It was perhaps ten o’clock, and the sun-filled basin was like a warm oven to a thick-coated bear, when Thor searched up among the rocks near the waterfall until he found a place that was as cool as an old-fashioned cellar.  It was a miniature cavern.  All about it the slate and sandstone was of a dark and clammy wet from a hundred little trickles of snow water that ran down from the peaks.

It was just the sort of a place Thor loved on a July day, but to Muskwa it was dark and gloomy and not a thousandth part as pleasant as the sun.  So after an hour or two he left Thor in his frigidarium and began to investigate the treacherous ledges.

For a few minutes all went well—­then he stepped on a green-tinted slope of slate over which a very shallow dribble of water was running.  The water had been running over it in just that way for some centuries, and the shelving slate was worn as smooth as the surface of a polished pearl, and it was as slippery as a greased pole.  Muskwa’s feet went out from under him so quickly that he hardly knew what had happened.  The next moment he was on his way to the lake a hundred feet below.  He rolled over and over.  He plashed into shallow pools.  He bounced over miniature waterfalls like a rubber ball.  The wind was knocked out of him.  He was blinded and dazed by water and shock, and he gathered fresh speed with every yard he made.  He had succeeded in letting out half a dozen terrified yelps at the start, and these roused Thor.

Where the water from the peaks fell into the lake there was a precipitous drop of ten feet, and over this Muskwa shot with a momentum that carried him twice as far out into the pond.  He hit with a big splash, and disappeared.  Down and down he went, where everything was black and cold and suffocating; then the life-preserver with which nature had endowed him in the form of his fat brought him to the surface.  He began to paddle with all four feet.  It was his first swim, and when he finally dragged himself ashore he was limp and exhausted.

While he still lay panting and very much frightened, Thor came down from the rocks.  Muskwa’s mother had given him a sound cuffing when he got the porcupine quill in his foot.  She had cuffed him for every accident he had had, because she believed that cuffing was good medicine.  Education is largely cuffed into a bear cub, and she would have given him a fine cuffing now.  But Thor only smelled of him, saw that he was all right, and began to dig up a dog-tooth violet.

He had not finished the violet when suddenly he stopped.  For a half-minute he stood like a statue.  Muskwa jumped and shook himself.  Then he listened.  A sound came to both of them.  In one slow, graceful movement the grizzly reared himself to his full height.  He faced the north, his ears thrust forward, the sensitive muscles of his nostrils twitching.  He could smell nothing, but he heard!

Over the slopes which they had climbed there had come to him faintly a sound that was new to him, a sound that had never before been a part of his life.  It was the barking of dogs.