“As Thor had more than once come into contact with porcupine quills, he hesitated.”

“Like the wind Thor bore down on the flank of the caribou, swung a little to one side, and then without any apparent effort—­still like a huge ball—­he bounded in and upward, and the short race was done.”

“They headed up the creek-bottom, bending over from their saddles to look at every strip of sand they passed for tracks.  They had not gone a quarter of a mile when Bruce gave a sudden exclamation and stopped.”

“‘Come on!’ he cried.  ’The black’s dead!  If we hustle we can get our grizzly!’”

THE GRIZZLY KING

CHAPTER ONE

With the silence and immobility of a great reddish-tinted, rock, Thor stood for many minutes looking out over his domain.  He could not see far, for, like all grizzlies, his eyes were small and far apart, and his vision was bad.  At a distance of a third or a half a mile he could make out a goat or a mountain sheep, but beyond that his world was a vast sun-filled or night-darkened mystery through which he ranged mostly by the guidance of sound and smell.

It was the sense of smell that held him still and motionless now.  Up out of the valley a scent had come to his nostrils that he had never smelled before.  It was something that did not belong there, and it stirred him strangely.  Vainly his slow-working brute mind struggled to comprehend it.  It was not caribou, for he had killed many caribou; it was not goat; it was not sheep; and it was not the smell of the fat and lazy whistlers sunning themselves on the rocks, for he had eaten hundreds of whistlers.  It was a scent that did not enrage him, and neither did it frighten him.  He was curious, and yet he did not go down to seek it out.  Caution held him back.

If Thor could have seen distinctly for a mile, or two miles, his eyes would have discovered even less than the wind brought to him from down the valley.  He stood at the edge of a little plain, with the valley an eighth of a mile below him, and the break over which he had come that afternoon an eighth of a mile above him.  The plain was very much like a cup, perhaps an acre in extent, in the green slope of the mountain.  It was covered with rich, soft grass and June flowers, mountain violets and patches of forget-me-nots, and wild asters and hyacinths, and in the centre of it was a fifty-foot spatter of soft mud which Thor visited frequently when his feet became rock-sore.

To the east and the west and the north of him spread out the wonderful panorama of the Canadian Rockies, softened in the golden sunshine of a June afternoon.

From up and down the valley, from the breaks between the peaks, and from the little gullies cleft in shale and rock that crept up to the snow-lines came a soft and droning murmur.  It was the music of running water.  That music was always in the air, for the rivers, the creeks, and the tiny streams gushing down from the snow that lay eternally up near the clouds were never still.