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Show 549 about a man who wandered about in glaciers, so Muir suspected Stickeen's good sense. Like Muir's, his courage "seemed to be due to dullness of perception, as if he were only blindly bold." Yet Muir portrayed Stickeen's wild soul, and the dog in turn spoke sentiments which Muir would have been embarrassed to speak in his own person. He later used the same narrative technique in Travels in Alaska, allowing Indians to speak for him at times. And Stickeen had an Indian soul as well as an Indian name. This was not surprising, since, "before the whites came, the Thinkits held, with Agassiz, that animals have souls." When these two mountaineers were hard beset by dangers, Muir said they "doggedly persevered." Their roles were complementary; Muir's will was leading not only his own, but also another soul into the unknown, where they would be faced with crossing a sunken ice bridge, a "tremendous necessity." They became marooned on a giant island of ice in the midst of the glacier because Muir had broken the "rule of mountaineers who live ling" by following a route which he could not retrace, into a bewildering maze of crevasses. He portrayed himself as highly rational and calmly deliberate, but his reasoning was specious. "At length because of the dangers behind me, I determined to venture against those that might be ahead," he explained. So they finally arrived at the great unknown, a seventy foot sliver of ice, a thin knife edge which bridged a huge and bottomless crevasse. It was indeed a symbolic bridge. Could-it bear the weight of a man? Would a dog be able to descend and ascend the |