[Illustration: SECTION OF THE MUIR GLACIER (FRONT.)]
While we cruised away in the mist and twilight, the children, who never could be made to keep ordinary bedtime in that latitude, celebrated the birthday of one of their number with high revel. While they danced around the cake on the cabin table, and blew out the eight candles one by one with an accompanying wish, the last boy wished that the happy youngster might “celebrate many more birthdays in Glacier Bay,” and the elders applauded him.
After the _Idaho_ had made its first visit to the Muir Glacier, and returned Dick Willoughby to his Hooniah home and his strawberry farm, we had a seven hours’ enforced anchorage, on the succeeding day, in a narrow fiord on the north end of Chicagoff Island, which that same Willoughby had described as an unknown channel, “a hole in the mountain,” and a short cut to the open ocean, that he had travelled many times himself. Following up his forty-fathom channel, the lead marked shoaling waters, and before we knew it the _Idaho_ ran her nose on a sloping bank, and stayed there until the returning tide floated her off.
There had not been a canoe in sight, nor a sign of life along the shores all that morning, but the ship’s officers had hardly settled the fact that they were hard aground before several canoes were seen in the wake, and the gangway was surrounded with bargaining Hooniahs, who held up furs, baskets, and trophies for us to buy. More and more of them came paddling down the narrow lane of emerald water, and family groups in red blankets were soon at home around blazing camp fires on the narrow ledges of the shore, and added greatly to the picturesqueness of the scene. Of all the little fiords we had been into, this one was the most beautiful, and even Naha Bay cannot surpass it. The narrow channel has steep, wooded hills on either side, and a rugged, snow-covered mountain stands sentry at the head of the fiord, and the clear, green water was so still that every tree and twig was clearly reflected; the ship rested double, and the breasts of the soaring eagles were mirrored in all the shadings of their plumage. The silence was profound, and every voice or sound on deck was echoed from the mountains, and could be heard for a long distance up the inlet. Had it not been for the Hooniah canoes following so promptly, we might have supposed ourselves explorers, who had penetrated into some enchanted region, or dreamers who were seeing this beautiful valley in a strange sleep. It was exploration to the extent that all our course up the inlet was across the dry land of all the charts then published, and the _Idaho_ was aground in the woods according to the authorized maps.