CHAPTER SIX

The creek which Thor was following was a tributary of the Babine, and he was headed pretty nearly straight for the Skeena.  As he was travelling upstream the country was becoming higher and rougher.  He had come perhaps seven or eight miles from the summit of the divide when he found Muskwa.  From this point the slopes began to assume a different aspect.  They were cut up by dark, narrow gullies, and broken by enormous masses of rocks, jagged cuffs, and steep slides of shale.  The creek became noisier and more difficult to follow.

Thor was now entering one of his strongholds:  a region which contained a thousand hiding-places, if he had wanted to hide; a wild, uptorn country where it was not difficult for him to kill big game, and where he was certain that the man-smell would not follow him.

For half an hour after leaving the mass of rocks where he had encountered Muskwa, Thor lumbered on as if utterly oblivious of the fact that the cub was following.  But he could hear him and smell him.

Muskwa was having a hard time of it.  His fat little body and his fat little legs were unaccustomed to this sort of journeying, but he was a game youngster, and only twice did he whimper in that half-hour—­once he toppled off a rock into the edge of the creek, and again when he came down too hard on the porcupine quill in his foot.

At last Thor abandoned the creek and turned up a deep ravine, which he followed until he came to a dip, or plateau-like plain, halfway up a broad slope.  Here he found a rock on the sunny side of a grassy knoll, and stopped.  It may be that little Muskwa’s babyish friendship, the caress of his soft little red tongue at just the psychological moment, and his perseverance in following Thor had all combined to touch a responsive chord in the other’s big brute heart, for after nosing about restlessly for a few moments Thor stretched himself out beside the rock.  Not until then did the utterly exhausted little tan-faced cub lie down, but when he did lie down he was so dead tired that he was sound asleep in three minutes.

Twice again during the early part of the afternoon the sapoos oowin worked on Thor, and he began to feel hungry.  It was not the sort of hunger to be appeased by ants and grubs, or even gophers and whistlers.  It may be, too, that he guessed how nearly starved little Muskwa was.  The cub had not once opened his eyes, and he still lay in his warm pool of sunshine when Thor made up his mind to go on.

It was about three o’clock, a particularly quiet and drowsy part of a late June or early July day in a northern mountain valley.  The whistlers had piped until they were tired, and lay squat out in the sunshine on their rocks; the eagles soared so high above the peaks that they were mere dots; the hawks, with meat-filled crops, had disappeared into the timber; goat and sheep were lying down far up toward the sky-line, and if there were any grazing animals near they were well fed and napping.