Why he sensed this, why he understood all at once that a creature had come into his world, a pigmy in size, yet more to be dreaded than any foe he had ever known, was a miracle which nature alone could explain.  It was a hearkening back in the age-dimmed mental fabric of Thor’s race to the earliest days of man—­man, first of all, with the club; man with the spear hardened in fire; man with the flint-tipped arrow; man with the trap and the deadfall, and, lastly, man with the gun.  Through all the ages man had been his one and only master.  Nature had impressed it upon him—­had been impressing it upon him through a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand generations.

And now for the first time in his life that dormant part of his instinct leaped into warning wakefulness, and he understood.  He hated man, and hereafter he would hate everything that bore the man-smell.  And with this hate there was also born in him for the first time fear.  Had man never pushed Thor and his kind to the death the world would not have known him as Ursus Horribilis the Terrible.

Thor still followed the creek, nosing along slowly and lumberingly, but very steadily; his head and neck bent low, his huge rear quarters rising and falling in that rolling motion peculiar to all bears, and especially so of the grizzly.  His long claws click-click-clicked on the stones; he crunched heavily in the gravel; in soft sand he left enormous footprints.

That part of the valley which he was now entering held a particular significance for Thor, and he began to loiter, pausing often to sniff the air on all sides of him.  He was not a monogamist, but for many mating seasons past he had come to find his Iskwao in this wonderful sweep of meadow and plain between the two ranges.  He could always expect her in July, waiting for him or seeking him with that strange savage longing of motherhood in her breast.  She was a splendid grizzly who came from the western ranges when the spirit of mating days called; big, and strong, and of a beautiful golden-brown colour, so that the children of Thor and his Iskwao were the finest young grizzlies in all the mountains.  The mother took them back with her unborn, and they opened their eyes and lived and fought in the valleys and on the slopes far to the west.  If in later years Thor ever chased his own children out of his hunting grounds, or whipped them in a fight, Nature kindly blinded him to the fact.  He was like most grouchy old bachelors:  he did not like small folk.  He tolerated a little cub as a cross-grained old woman-hater might have tolerated a pink baby; but he wasn’t as cruel as Punch, for he had never killed a cub.  He had cuffed them soundly whenever they had dared to come within reach of him, but always with the flat, soft palm of his paw, and with just enough force behind it to send them keeling over and over like little round fluffy balls.

This was Thor’s only expression of displeasure when a strange mother-bear invaded his range with her cubs.  In other ways he was quite chivalrous.  He would not drive the mother-bear and her cubs away, and he would not fight with her, no matter how shrewish or unpleasant she was.  Even if he found them eating at one of his kills, he would do nothing more than give the cubs a sound cuffing.