In his massive strength, in his aloneness and his supremacy, the great bear was like the mountains, unrivalled in the valleys as they were in the skies.  With the mountains, he had come down out of the ages.  He was part of them.  The history of his race had begun and was dying among them, and they were alike in many ways.  Until this day he could not remember when anything had come to question his might and his right—­except those of his own kind.  With such rivals he had fought fairly and more than once to the death.  He was ready to fight again, if it came to a question of sovereignty over the ranges which he claimed as his own.  Until he was beaten he was dominator, arbiter, and despot, if he chose to be.  He was dynast of the rich valleys and the green slopes, and liege lord of all living things about him.  He had won and kept these things openly, without strategy or treachery.  He was hated and he was feared, but he was without hatred or fear of his own—­and he was honest.  Therefore he waited openly for the strange thing that was coming to him from down the valley.

As he sat on his haunches, questioning the air with his keen brown nose, something within him was reaching back into dim and bygone generations.  Never before had he caught the taint that was in his nostrils, yet now that it came to him it did not seem altogether new.  He could not place it.  He could not picture it.  Yet he knew that it was a menace and a threat.

For ten minutes he sat like a carven thing on his haunches.  Then the wind shifted, and the scent grew less and less, until it was gone altogether.

Thor’s flat ears lifted a little.  He turned his huge head slowly so that his eyes took in the green slope and the tiny plain.  He easily forgot the smell now that the air was clear and sweet again.  He dropped on his four feet, and resumed his gopher-hunting.

There was something of humour in his hunt.  Thor weighed a thousand pounds; a mountain gopher is six inches long and weighs six ounces.  Yet Thor would dig energetically for an hour, and rejoice at the end by swallowing the fat little gopher like a pill; it was his bonne bouche, the luscious tidbit in the quest of which he spent a third of his spring and summer digging.

He found a hole located to his satisfaction and began throwing out the earth like a huge dog after a rat.  He was on the crest of the slope.  Once or twice during the next half-hour he lifted his head, but he was no longer disturbed by the strange smell that had come to him with the wind.

CHAPTER TWO

A mile down the valley Jim Langdon stopped his horse where the spruce and balsam timber thinned out at the mouth of a coulee, looked ahead of him for a breathless moment or two, and then with an audible gasp of pleasure swung his right leg over so that his knee crooked restfully about the horn of his saddle, and waited.