Many a time the cabin door formed a delightful frame for a forest-picture,—gliding water, pale-blue sky, a broken shore, and, behind, long lines of brilliant snow-peaks, with their chased and frozen silver. We would lie asleep for a few moments in the cool dark of the cabin-interior, and then wake up with one of these perfect, swiftly-moving views in the foreground. Before we caught it, often it had gone,—the pale, plenteous beauty of the fir-crowned shore, the dancing islets, the sedgy strand-line, the many-colored rocks, with their pools and fountain-basins of transparent water caught from the deep and held in by their rocky framework in a lightness and purity of crystal dew.
Then the ship ran dangerously near to the coast, or again out into the open sound, with its mediterranean sprinkle of islets, serrated walls of rocks, coves and island-mounds, wherein nested shadows of amethyst or indigo.
The flow of life in some of these coves and estuary-like indentations is marvellous, the fish coming in egg-laden, and looking for streams of fresh water in which to deposit their ova. We anchored in one of these inlets, and found on the land luxuriant ferns and splendid clumps of yellow cedar and hemlock, with snow-banks behind. Half a dozen little bucks and half-breeds were tumbling about in the water through the long afternoon light, which seemed to have an amaranthine quality and to be unfading. The sun did not set till after eight o’clock, and there was cold, ghostly, green light up in the north till nearly midnight. When darkness did come, it was of the genuine cuttle-fish kind,—inky,—splashed with stars. There was now and then a delicate shell of a moon incising the sky against a mountain-side and lending the most fragile transfiguration to its top.
As we approached Fort Wrangel, the ship’s company turned out in the sweet evening sunshine and found a glorious panorama awaiting them. The sheen of a mighty mass of embattled peaks and pinnacles and feathery floating snow-points shone high up in the evening air, just mellowing under a magnificent sunset. These mountains guard the entrance to the Stickeen River and mount up the horizon after the Duke of Clarence Strait has been traversed.
Wrangel itself is most memorably situated just on one side of these sheeny peaks and glaciers, almost in the shadow of the Devil’s Thumb, which rises about four hundred feet above its own mountain-cluster and forms one of a throng of confused and radiant aiguilles overlooking the Stickeen. The sunset had not entirely faded at nine o’clock, when we touched shore and rejoiced our eyes with a series of wonderful semi-arctic color-pictures,—coal-black islands, purple islands, lilac islands, islands in india-ink and amber, lying in glacier-water of pale green, and above and beyond all the glorious flush of the sun stealing in between the white snow-needles and throwing them out and up into luminous relief.
Opposite the town is an island shaped like the cocked hat of a gendarme, where it was said that the curious polygonal garnets embedded in schist and peculiar to this region are found. There were plenty of them as large as walnuts for sale at twenty-five cents a dozen. Odd carved boxes, too, made of an unknown wood and inlaid with shells, were here in plenty; cases of buckskin, containing the conjuring-sticks or gambling-kits of the Thlinkit medicine-men; loin-cloths, ornamented with multitudes of rattling puffin-beaks; head-dresses of defunct warriors; fantastic and horrible masks; huge spoons carved out of the horns of the mountain-ibex; bead-work on leather; robes of many-colored skins quilted together; images carved to resemble otters; fleecy robes of wild sheep and goat; pipes cut with nude figures; antlers; stuffed animals; white-breasted loons, and the like.
After a short stop for landing the mails, the vessel was soon traversing Wrangel Strait, just under some splendid glaciers and snowy mountains, the water perfectly smooth, though full of small icebergs, which glittered in the sunshine and had broken off from the descending ice-mass. Enormous rivers of ice flow down between these mountains and debouch in the sea, their current mysteriously stayed by the low temperature. We were particularly fortunate in having fine, clear weather early in the morning, especially at this point, where we could see the great Pattison Glacier. The ship entered the enchanted region through a narrow passage, which one of us christened the “Silver Gates,” the Beulah Mountains edging our Pilgrim’s Progress in passionless white as we zigzagged along the course.
A little later, the scenery on Frederic Sound became truly transcendent: grand mountains, forms that would be awful but for the sunshine resting on their heads, the lake-like sound, with its blue spits of land and cameo-like promontories profiled against the sky, motionless glace-de-Venise water reflecting a thousand shades of azure and gray and white, gulls resting on the water, with white bodies and black tips, almost a complete circle of brilliant snow-banks peeping above the clouds that hung to them amorously, and far-away vistas of blue-white glaciers coming down to meet the water-margin.
Schools of spouting whales played in the distance, and the passengers sent balls out of their pistols hissing on the water, but happily hitting nothing. During the last trip two lovely antlered creatures came swimming along in the water, trying to cross one of the channels to another grazing-ground. They were taken on board, but one of them died.
The next landing-place was Killimoo, a little Indian village on an island surrounded by dim-green heights and flickering, ever-changing mountain-views. It is a great station for drying cod-fish, long lines of which lay spread out on the wharf in the sun to dry. As night fell the squaws and Indian maidens gathered the rattling fish-carcasses under little ark-like receptacles, where they lay till morning out of the dew.