Creator

John Muir

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Circa Date

1887

Transcription

49

No wonder the belief is so widespread of the transmigration of souls & everybody is charged with speculations as to whether animals have souls

The most singularly reticent (& observing small dog I had ever met. He had none of the fussy actively fun & wise mirth of the hairy terriers with kind speaking eyes

Venerable moss hung woods in abrupt contact with threatening ice snout.

Gave way to the wildest hysterical tumultuous emotion

Not in the least nervous or skittish & no coward, plunged into waves breaking on the beach & swim like a seal in the surf

Such a dreadful compendium of misery

# Most of his beds were made in the mossy hollows between the roots of big spruce trees

On one of the rarest adventures I ever had I was accompanied by a little dog

50

But we had a grand memorable day of it doggie & I in spite of the wind & the rain & [the] a network of [threatening] crevasses that threatened to hide us

And so we two quitted the comforts of camp in quest of comfortable adventures & knowledge & I couldn’t even at this early hour think that my little hairy companion was a hero in disguise. He seemed not to be made up of a combination of features & characteristics but to be simply a mass of dull commonplace nothing soft or delicate but vigorous enduring heroic like a cedar tree or granite rock

Such ghastly fear in so small a creature seemed dreadful

In the long list of doggish oddities some of Stick’s seemed new

Amid scenes so stern & so exciting [so beautiful] I sat down & pondered on the brink of the gulf the way I had come scanning my devious way in imagination like a chart, I saw that I was recrossing the glacier at a higher level & was entangled in a new unknown section of the glacier. It was getting late in the PM & the sky threatened. Would I return to the woods a mile or two distant

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MuirReel33 Notebook01 Img027.Jpeg

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Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library

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