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Show 552. "Through him," said Muir, "as through a window I have ever since been looking with deeper sympathy into all my fellow mortals." But the story was also about Muir himself, the rebirth of the boy in him who was frightened by danger, and joyous when he had passed over. As Muir turned the focus of the narrative onto the dog, and through the dog back onto himself, he was beginning to look back on his own experiences with a more critical eye and ask whether such adventures really had been valuable, and if so how he could recommend them to his fellow mortals. Why was it better to live life and risk death in the mountains? Because he could only appreciate life after facing death? Perhaps, but also because he needed to be reminded that he was, at bottom, only a child. A second theme also emerged in Stickeen. How could he ask other mortals to take the risks he had taken? Of that he was not so certain. No amount of sermonizing about Noble Deaths could justify his insistence that others, or even he, should set foot on such uncertain ground. In the summer of 1880, he had been a husband for four months. "Surely you are not going into the awful place," said Stickeen, when he saw his master crawling down onto the ice bridge. God may have led Muir into the wilderness, but He did not necessarily invest him with the authority to lead other unsuspecting mortals into the same dangerous paths. It was hard to know where responsibility began in these things, A year before Stickeen followed him onto the Taylor Glacier, Hall Young had foolishly followed on an ascent of |