After a little Iskwao came from the thicket and nosed the wind as Thor had felt it.  Then she turned in the opposite direction, and with Pipoonaskoos close behind her, went up the slope and continued slowly and steadily in the face of the setting sun.

So ended Thor’s love-making and Muskwa’s first fighting; and together they trailed eastward again, to face the most terrible peril that had ever come into the mountains for four-footed beast-a peril that was merciless, a peril from which there was no escape, a peril that was fraught with death.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The first night after leaving Iskwao and Pipoonaskoos the big grizzly and the tan-faced cub wandered without sleep under the brilliant stars.  Thor did not hunt for meat.  He climbed a steep slope, then went down the shale side of a dip, and in a small basin hidden at the foot of a mountain came to a soft green meadow where the dog-tooth violet, with its slender stem, its two lily-like leaves, its single cluster of five-petalled flowers, and its luscious, bulbous root grew in great profusion.  And here all through the night he dug and ate.

Muskwa, who had filled himself on spring beauty roots, was not hungry, and as the day had been a restful one for him, outside of his fighting, he found this night filled with its brilliant stars quite enjoyable.  The moon came up about ten o’clock, and it was the biggest, and the reddest, and the most beautiful moon Muskwa had seen in his short life.  It rolled up over the peaks like a forest fire, and filled all the Rocky Mountains with a wonderful glow.  The basin, in which there were perhaps ten acres of meadow, was lighted up almost like day.  The little lake at the foot of the mountain glimmered softly, and the tiny stream that fed it from the melting snows a thousand feet above shot down in glistening cascades that caught the moonlight like rivulets of dull polished diamonds.

About the meadow were scattered little clumps of bushes and a few balsams and spruce, as if set there for ornamental purposes; and on one side there was a narrow, verdure-covered slide that sloped upward for a third of a mile, and at the top of which, unseen by Muskwa and Thor, a band of sheep were sleeping.

Muskwa wandered about, always near Thor, investigating the clumps of bushes, the dark shadows of the balsams and spruce, and the edge of the lake.  Here he found a plashet of soft mud which was a great solace to his sore feet.  Twenty times during the night he waded in the mud.

Even when the dawn came Thor seemed to be in no great haste to leave the basin.  Until the sun was well up he continued to wander about the meadow and the edge of the lake, digging up occasional roots, and eating tender grass.  This did not displease Muskwa, who made his breakfast of the dog-tooth violet bulbs.  The one matter that puzzled him was why Thor did not go into the lake and throw out trout, for he yet had to learn that all water did not contain fish.  At last he went fishing for himself, and succeeded in getting a black hard-shelled water beetle that nipped his nose with a pair of needle-like pincers and brought a yelp from him.