The adventure of the sheep-trail was not yet quite over, for scarcely had Porky maneuvered himself to safety when around the edge of the big boulder above appeared a badger, hot on the fresh and luscious scent of his favourite dinner, a porcupine.  This worthless outlaw of the mountains was three times as large as Muskwa, and every ounce of him was fighting muscle and bone and claw and sharp teeth.  He had a white mark on his nose and forehead; his legs were short and thick; his tail was bushy, and the claws on his front feet were almost as long as a bear’s.  Thor greeted him with an immediate growl of warning, and the badger scooted back up the trail in fear of his life.

Meanwhile Porky lumbered slowly along in quest of new feeding-grounds, talking and singing to himself, forgetting entirely what had happened a minute or two before, and unconscious of the fact that Thor had saved him from a death as certain as though he had fallen over a thousand-foot precipice.

For nearly a mile Thor and Muskwa followed the Bighorn Highway before its winding course brought them at last to the very top of the range.  They were fully three-quarters of a mile above the creek-bottom, and so narrow in places was the crest of the mountain along which the sheep-trail led that they could look down into both valleys.

To Muskwa it was all a greenish golden haze below him; the depths seemed illimitable; the forest along the stream was only a black streak, and the parklike clumps of balsams and cedars on the farther slopes looked like very small bosks of thorn or buffalo willow.

Up here the wind was blowing, too.  It whipped him with a strange fierceness, and half a dozen times he felt the mysterious and very unpleasant chill of snow under his feet.  Twice a great bird swooped near him.  It was the biggest bird he had ever seen—­an eagle.  The second time it came so near that he heard the beat of it, and saw its great, fierce head and lowering talons.

Thor whirled toward the eagle and growled.  If Muskwa had been alone, the cub would have gone sailing off in those murderous talons.  As it was, the third time the eagle circled it was down the slope from them.  It was after other game.  The scent of the game came to Thor and Muskwa, and they stopped.

Perhaps a hundred yards below them was a shelving slide of soft shale, and on this shale, basking in the warm sun after their morning’s feed lower down, was a band of sheep.  There were twenty or thirty of them, mostly ewes and their lambs.  Three huge old rams were lying on a patch of snow farther to the east.

With his six-foot wings spread out like twin fans, the eagle continued to circle.  He was as silent as a feather floating with the wind.  The ewes and even the old bighorns were unconscious of his presence over them.  Most of the lambs were lying close to their mothers, but two or three of a livelier turn of mind were wandering over the shale and occasionally hopping about in playful frolic.