ir; past the bold Pt. Windham with
its bluff of three thousand feet frowning upon the waters of Prince
Frederick Sound; across Port Houghton, whose deep fiord had no ice in it
and, therefore, was not worthy of an extended visit. We made all haste,
for Muir was, as the Indians said, "always hungry for ice," and this was
more especially his expedition. He was the commander now, as I had been
the year before. He had set for himself the limit of a month and must
return by the October boat. Often we ran until late at night against the
protests of our Indians, whose life of infinite leisure was not
accustomed to such rude interruption. They could not understand Muir at
all, nor in the least comprehend his object in visiting icy bays where
there was no chance of finding gold and nothing to hunt.

The vision rises before me, as my mind harks back to this second trip of
seven hundred miles, of cold, rainy nights, when, urged by Muir to make
one more point, the natives passed the last favorable camping place and
we blindly groped for hours in pitchy darkness, trying to find a
friendly beach. The intensely phosphorescent water flashed about us, the
only relief to the inky blackness of the night. Occasionally a salmon or
a big halibut, disturbed by our canoe, went streaming like a meteor
through the water, throwing off coruscations of light. As we neared the
shore, the waves breaking upon the rocks furnished us the only
illumination. Sometimes their black tops with waving seaweed, surrounded
by phosphorescent breakers, would have the appearance of mouths set
with gleaming teeth rushing at us out of the dark as if to devour us.
Then would come the landing on a sandy beach, the march through the
seaweed up to the wet woods, a fusillade of exploding fucus pods
accompanying us as if the outraged fairies were bombarding us with tiny
guns. Then would ensue a tedious groping with the lantern for a camping
place and for some dry, fat spruce wood from which to coax a fire; then
the big camp-fire, the bean-pot and coffee-pot, the cheerful song and
story, and the deep, dreamless sleep that only the weary voyageur or
hunter can know.

Four or five days sufficed to bring us to our first objective--Sumdum or
Holkham Bay, with its three wonderful arms. Here we were to find the
lost glacier. This deep fiord has two great prongs. Neither of them
figured in Vancouver's chart, and so far as records go we were the first
to enter and follow to its end