g? Surely nothing akin to
human enthusiasm for scenery or geology. Anyhow, on he came,
breakfastless, through the choking blast. I stopped and did my best to
turn him back. "Now don't," I said, shouting to make myself heard in the
storm, "now don't, Stickeen. What has got into your queer noddle now?
You must be daft. This wild day has nothing for you. There is no game
abroad, nothing but weather. Go back to camp and keep warm, get a good
breakfast with your master, and be sensible for once. I can't carry you
all day or feed you, and this storm will kill you."

But Nature, it seems, was at the bottom of the affair, and she gains her
ends with dogs as well as with men, making us do as she likes, shoving
and pulling us along her ways, however rough, all but killing us at
times in getting her lessons driven hard home. After I had stopped again
and again, shouting good warning advice, I saw that he was not to be
shaken off; as well might the earth try to shake off the moon. I had
once led his master into trouble, when he fell on one of the topmost
jags of a mountain and dislocated his arm; now the turn of his humble
companion was coming. The pitiful little wanderer just stood there in
the wind, drenched and blinking, saying doggedly, "Where thou goest I
will go." So at last I told him to come on if he must, and gave him a
piece of the bread I had in my pocket; then we struggled on together,
and thus began the most memorable of all my wild days.

The level flood, driving hard in our faces, thrashed and washed us
wildly until we got into the shelter of a grove on the east side of the
glacier near the front, where we stopped awhile for breath and to
listen and look out. The exploration of the glacier was my main object,
but the wind was too high to allow excursions over its open surface,
where one might be dangerously shoved while balancing for a jump on the
brink of a crevasse. In the mean time the storm was a fine study. Here
the end of the glacier, descending an abrupt swell of resisting rock
about five hundred feet high, leans forward and falls in ice cascades.
And as the storm came down the glacier from the north, Stickeen and I
were beneath the main current of the blast, while favorably located to
see and hear it. What a psalm the storm was singing, and how fresh the
smell of the washed earth and leaves, and how sweet the still small
voices of the storm! Detached wafts and swirls were coming through the
woods, with music