CHAPTER FIVE

Thor had gone up the gorge at daybreak.  He was stiff when he rose from the clay wallow, but a good deal of the burning and pain had gone from his wound.  It still hurt him, but not as it had hurt him the preceding evening.  His discomfort was not all in his shoulder, and it was not in any one place in particular.  He was sick, and had he been human he would have been in bed with a thermometer under his tongue and a doctor holding his pulse.  He walked up the gorge slowly and laggingly.  An indefatigable seeker of food, he no longer thought of food.  He was not hungry, and he did not want to eat.

With his hot tongue he lapped frequently at the cool water of the creek, and even more frequently he turned half about, and sniffed the wind.  He knew that the man-smell and the strange thunder and the still more inexplicable lightning lay behind him.  All night he had been on guard, and he was cautious now.

For a particular hurt Thor knew of no particular remedy.  He was not a botanist in the finer sense of the word, but in creating him the Spirit of the Wild had ordained that he should be his own physician.  As a cat seeks catnip, so Thor sought certain things when he was not feeling well.  All bitterness is not quinine, but certainly bitter things were Thor’s remedies, and as he made his way up the gorge his nose hung close to the ground, and he sniffed in the low copses and thick bush-tangles he passed.

He came to a small green spot covered with kinnikinic, a ground plant two inches high which bore red berries as big as a small pea.  They were not red now, but green; bitter as gall, and contained an astringent tonic called uvaursi.  Thor ate them.

After that he found soap berries growing on bushes that looked very much like currant bushes.  The fruit was already larger than currants, and turning pink.  Indians ate these berries when they had fever, and Thor gathered half a pint before he went on.  They, too, were bitter.

He nosed the trees, and found at last what he wanted.  It was a jackpine, and at several places within his reach the fresh pitch was oozing.  A bear seldom passes a bleeding jackpine.  It is his chief tonic, and Thor licked the fresh pitch with his tongue.  In this way he absorbed not only turpentine, but also, in a roundabout sort of way, a whole pharmacopoeia of medicines made from this particular element.

By the time he arrived at the end of the gorge Thor’s stomach was a fairly well-stocked drug emporium.  Among other things he had eaten perhaps half a quart of spruce and balsam needles.  When a dog is sick he eats grass; when a bear is sick he eats pine or balsam needles if he can get them.  Also he pads his stomach and intestines with them in the last hour before denning himself away for the winter.