the true explanation flashed into my brain, and I shocked my
Indians by bursting into a roar of laughter. In imagination I could see
him so plainly--John Muir, wet but happy, feeding his fire with spruce
sticks, studying and enjoying the storm! But I explained to my natives,
who ever afterwards eyed Muir askance, as a mysterious being whose ways
and motives were beyond all conjecture.

"Why does this strange man go into the wet woods and up the mountains on
stormy nights?" they asked. "Why does he wander alone on barren peaks
or on dangerous ice-mountains? There is no gold up there and he never
takes a gun with him or a pick. _Icta mamook_--what make? Why--why?"

The first week in October saw the culmination of plans long and eagerly
discussed. Almost the whole of the Alexandrian Archipelago, that great
group of eleven hundred wooded islands that forms the southeastern
cup-handle of Alaska, was at that time a _terra incognita_. The only
seaman's chart of the region in existence was that made by the great
English navigator, Vancouver, in 1807. It was a wonderful chart,
considering what an absurd little sailing vessel he had in which to
explore those intricate waters with their treacherous winds and tides.

But Vancouver's chart was hastily made, after all, in a land of fog and
rain and snow. He had not the modern surveyor's instruments, boats or
other helps. And, besides, this region was changing more rapidly than,
perhaps, any other part of the globe. Volcanic islands were being born
out of the depths of the ocean; landslides were filling up channels
between the islands; tides and rivers were opening new passages and
closing old ones; and, more than all, those mightiest tools of the great
Engineer, the glaciers, were furrowing valleys, dumping millions of tons
of silt into the sea, forming islands, promontories and isthmuses, and
by their recession letting the sea into deep and long fiords, forming
great bays, inlets and passages, many of which did not exist in
Vancouver's time. In certain localities the living glacier stream was
breaking off bergs so fast that the resultant bays were lengthening a
mile or more each year. Where Vancouver saw only a great crystal wall
across the sea, we were to paddle for days up a long and sinuous fiord;
and where he saw one glacier, we were to find a dozen.

My mission in the proposed voyage of discovery was to locate and visit
the tribes and villages of Thlingets to the north and we