Preview
Circa Date
1887
Transcription
69
One vast sheet of gashed wrinkled unvital desolation
Ran back & forth shrieking & distracted
The glacier stretched away in every direction fainter & fainter until lost in the gloomy clouds, an untraceable shoreless chaos of ice-crags & chasms & white crusty plains
# I was often tempted to tell him he might fall if he didn’t take care gravitation was no respecter of persons, his little feet might slip. He didn’t bound over crevasses like a greyhound with [sinewy] loins, he had no loins, just a lump of body though firm like a muskrat bunchy but not loose
# The brave thing was done & he was correspondingly happy. Where now was his stoic silence & serenity the noisiest fussiest hysterical demonstrative creature ever on legs, etc.
Twitched & rustled with fear that began to rise in him
He [twitched] & rustled himself over even broad crevasses without seeming to look at them, showing no resolution or cerebration of any sort
# A poor little wild apostle of Alaska wilderness taught me much, a child-dog of the wilderness so much in the wilderness
70
The bodeful meaning of the blast over the grim wilderness
A child of our common mother with heartland bare
We had already met & escaped many a dangerful [in] entanglements of crevasses threading the intricacies in safety but here we were stopped by a stern “thus far & no farther” [met us]
He suddenly lost hope & heart & dissolved in blank despair
People want not mountains but the gold in them coined for traffic not wheat fields but wheat, not forests but lumber
No escape you must come the wolves will get you the big black & gray wolves
[Every] Now & then a knowing sparkle of the eyes suggested that this seeming dullness might be a shy [dignified] reserve of prince in disguise & therefore I was stimulated from day to day to watch him as a curious problem.
An independent friendly law abiding vagabond owning nothing in a common way [commercial sense] yet possessing all the wide world.
All of us like thistle seeds are winged for flight though dry weather & the right wind does not always come to waft us.
Resource Identifier
MuirReel33 Notebook01 Img037.Jpeg
Contributing Institution
Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library
Rights Management
To view additional information on copyright and related rights of this item, such as to purchase copies of images and/or obtain permission to publish them, click here to view the Holt-Atherton Special Collections policies.
