Had the wind been in another direction the pack would have triumphed, but each time that Langdon and Bruce gained ground the wind warned Thor by bringing to him the warm odour of their bodies.  And the grizzly was careful to keep that wind from the right quarter.  He could have gained the top of the mountain more easily and quickly by quartering the face of it on a back-trail, but this would have thrown the wind too far under him.  As long as he held the wind he was safe, unless the hunters made an effort to checkmate his method of escape by detouring and cutting him off.

It took him half an hour to reach the topmost ridge of rock, from which point he would have to break cover and reveal himself as he made the last two or three hundred yards up the shale side of the mountain to the backbone of the range.

When Thor made this break he put on a sudden spurt of speed that left the dogs thirty or forty yards behind him.  For two or three minutes he was clearly outlined on the face of the mountain, and during the last minute of those three he was splendidly profiled against a carpet of pure-white snow, without a shrub or a rock to conceal him from the eyes below.

Bruce and Langdon saw him at five hundred yards, and began firing.  Close over his head Thor heard the curious ripping wail of the first bullet, and an instant later came the crack of the rifle.

A second shot sent up a spurt of snow five yards ahead of him.  He swung sharply to the right.  This put him broadside to the marksmen.  Thor heard a third shot—­and that was all.

While the reports were still echoing among the crags and peaks something struck Thor a terrific blow on the flat of his skull, five inches back of his right ear.  It was as if a club had descended upon him from out of the sky.  He went down like a log.

It was a glancing shot.  It scarcely drew blood, but for a moment it stunned the grizzly, as a man is dazed by a blow on the end of the chin.

Before he could rise from where he had fallen the dogs were upon him, tearing at his throat and neck and body.  With a roar Thor sprang to his feet and shook them off.  He struck out savagely, and Langdon and Bruce could hear his bellowing as they stood with fingers on the triggers of their rifles waiting for the dogs to draw away far enough to give them the final shots.

Yard by yard Thor worked his way upward, snarling at the frantic pack, defying the man-smell, the strange thunder, the burning lightning—­even death itself, and five hundred yards below Langdon cursed despairingly as the dogs hung so close he could not fire.

Up to the very sky-line the blood-thirsting pack shielded Thor.  He disappeared over the summit.  The dogs followed.  And after that their baying came fainter and fainter as the big grizzly led them swiftly away from the menace of man in a long and thrilling race from which more than one was doomed not to return.