It was a scent that tightened every muscle in his great body and set strange fires burning in him like raging furnaces.  With the dogs came also the man-smell!

He travelled upward a little faster now, and the fierce and joyous yelping of the dogs seemed scarcely a hundred yards away when he entered a small open space in the wild upheaval of rock.  On the mountainside was a wall that rose perpendicularly.  Twenty feet on the other side was a sheer fall of a hundred feet, and the way ahead was closed with the exception of a trail scarcely wider than Thor’s body by a huge crag of rock that had fallen from the shoulder of the mountain.  The big grizzly led Muskwa close up to this crag and the break that opened through it, and then turned suddenly back, so that Muskwa was behind him.  In the face of the peril that was almost upon them a mother-bear would have driven Muskwa into the safety of a crevice in the rock wall.  Thor did not do this.  He fronted the danger that was coming, and reared himself up on his hind quarters.

Twenty feet away the trail he had followed swung sharply around a projecting bulge in the perpendicular wall, and with eyes that were now red and terrible Thor watched the trap he had set.

The pack was coming full tongue.  Fifty yards beyond the bulge the dogs were running shoulder to shoulder, and a moment later the first of them rushed into the arena which Thor had chosen for himself.  The bulk of the horde followed so closely that the first dogs were flung under him as they strove frantically to stop themselves in time.

With a roar Thor launched himself among them.  His great right arm swept out and inward, and it seemed to Muskwa that he had gathered a half of the pack under his huge body.  With a single crunch of his jaws he broke the back of the foremost hunter.  From a second he tore the head so that the windpipe trailed out like a red rope.

He rolled himself forward, and before the remaining dogs could recover from their panic he had caught one a blow that sent him flying over the edge of the precipice to the rocks a hundred feet below.  It had all happened in half a minute, and in that half-minute the remaining nine dogs had scattered.

But Langdon’s Airedales were fighters.  To the last dog they had come of fighting stock, and Bruce and Metoosin had trained them until they could be hung up by their ears without whimpering.  The tragic fate of three of their number frightened them no more than their own pursuit had frightened Thor.

Swift as lightning they circled about the grizzly, spreading themselves on their forefeet, ready to spring aside or backward to avoid sudden rushes, and giving voice now to that quick, fierce yapping which tells hunters their quarry is at bay.  This was their business—­to harass and torment, to retard flight, to stop their prey again and again until their masters came to finish the kill.  It was a quite fair and thrilling sport for the bear and the dogs.  The man who comes up with the rifle ends it in murder.