ones were easily avoided by passing around
them, and the clouds began to open here and there.

Thus encouraged, I at last pushed out for the other side; for Nature can
make us do anything she likes. At first we made rapid progress, and the
sky was not very threatening, while I took bearings occasionally with a
pocket compass to enable me to find my way back more surely in case the
storm should become blinding; but the structure lines of the glacier
were my main guide. Toward the west side we came to a closely crevassed
section in which we had to make long, narrow tacks and doublings,
tracing the edges of tremendous transverse and longitudinal crevasses,
many of which were from twenty to thirty feet wide, and perhaps a
thousand feet deep--beautiful and awful. In working a way through them I
was severely cautious, but Stickeen came on as unhesitating as the
flying clouds. The widest crevasse that I could jump he would leap
without so much as halting to take a look at it. The weather was now
making quick changes, scattering bits of dazzling brightness through the
wintry gloom; at rare intervals, when the sun broke forth wholly free,
the glacier was seen from shore to shore with a bright array of
encompassing mountains partly revealed, wearing the clouds as garments,
while the prairie bloomed and sparkled with irised light from myriads of
washed crystals. Then suddenly all the glorious show would be darkened
and blotted out.

Stickeen seemed to care for none of these things, bright or dark, nor
for the crevasses, wells, moulins, or swift flashing streams into which
he might fall. The little adventurer was only about two years old, yet
nothing seemed novel to him, nothing daunted him. He showed neither
caution nor curiosity, wonder nor fear, but bravely trotted on as if
glaciers were playgrounds. His stout, muffled body seemed all one
skipping muscle, and it was truly wonderful to see how swiftly and to
all appearance heedlessly he flashed across nerve-trying chasms six or
eight feet wide. His courage was so unwavering that it seemed to be due
to dullness of perception, as if he were only blindly bold; and I kept
warning him to be careful. For we had been close companions on so many
wilderness trips that I had formed the habit of talking to him as if he
were a boy and understood every word.

We gained the west shore in about three hours; the width of the glacier
here being about seven miles. Then I pushed northward in ord