887], Image 37

• Main Author: Muir, John
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarly Commons 2019
• Subjects: Grim; glacier; Alaska
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmn-st1/37; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/context/jmn-st1/article/1036/type/native/viewcontent/MuirReel33_Notebook01_Img037.Jpeg

69 One vast sheet of gashed wrinkled unvital desolation Ran back & forth shrieking & distracted The glacier stretched away in every direction fainter & fainter until lost in the gloomy clouds, an untraceable shoreless chaos of ice-crags & chasms & white crusty plains # I was often tempted to tell him he might fall if he didn’t take care gravitation was no respecter of persons, his little feet might slip. He didn’t bound over crevasses like a greyhound with [sinewy] loins, he had no loins, just a lump of body though firm like a muskrat bunchy but not loose # The brave thing was done & he was correspondingly happy. Where now was his stoic silence & serenity the noisiest fussiest hysterical demonstrative creature ever on legs, etc. Twitched & rustled with fear that began to rise in him He [twitched] & rustled himself over even broad crevasses without seeming to look at them, showing no resolution or cerebration of any sort # A poor little wild apostle of Alaska wilderness taught me much, a child-dog of the wilderness so much in the wilderness 70 The bodeful meaning of the blast over the grim wilderness A child of our common mother with heartland bare We had already met & escaped many a dangerful [in] entanglements of crevasses threading the intricacies in safety but here we were stopped by a stern “thus far & no farther” [met us] He suddenly lost hope & heart & dissolved in blank despair People want not mountains but the gold in them coined for traffic not wheat fields but wheat, not forests but lumber No escape you must come the wolves will get you the big black & gray wolves [Every] Now & then a knowing sparkle of the eyes suggested that this seeming dullness might be a shy [dignified] reserve of prince in disguise & therefore I was stimulated from day to day to watch him as a curious problem. An independent friendly law abiding vagabond owning nothing in a common way [commercial sense] yet possessing all the wide world. All of us like thistle seeds ...