The sun was not yet up when Thor came to the end of the gorge, and stood for a few moments at the mouth of a low cave that reached back into the wall of the mountain.  How far his memory went back it would be impossible to say; but in the whole world, as he knew it, this cave was home.  It was not more than four feet high, and twice as wide, but it was many times as deep and was carpeted with a soft white floor of sand.  In some past age a little stream had trickled out of this cavern, and the far end of it made a comfortable bedroom for a sleeping bear when the temperature was fifty degrees below zero.

Ten years before Thor’s mother had gone in there to sleep through the winter, and when she waddled out to get her first glimpse of spring three little cubs waddled with her.  Thor was one of them.  He was still half blind, for it is five weeks after a grizzly cub is born before he can see; and there was not much hair on his body, for a grizzly cub is born as naked as a human baby.  His eyes open and his hair begins to grow at just about the same time.  Since then Thor had denned eight times in that cavern home.

He wanted to go in now.  He wanted to lie down in the far end of it and wait until he felt better.  For perhaps two or three minutes he hesitated, sniffing yearningly at the door to his cave, and then feeling the wind from down the gorge.  Something told him that he should go on.

To the westward there was a sloping ascent up out of the gorge to the summit, and Thor climbed this.  The sun was well up when he reached the top, and for a little while he rested again and looked down on the other half of his domain.

Even more wonderful was this valley than the one into which Bruce and Langdon had ridden a few hours before.  From range to range it was a good two miles in width, and in the opposite directions it stretched away in a great rolling panorama of gold and green and black.  From where Thor stood it was like an immense park.  Green slopes reached almost to the summits of the mountains, and to a point halfway up these slopes—­the last timber-line—­clumps of spruce and balsam trees were scattered over the green as if set there by the hands of men.  Some of these timber-patches were no larger than the decorative clumps in a city park, and others covered acres and tens of acres; and at the foot of the slopes on either side, like decorative fringes, were thin and unbroken lines of forest.  Between these two lines of forest lay the open valley of soft and undulating meadow, dotted with its purplish bosks of buffalo willow and mountain sage, its green coppices of wild-rose and thorn, and its clumps of trees.  In the hollow of the valley ran a stream.

Thor descended about four hundred yards from where he stood, and then turned northward along the green slope, so that he was travelling from patch to patch of the parklike timber, a hundred and fifty or two hundred yards above the fringe of forest.  To this height, midway between the meadows in the valley and the first shale and bare rock of the peaks, he came most frequently on his small game hunts.