wn with his
head on Muir's foot, gazing into his face and murmuring soft canine
words of adoration to his god.

Not until 1897, seventeen years after the event, did Muir give to the
public his story of Stickeen. How many times he had written and
rewritten it I know not. He told me at the time of its first publication
that he had been thinking of the story all of these years and jotting
down paragraphs and sentences as they occurred to him. He was never
satisfied with a sentence until it balanced well. He had the keenest
sense of melody, as well as of harmony, in his sentence structure, and
this great dog-story of his is a remarkable instance of the growth to
perfection of the great production of a great master.

The wonderful power of endurance of this man, whom Theodore Roosevelt
has well called a "perfectly natural man," is instanced by the fact
that, although he was gone about seventeen hours on this day of his
adventure with Stickeen, with only a bite of bread to eat, and never
rested a minute of that time, but was battling with the storm all day
and often racing at full speed across the glacier, yet he got up at
daylight the next morning, breakfasted with me and was gone all day
again, with Stickeen at his heels, climbing a high mountain to get a
view of the snow fountains and upper reaches of the glacier; and when he
returned after nightfall he worked for two or three hours at his notes
and sketches.

The latter part of this voyage was hurried. Muir had a wife waiting for
him at home and he had promised to stay in Alaska only one month. He had
dallied so long with his icy loves, the glaciers, that we were obliged
to make all haste to Sitka, where he expected to take the return
steamer. To miss that would condemn him to Alaska and absence from his
wife for another month. Through a continually pouring rain we sailed by
the then deserted town of Hoonah, ascended with the rising tide a long,
narrow, shallow inlet, dragged our canoe a hundred yards over a little
hill and then descended with the receding tide another long, narrow
passage down to Chatham Strait; and so on to the mouth of Peril Strait
which divided Baranof from Chichagof Island.

On the other side of Chatham Strait, opposite the mouth of Peril, we
visited again Angoon, the village of the Hootz-noos. From this town the
painted and drunken warriors had come the winter before and attacked the
Stickeens, killing old Tow-a-att, Moses and another of our Chr