With the silence and immobility of a great reddish-tinted, rock, Thor stood
for many minutes looking out over his domain. He could not see far, for,
like all grizzlies, his eyes were small and far apart, and his vision was
bad. At a distance of a third or a half a mile he could make out a goat or
a mountain sheep, but beyond that his world was a vast sun-filled or
night-darkened mystery through which he ranged mostly by the guidance of
sound and smell.
It was the sense of smell that held him still and motionless now. Up out of
the valley a scent had come to his nostrils that he had never smelled
before. It was something that did not belong there, and it stirred him
strangely. Vainly his slow-working brute mind struggled to comprehend it.
It was not caribou, for he had killed many caribou; it was not goat; it
was not sheep; and it was not the smell of the fat and lazy whistlers
sunning themselves on the rocks, for he had eaten hundreds of whistlers. It
was a scent that did not enrage him, and neither did it frighten him. He
was curious, and yet he did not go down to seek it out. Caution held him
back.
If Thor could have seen distinctly for a mile, or two miles, his eyes would
have discovered even less than the wind brought to him from down the
valley. He stood at the edge of a little plain, with the valley an eighth
of a mile below him, and the break over which he had come that afternoon an
eighth of a mile above him. The plain was very much like a cup, perhaps an
acre in extent, in the green slope of the mountain. It was covered with
rich, soft grass and June flowers, mountain violets and patches of
forget-me-nots, and wild asters and hyacinths, and in the centre of it was
a fifty-foot spatter of soft mud which Thor visited frequently when his
feet became rock-sore.
To the east and the west and the north of him spread out the wonderful
panorama of the Canadian Rockies, softened in the golden sunshine of a June
afternoon.
From up and down the valley, from the breaks between the peaks, and from
the little gullies cleft in shale and rock that crept up to the snow-lines
came a soft and droning murmur. It was the music of running water. That
music was always in the air, for the rivers, the creeks, and the tiny
streams gushing down from the snow that lay eternally up near the clouds
were never still.
There were sweet perfumes as well as music in the air. June and July--the
last of spring and the first of summer in the northern mountains--were
commingling. The earth was bursting with green; the early flowers were
turning the sunny slopes into coloured splashes of red and white and
purple, and everything that had life was singing--the fat whistlers on
their rocks, the pompous little gophers on their mounds, the big bumblebees
that buzzed from flower to flower, the hawks in the valley, and the eagles
over the peaks. Even Thor was singing in his way, for as he had paddled
through the soft mud a few minutes before he had rumbled curiously deep
down in his great chest. It was not a growl or a roar or a snarl; it was
the noise he made when he was contented. It was his song.
And now, for some mysterious reason, there had suddenly come a change in
this wonderful day for him. Motionless he still sniffed the wind. It
puzzled him. It disquieted him without alarming him. To the new and strange
smell that was in the air he was as keenly sensitive as a child's tongue to
the first sharp touch of a drop of brandy. And then, at last, a low and
sullen growl came like a distant roll of thunder from out of his chest. He
was overlord of these domains, and slowly his brain told him that there
should be no smell which he could not comprehend, and of which he was not
the master.
Thor reared up slowly, until the whole nine feet of him rested on his
haunches, and he sat like a trained dog, with his great forefeet, heavy
with mud, drooping in front of his chest. For ten years he had lived in
these mountains and never had he smelled that smell. He defied it. He
waited for it, while it came stronger and nearer. He did not hide himself.
Clean-cut and unafraid, he stood up.
He was a monster in size, and his new June coat shone a golden brown in the
sun. His forearms were almost as large as a man's body; the three largest
of his five knifelike claws were five and a half inches long; in the mud
his feet had left tracks that were fifteen inches from tip to tip. He was
fat, and sleek, and powerful. His eyes, no larger than hickory nuts, were
eight inches apart. His two upper fangs, sharp as stiletto points, were as
long as a man's thumb, and between his great jaws he could crush the neck
of a caribou.
Thor's life had been free of the presence of man, and he was not ugly. Like
most grizzlies, he did not kill for the pleasure of killing. Out of a herd
he would take one caribou, and he would eat that caribou to the marrow in
the last bone. He was a peaceful king. He had one law: "Let me alone!" he
said, and the voice of that law was in his attitude as he sat on his
haunches sniffing the strange smell.
In his massive strength, in his aloneness and his supremacy, the great bear
was like the mountains, unrivalled in the valleys as they were in the
skies. With the mountains, he had come down out of the ages. He was part of
them. The history of his race had begun and was dying among them, and they
were alike in many ways. Until this day he could not remember when anything
had come to question his might and his right--except those of his own
kind. With such rivals he had fought fairly and more than once to the
death. He was ready to fight again, if it came to a question of sovereignty
over the ranges which he claimed as his own. Until he was beaten he was
dominator, arbiter, and despot, if he chose to be. He was dynast of the
rich valleys and the green slopes, and liege lord of all living things
about him. He had won and kept these things openly, without strategy or
treachery. He was hated and he was feared, but he was without hatred or
fear of his own--and he was honest. Therefore he waited openly for the
strange thing that was coming to him from down the valley.
As he sat on his haunches, questioning the air with his keen brown nose,
something within him was reaching back into dim and bygone generations.
Never before had he caught the taint that was in his nostrils, yet now that
it came to him it did not seem altogether new. He could not place it. He
could not picture it. Yet he knew that it was a menace and a threat.
For ten minutes he sat like a carven thing on his haunches. Then the wind
shifted, and the scent grew less and less, until it was gone altogether.
Thor's flat ears lifted a little. He turned his huge head slowly so that
his eyes took in the green slope and the tiny plain. He easily forgot the
smell now that the air was clear and sweet again. He dropped on his four
feet, and resumed his gopher-hunting.
There was something of humour in his hunt. Thor weighed a thousand pounds;
a mountain gopher is six inches long and weighs six ounces. Yet Thor would
dig energetically for an hour, and rejoice at the end by swallowing the fat
little gopher like a pill; it was his _bonne bouche_, the luscious tidbit
in the quest of which he spent a third of his spring and summer digging.
He found a hole located to his satisfaction and began throwing out the
earth like a huge dog after a rat. He was on the crest of the slope. Once
or twice during the next half-hour he lifted his head, but he was no longer
disturbed by the strange smell that had come to him with the wind.