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

The coulee, or ravine, hid them from the valley as they ascended.  Its bottom was covered with rock and shale.  The wounds Thor had received in the fight, unlike bullet wounds, had stopped bleeding after the first few minutes, and he left no telltale red spots behind.  The ravine took them to the first chaotic upheaval of rock halfway up the mountain, and here they were still more lost to view from below.

They stopped and drank at a pool formed by the melting snow on the peaks, and then went on.  Thor did not stop when they reached the ledge on which they had slept the previous night.  And this time Muskwa was not tired when they reached the ledge.  Two days had made a big change in the little tan-faced cub.  He was not so round and puffy.  And he was stronger—­a great deal stronger; he was becoming hardened, and under Thor’s strenuous tutelage he was swiftly graduating from cubhood to young bearhood.

It was evident that Thor had followed this ledge at some previous time.  He knew where he was going.  It continued up and up, and finally seemed to end in the face of a precipitous wall of rock.  Thor’s trail led him directly to a great crevice, hardly wider than his body, and through this he went, emerging at the edge of the wildest and roughest slide of rock that Muskwa had ever seen.  It looked like a huge quarry, and it broke through the timber far below them, and reached almost to the top of the mountain above.

For Muskwa to make his way over the thousand pitfalls of that chaotic upheaval was an impossibility, and as Thor began to climb over the first rocks the cub stopped and whined.  It was the first time he had given up, and when he saw that Thor gave no attention to his whine, terror seized upon him and he cried for help as loudly as he could while he hunted frantically for a path up through the rocks.

Utterly oblivious of Muskwa’s predicament, Thor continued until he was fully thirty yards away.  Then he stopped, faced about deliberately, and waited.

This gave Muskwa courage, and he scratched and clawed and even used his chin and teeth in his efforts to follow.  It took him ten minutes to reach Thor, and he was completely winded.  Then, all at once, his terror vanished.  For Thor stood on a white, narrow path that was as solid as a floor.

The path was perhaps eighteen inches wide.  It was unusual—­and mysterious-looking, and strangely out of place where it was.  It looked as though an army of workmen had come along with hammers and had broken up tons of sandstone and slate, and then filled in between the boulders with rubble, making a smooth and narrow road that in places was ground to the fineness of powder and the hardness of cement.  But instead of hammers, the hoofs of a hundred or perhaps a thousand generations of mountain sheep had made the trail.  It was the sheep-path over the range.  The first band of bighorn may have blazed the way before Columbus discovered America; surely it had taken a great many years for hoofs to make that smooth road among the rocks.