Like fat woodchucks the whistlers were already beginning to sun themselves on their rocks.  Their long, soft, elusive whistlings, pleasant to hear above the drone of mountain waters, filled the air with a musical cadence.  Now and then one would whistle shrilly and warningly close at hand, and then flatten himself out on his rock as the big bear passed, and for a few moments no whistling would break upon the gentle purring of the valley.

But Thor was giving no thought to the hunt this morning.  Twice he encountered porcupines, the sweetest of all morsels to him, and passed them unnoticed; the warm, sleeping smell of a caribou came hot and fresh from a thicket, but he did not approach the thicket to investigate; out of a coulee, narrow and dark, like a black ditch, he caught the scent of a badger.  For two hours he travelled steadily northward along the half-crest of the slopes before he struck down through the timber to the stream.

The clay adhering to his wound was beginning to harden, and again he waded shoulder-deep into a pool, and stood there for several minutes.  The water washed most of the clay away.  For another two hours he followed the creek, drinking frequently.  Then came the sapoos oowin—­six hours after he had left the clay wallow.  The kinnikinic berries, the soap berries, the jackpine pitch, the spruce and balsam needles, and the water he had drunk, all mixed in his stomach in one big compelling dose, brought it about—­and Thor felt tremendously better, so much better that for the first time he turned and growled back in the direction of his enemies.  His shoulder still hurt him, but his sickness was gone.

For many minutes after the sapoos oowin he stood without moving, and many times he growled.  The snarling rumble deep in his chest had a new meaning now.  Until last night and to-day he had not known a real hatred.  He had fought other bears, but the fighting rage was not hate.  It came quickly, and passed away quickly; it left no growing ugliness; he licked the wounds of a clawed enemy, and was quite frequently happy while he nursed them.  But this new thing that was born in him was different.

With an unforgetable and ferocious hatred he hated the thing that had hurt him.  He hated the man-smell; he hated the strange, white-faced thing he had seen clinging to the side of the gorge; and his hatred included everything associated with them.  It was a hatred born of instinct and roused sharply from its long slumber by experience.

Without ever having seen or smelled man before, he knew that man was his deadliest enemy, and to be feared more than all the wild things in the mountains.  He would fight the biggest grizzly.  He would turn on the fiercest pack of wolves.  He would brave flood and fire without flinching.  But before man he must flee!  He must hide!  He must constantly guard himself in the peaks and on the plains with eyes and ears and nose!