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Show 548. persisted in following wherever Muir went, and for reasons which were not altogether clear since he was offered no food, and none of the usual encouragements - why would anyone want to follow Muir anyway? This was virtually the same as asking why Muir would want to follow his own impulse to wander into a wilderness of ice. Thus when Stickeen seemed to understand Muir, and Muir came to appreciate the small dog, they learned together to see into the Soul which they shared deep in the wilderness. Stickeen was a second self. Certainly one would expect a glacier to be at the heart of Muir's Alaskan adventures. A glacier obscured by a storm; a grand wild landscape, but impossible to comprehend from a distance. "I tried to draw the marvelous scene in my note-book, but the rain blurred the page in spite of all my pains to shelter it, and the sketch was almost worthless," he remembered. Grinding large trees to pulp along its margin, the glacier was involved in its own massive creation and dwarfed Muir's dealings with paper. Because he could not see it from a distant prospect, and because art would not capture it, Muir chose to enter into its life. And so he set off, in July of 1880, upon this "seemingly boundless prairie of ice," the Taylor Glacier. Stickeen's motives in following were perhaps more obscure. He "showed neither caution nor curiosity, wonder nor fear, hut bravely trotted on as if glaciers were playgrounds." Just as Muir's companions back at camp might have wondered |
