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Show 551. isolated in the snowy gloom of late afternoon. The dog muttered and whined, and his fears seemed as human to Muir as those of a frightened boy. He would preach to the dog even as he might preach to himself: "No right way is easy in this rough world. We must risk our lives to save them. At the worst we can only slip, and then how grand a grave we will have, and by and by our nice bones will do good in the terminal moraine." But such a sermon was hardly reassuring. It was all well and fine for a man to talk that way after he had crossed the danger, but the small dog, who "was able to weigh and appreciate it so justly," was not fooled by empty words. He tested Muir's assumptions, reacted emotionally, but finally followed. "His voice and gestures, hopes and fears, were so perfectly human that none could mistake them; while he seemed to understand every word. . . . " Thus Muir discovered in the dog what he had willed to ignore in himself. As Stickeen finally made his crossing from death to life, from despair to joy, as he called up the courage in himself, Muir learned what it was to be human. He became what he saw so clearly in his companion; he embraced his own redemption: "The joy of deliverance burned in us like fire, and we ran without fatigue, every muscle with immense rebound glorying in its strength." Stickeen is a sentimental but thoughtful dog story, and Muir did not mean to transcend the conventions of his chosen genre when he wrote it. Its message is straightforward. |