By Tim Cahill
Glacier Bay is surrounded on three sides by a horseshoe-shaped rim of high mountains: Glaciers still form on these mountains and flow slowly down to the new sea. Nowhere else in the world are there so many tidewater glaciers. Nowhere else are the glaciers in such rapid retreat. A warming trend that started at the beginning of this century has made Glacier Bay a master of the ice.
The Tlingit Indians are native to the bay, and their legends encapsulate this geological history in myth. They tell a story of the ancient ones, the Hoonah Kwan, who lived in the time of the ice. They speak of a young girl, Kahsteen, who was kept in seclusion until her marriage. Unbearably lonely, Kahsteen called down the ice to punish her people. The glacier drove the Hoonah Kwan all the way back to Icy Straits. Kahsteen was sentence to be left behind as a sacrifice to the ice, but an old woman, Shaw-whad-seet, who was past childbearing years, gave herself up to the ice so that the girl could strengthen the tribe with children.
It is Sahw-whad-seet who is said to cause the tidewater glaciers to retreat so rapidly, over so short a time. The old woman in the ice gives birth to her children—the great slabs of ice that calve off the tidewater glaciers and thunder into the sea.
Dusk. The last night, camped at Wolf Point. I sat out on a high promontory, overlooking the sea on one side and a valley that extends back into the Fairweathers on another. Above, the sky was pulsing with pale green arcs and shimmering curtains. The Innuit people call the aurora borealis the “spirit lights.” They dance over the new land and the living sea, these spirit lights, glowing with the vast, pale mysteries of life and death. In the valley below, a moose called; she sounded like a cow, lost and lowing. Nearby, wolves yipped and howled, planning the hunt. To my left, out in the inlet, I heard the breathing of the killer whales as they moved back down the inlet. Some seals had surely died, just as the moose might die that night. In the far distance, there was the faint thunder of Shaw-whad-seet’s children, of the new land being born.
