The mountain hunter knew that this was the hour when he should scan the green slopes and the open places between the clumps of timber for bears, and especially for flesh-eating bears.

It was Thor’s chief prospecting hour.  Instinct told him that when all other creatures were well fed and napping he could move more openly and with less fear of detection.  He could find his game, and watch it.  Occasionally he would kill a goat or a sheep or a caribou in broad daylight, for over short distances he could run faster than either a goat or a sheep, and as fast as a caribou.  But chiefly he killed at sunset or in the darkness of early evening.

Thor rose from beside the rock with a prodigious whoof that roused Muskwa.  The cub got up, blinked at Thor and then at the sun, and shook himself until he fell down.

Thor eyed the black and tan mite a bit sourly.  After the sapoos oowin he was craving red, juicy flesh, just as a very hungry man yearns for a thick porterhouse instead of lady fingers or mayonnaise salad—­flesh and plenty of it; and how he could hunt down and kill a caribou with that half-starved but very much interested cub at his heels puzzled him.

Muskwa himself seemed to understand and answer the question.  He ran a dozen yards ahead of Thor, then stopped and looked back impudently, his little ears perked forward, and with the look in his face of a small boy proving to his father that he is perfectly qualified to go on his first rabbit hunt.

With another whoof Thor started along the slope in a spurt that brought him up to Muskwa immediately, and with a sudden sweep of his right paw he sent the cub rolling a dozen feet behind him, a manner of speech that said plainly enough, “That’s where you belong if you’re going hunting with me!”

Then Thor lumbered slowly on, eyes and ears and nostrils keyed for the hunt.  He descended until he was not more than a hundred yards above the creek, and he no longer sought out the easiest trail, but the rough and broken places.  He travelled slowly and in a zigzag fashion, stealing cautiously around great masses of boulders, sniffing up each coulee that he came to, and investigating the timber clumps and windfalls.

At one time he would be so high up that he was close to the bare shale, and again so low down that he walked in the sand and gravel of the creek.  He caught many scents in the wind, but none that held or deeply interested him.  Once, up near the shale, he smelled goat; but he never went above the shale for meat.  Twice he smelled sheep, and late in the afternoon he saw a big ram looking down on him from a precipitous crag a hundred feet above.

Lower down his nose touched the trails of porcupines, and often his head hung over the footprints of caribou as he sniffed the air ahead.

There were other bears in the valley, too.  Mostly these had travelled along the creek-bottom, showing they were blacks or cinnamons.  Once Thor struck the scent of another grizzly, and he rumbled ill-humouredly.