His huge right arm swung over the two-year-old’s shoulder, and as they went down his left paw gripped the caribou’s muzzle like a huge human hand.  Thor fell under, as he always planned to fall.  He did not hug his victim to death.  Just once he doubled up one of his hind legs, and when it went back the five knives it carried disembowelled the caribou.  They not only disembowelled him, but twisted and broke his ribs as though they were of wood.  Then Thor got up, looked around, and shook himself with a rumbling growl which might have been either a growl of triumph or an invitation for Muskwa to come to the feast.

If it was an invitation, the little tan-faced cab did not wait for a second.  For the first time he smelled and tasted the warm blood of meat.  And this smell and taste had come at the psychological moment in his life, just as it had come in Thor’s life years before.  All grizzlies are not killers of big game.  In fact, very few of them are.  Most of them are chiefly vegetarians, with a meat diet of smaller animals, such as gophers, whistling marmots, and porcupines.  Now and then chance makes of a grizzly a hunter of caribou, goat, sheep, deer, and even moose.  Such was Thor.  And such, in days to come, would Muskwa be, even though he was a black and not of the family Ursus Horribilis Ord.

For an hour the two feasted, not in the ravenous way of hungry dogs, but in the slow and satisfying manner of gourmets.  Muskwa, flat on his little paunch, and almost between Thor’s huge forearms, lapped up the blood and snarled like a kitten as he ground tender flesh between his tiny teeth.  Thor, as in all his food-seeking, hunted first for the tidbits, though the sapoos oovin had made him as empty as a room without furniture.  He pulled out the thin leafs of fat from about the kidneys and bowels, and munched at yard-long strings of it, his eyes half closed.

The last of the sun faded away from the mountains, and darkness followed swiftly after the twilight.  It was dark when they finished, and little Muskwa was as wide as he was long.

Thor was the greatest of nature’s conservators.  With him nothing went to waste that was good to eat, and at the present moment if the old bull caribou had deliberately walked within his reach Thor in all probability would not have killed him.  He had food, and his business was to store that food where it would be safe.

He went back to the balsam thicket, but the gorged cub now made no effort to follow him.  He was vastly contented, and something told him that Thor would not leave the meat.  Ten minutes later Thor verified his judgment by returning.  In his huge jaws he caught the caribou at the back of the neck.  Then he swung himself partly sidewise and began dragging the carcass toward the timber as a dog might have dragged a ten-pound slab of bacon.

The young bull probably weighed four hundred pounds.  Had he weighed eight hundred, or even a thousand, Thor would still have dragged him—­but had the carcass weighed that much he would have turned straight around and backed with his load.