If you look long enough on a moonlight night you can see the Enchantress move, but she cannot leave the mountain. She cannot come down, yet Chilkat Pass remains enchanted.
[Illustration: SKAGWAY, SHOWING WHITE PASS.]
The sun shone bright and warm, but a cold wave swept over the glacier. It was the beautiful Muir glacier.
We left the steamer in a little boat and were rowed to the shore, landing on the sandy beach. High on the sand lay an Indian canoe, a dug-out. Near by a party of Indians wrapped in their scarlet blankets squatted on the sand. They had come to meet the steamer and sell their toys, baskets and slippers.
A little black eyed boy had a half dozen young seagulls, in a basket, great awkward squabs. Their coats were a dirty fuzzy down like that of a gosling, sprinkled over with black dots. Their big hungry mouths and frowsy coats gave no hint of the beautiful birds they would be when they grew up.
When I paused to look at the birds their owner regarded me with interest as he sat with the basket hugged to his breast. Then the young merchant held one up for my inspection, with the remark, “hees nice bird.”
“Yes,” said I, “hees very nice.” I had no thought of buying a seagull. What would I do with it? Then I remembered a little invalid boy whom I thought might be pleased with a pet seagull.
“How much you give?” inquired my little Indian boy.
So, I paid down my two bits and picked up my baby seagull. Then my little merchant spoke up, “Him want basket?”
“Yes,” I said, “I think that I want a basket.”
The basket was paid for and my enterprising little Indian tucked the baby gull in with a wisp of sea weed and handed him to me with the remark, “Him all right now.”
How that gull did squawk when he found himself all alone in a big basket. What cared he that I had purchased for him the prettiest basket on the beach? He wanted his brothers. When we arrived on the deck of the steamer I hurried my gull down to the steward and gained admission for him to the cook’s department, where he was cared for the remainder of the voyage.
[Illustration: MUIR GLACIER (SECTION OF).]
It is something of a novelty to be seated at the base of a glacier in July. From the Chilkoot to the source of the Yukon river is only thirty-five miles, but the intervening mountain chain is several thousand feet high and bears numerous glaciers on its seaward side. Forty miles west of Lynn canal and separated from it by a low range of mountains is Glacier bay, and at the head of one of its inlets is the far-famed Muir glacier. It is one of the many fields of ice which stellates from a center fifteen miles back of the Muir front and covers the valley of the mountains between the Pacific and the headwaters of the Yukon river. Nine glaciers now discharge icebergs into the bay. All of these glaciers have receded from one to four miles in the past twenty years. Kate Field says, “In Switzerland a glacier is a vast bed of dirty air-holed ice that has fastened itself like a cold porous plaster to the Alps. In Alaska a glacier is a wonderful torrent that seems to have been frozen when about to plunge into the sea.” There they lay, almost free from debris, clear and gleaming in the cold sunshine of Alaska. The most beautiful of them all is the Muir glacier. It is named in honor of John Muir, who visited Alaska in company with Mr. Young, the Presbyterian missionary, in 1879, and discovered it. This glacier extends straight across the fiord, presenting at tide water a perpendicular wall two hundred to four hundred feet above and seven hundred and fifty feet below the surface, making a solid wall of ice a thousand feet high and three miles wide.