Neither Thor nor Muskwa went near the caribou meat after the big fight.
Thor was in no condition to eat, and Muskwa was so filled with excitement
and trembling that he could not swallow a mouthful. He continued to worry a
strip of black hide, snarling and growling in his puny way, as though
finishing what the other had begun.
For many minutes the grizzly stood with his big head drooping, and the
blood gathered in splashes under him. He was facing down the valley. There
was almost no wind--so little that it was scarcely possible to tell from
which direction it came. Eddies of it were caught in the coulees, and
higher up about the shoulders and peaks it blew stronger. Now and then one
of these higher movements of air would sweep gently downward and flow
through the valley for a few moments in a great noiseless breath that
barely stirred the tops of the balsams and spruce.
One of these mountain-breaths came as Thor faced the east. And with it,
faint and terrible, came the _man-smell_!
Thor roused himself with a sudden growl from the lethargy into which he had
momentarily allowed himself to sink. His relaxed muscles hardened. He
raised his head and sniffed the wind.
Muskwa ceased his futile fight with the bit of hide and also sniffed the
air. It was warm with the man-scent, for Langdon and Bruce were running and
sweating, and the odour of man-sweat drifts heavy and far. It filled Thor
with a fresh rage. For a second time it came when he was hurt and bleeding.
He had already associated the man-smell with hurt, and now it was doubly
impressed upon him. He turned his head and snarled at the mutilated body of
the big black. Then he snarled menacingly in the face of the wind. He was
in no humour to run away. In these moments, if Bruce and Langdon had
appeared over the rise, Thor would have charged with that deadly ferocity
which lead can scarcely stop, and which has given to his kind their
terrible name.
But the breath of air passed, and there followed a peaceful calm. The
valley was filled with the purr of running water; from their rocks the
whistlers called forth their soft notes; up on the green plain the
ptarmigan were fluting, and rising in white-winged flocks. These things
soothed Thor, as a woman's gentle hand quiets an angry man. For five
minutes he continued to rumble and growl as he tried vainly to catch the
scent again; but the rumbling and growling grew steadily less, and finally
he turned and walked slowly toward the coulee down which he and Muskwa had
come a little while before. Muskwa followed.
[Illustration: "'Come on!' he cried. 'The black's dead! If we hustle we can
get our grizzly!'"]
The coulee, or ravine, hid them from the valley as they ascended. Its
bottom was covered with rock and shale. The wounds Thor had received in the
fight, unlike bullet wounds, had stopped bleeding after the first few
minutes, and he left no telltale red spots behind. The ravine took them to
the first chaotic upheaval of rock halfway up the mountain, and here they
were still more lost to view from below.
They stopped and drank at a pool formed by the melting snow on the peaks,
and then went on. Thor did not stop when they reached the ledge on which
they had slept the previous night. And this time Muskwa was not tired when
they reached the ledge. Two days had made a big change in the little
tan-faced cub. He was not so round and puffy. And he was stronger--a great
deal stronger; he was becoming hardened, and under Thor's strenuous
tutelage he was swiftly graduating from cubhood to young bearhood.
It was evident that Thor had followed this ledge at some previous time. He
knew where he was going. It continued up and up, and finally seemed to end
in the face of a precipitous wall of rock. Thor's trail led him directly to
a great crevice, hardly wider than his body, and through this he went,
emerging at the edge of the wildest and roughest slide of rock that Muskwa
had ever seen. It looked like a huge quarry, and it broke through the
timber far below them, and reached almost to the top of the mountain above.
For Muskwa to make his way over the thousand pitfalls of that chaotic
upheaval was an impossibility, and as Thor began to climb over the first
rocks the cub stopped and whined. It was the first time he had given up,
and when he saw that Thor gave no attention to his whine, terror seized
upon him and he cried for help as loudly as he could while he hunted
frantically for a path up through the rocks.
Utterly oblivious of Muskwa's predicament, Thor continued until he was
fully thirty yards away. Then he stopped, faced about deliberately, and
waited.
This gave Muskwa courage, and he scratched and clawed and even used his
chin and teeth in his efforts to follow. It took him ten minutes to reach
Thor, and he was completely winded. Then, all at once, his terror vanished.
For Thor stood on a white, narrow path that was as solid as a floor.
The path was perhaps eighteen inches wide. It was unusual--and
mysterious-looking, and strangely out of place where it was. It looked as
though an army of workmen had come along with hammers and had broken up
tons of sandstone and slate, and then filled in between the boulders with
rubble, making a smooth and narrow road that in places was ground to the
fineness of powder and the hardness of cement. But instead of hammers, the
hoofs of a hundred or perhaps a thousand generations of mountain sheep had
made the trail. It was the sheep-path over the range. The first band of
bighorn may have blazed the way before Columbus discovered America; surely
it had taken a great many years for hoofs to make that smooth road among
the rocks.
Thor used the path as one of his highways from valley to valley, and there
were other creatures of the mountains who used it as well as he, and more
frequently. As he stood waiting for Muskwa to get his wind they both heard
an odd chuckling sound approaching them from above. Forty or fifty feet up
the slide the path twisted and descended a little depression behind a huge
boulder, and out from behind this boulder came a big porcupine.
There is a law throughout the North that a man shall not kill a porcupine.
He is the "lost man's friend," for the wandering and starving prospector or
hunter can nearly always find a porcupine, if nothing else; and a child can
kill him. He is the humourist of the wilderness--the happiest, the
best-natured, and altogether the mildest-mannered beast that ever drew
breath. He talks and chatters and chuckles incessantly, and when he travels
he walks like a huge animated pincushion; he is oblivious of everything
about him as though asleep.
As this particular "porky" advanced upon Muskwa and Thor, he was communing
happily with himself, the chuckling notes he made sounding very much like a
baby's cooing. He was enormously fat, and as he waddled slowly along his
side and tail quills clicked on the stones. His eyes were on the path at
his feet. He was deeply absorbed in nothing at all, and he was within five
feet of Thor before he saw the grizzly. Then, in a wink, he humped himself
into a ball. For a few seconds he scolded vociferously. After that he was
as silent as a sphinx, his little red eyes watching the big bear.
Thor did not want to kill him, but the path was narrow, and he was ready to
go on. He advanced a foot or two, and Porky turned his back toward Thor and
made ready to deliver a swipe with his powerful tail. In that tail were
several hundred quills. As Thor had more than once come into contact with
porcupine quills, he hesitated.
Muskwa was looking on curiously. He still had his lesson to learn, for the
quill he had once picked up in his foot had been a loose quill. But since
the porcupine seemed to puzzle Thor, the cub turned and made ready to go
back along the slide if it became necessary. Thor advanced another foot,
and with a sudden _chuck, chuck, chuck_--the most vicious sound he was
capable of making--Porky advanced backward and his broad, thick tail
whipped through the air with a force that would have driven quills a
quarter of an inch into the butt of a tree. Having missed, he humped
himself again, and Thor stepped out on the boulder and circled around him.
There he waited for Muskwa.
Porky was immensely satisfied with his triumph. He unlimbered himself; his
quills settled a bit; and he advanced toward Muskwa, at the same time
resuming his good-natured chuckling. Instinctively the cub hugged the edge
of the path, and in doing so slipped over the edge. By the time he had
scrambled up again Porky was four or five feet beyond him and totally
absorbed in his travel.
The adventure of the sheep-trail was not yet quite over, for scarcely had
Porky maneuvered himself to safety when around the edge of the big boulder
above appeared a badger, hot on the fresh and luscious scent of his
favourite dinner, a porcupine. This worthless outlaw of the mountains was
three times as large as Muskwa, and every ounce of him was fighting muscle
and bone and claw and sharp teeth. He had a white mark on his nose and
forehead; his legs were short and thick; his tail was bushy, and the claws
on his front feet were almost as long as a bear's. Thor greeted him with an
immediate growl of warning, and the badger scooted back up the trail in
fear of his life.
Meanwhile Porky lumbered slowly along in quest of new feeding-grounds,
talking and singing to himself, forgetting entirely what had happened a
minute or two before, and unconscious of the fact that Thor had saved him
from a death as certain as though he had fallen over a thousand-foot
precipice.
For nearly a mile Thor and Muskwa followed the Bighorn Highway before its
winding course brought them at last to the very top of the range. They were
fully three-quarters of a mile above the creek-bottom, and so narrow in
places was the crest of the mountain along which the sheep-trail led that
they could look down into both valleys.
To Muskwa it was all a greenish golden haze below him; the depths seemed
illimitable; the forest along the stream was only a black streak, and the
parklike clumps of balsams and cedars on the farther slopes looked like
very small bosks of thorn or buffalo willow.
Up here the wind was blowing, too. It whipped him with a strange
fierceness, and half a dozen times he felt the mysterious and very
unpleasant chill of snow under his feet. Twice a great bird swooped near
him. It was the biggest bird he had ever seen--an eagle. The second time it
came so near that he heard the _beat_ of it, and saw its great, fierce head
and lowering talons.
Thor whirled toward the eagle and growled. If Muskwa had been alone, the
cub would have gone sailing off in those murderous talons. As it was, the
third time the eagle circled it was down the slope from them. It was after
other game. The scent of the game came to Thor and Muskwa, and they
stopped.
Perhaps a hundred yards below them was a shelving slide of soft shale, and
on this shale, basking in the warm sun after their morning's feed lower
down, was a band of sheep. There were twenty or thirty of them, mostly ewes
and their lambs. Three huge old rams were lying on a patch of snow farther
to the east.
With his six-foot wings spread out like twin fans, the eagle continued to
circle. He was as silent as a feather floating with the wind. The ewes and
even the old bighorns were unconscious of his presence over them. Most of
the lambs were lying close to their mothers, but two or three of a livelier
turn of mind were wandering over the shale and occasionally hopping about
in playful frolic.
The eagle's fierce eyes were upon these youngsters. Suddenly he drifted
farther away--a full rifle-shot distance straight in the face of the wind;
then he swung gracefully, and came back with the wind. And as he came, his
wings apparently motionless, he gathered greater and greater speed, and
shot like a rocket straight for the lambs. He seemed to have come and gone
like a great shadow, and just one plaintive, agonized bleat marked his
passing-and two little lambs were left where there had been three.
There was instant commotion on the slide. The ewes began to run back and
forth and bleat excitedly. The three rams sprang up and stood like rocks,
their huge battlemented heads held high as they scanned the depths below
them and the peaks above for new danger.
One of them saw Thor, and the deep, grating bleat of warning that rattled
out of his throat a hunter could have heard a mile away. As he gave his
danger signal he started down the slide, and in another moment an avalanche
of hoofs was clattering down the steep shale slope, loosening small stones
and boulders that went tumbling and crashing down the mountain with a din
that steadily increased as they set others in motion on the way. This was
all mighty interesting to Muskwa, and he would have stood for a long time
looking down for other things to happen if Thor had not led him on.
After a time the Bighorn Highway began to descend into the valley from the
upper end of which Thor had been driven by Langdon's first shots. They were
now six or eight miles north of the timber in which the hunters had made
their permanent camp, and headed for the lower tributaries of the Skeena.
Another hour of travel, and the bare shale and gray crags were above them
again, and they were on the green slopes. After the rocks, and the cold
winds, and the terrible glare he had seen in the eagle's eyes, the warm and
lovely valley into which they were descending lower and lower was a
paradise to Muskwa.
It was evident that Thor had something in his mind. He was not rambling
now. He cut off the ends and the bulges of the slopes. With his head
hunched low he travelled steadily northward, and a compass could not have
marked out a straighter line for the lower waters of the Skeena. He was
tremendously businesslike, and Muskwa, tagging bravely along behind,
wondered if he were never going to stop; if there could be anything in the
whole wide world finer for a big grizzly and a little tan-faced cub than
these wonderful sunlit slopes which Thor seemed in such great haste to
leave.