Muskwa remained at the end of his rope up the tree, and for a long time the hunters paid no more attention to him.  He could see them eating and he could hear them talking as they planned a new campaign against Thor.

“We’ve got to trick him after what happened to-day,” declared Bruce.  “No more tracking ‘im after this, Jimmy.  We can track until doomsday an’ he’ll always know where we are.”  He paused for a moment and listened.  “Funny the dogs don’t come,” he said.  “I wonder—­”

He looked at Langdon.

“Impossible!” exclaimed the latter, as he read the significance of his companion’s look.  “Bruce, you don’t mean to say that bear might kill them all!”

“I’ve hunted a good many grizzlies,” replied the mountaineer quietly, “but I ain’t never hunted a trickier one than this.  Jimmy, he trapped them dogs on the ledge, an’ he tricked the dog he killed up on the peak.  He’s liable to get ’em all into a corner, an’ if that happens—­”

He shrugged his shoulders suggestively.

Again Langdon listened.

“If there were any alive at dark they should be here pretty soon,” he said.  “I’m sorry, now—­sorry we didn’t leave the dogs at home.”

Bruce laughed a little grimly.

“Fortunes o’ war, Jimmy,” he said.  “You don’t go hunting grizzlies with a pack of lapdogs, an’ you’ve got to expect to lose some of them sooner or later.  We’ve tackled the wrong bear, that’s all.  He’s beat us.”

“Beat us?”

“I mean he’s beat us in a square game, an’ we dealt a raw hand at that in using dogs at all.  Do you want that bear bad enough to go after him my way?”

Langdon nodded.

“What’s your scheme?”

“You’ve got to drop pretty idees when you go grizzly hunting,” began Bruce.  “And especially when you run up against a ‘killer.’  There won’t be any hour between now an’ denning-up time that this grizzly doesn’t get the wind from all directions.  How?  He’ll make detours.  I’ll bet if there was snow on the ground you’d find him back-tracking two miles out of every six, so he can get the wind of anything that’s following him.  An’ he’ll travel mostly nights, layin’ high up in the rocks an’ shale during the day.  If you want any more shootin’, there’s just two things to do, an’ the best of them two things is to move on and find other bears.”

“Which I won’t do, Bruce.  What’s your scheme for getting this one?”

Bruce was silent for several moments before he replied.

“We’ve got his range mapped out to a mile,” he said then.  “It begins up at the first break we crossed, an’ it ends down here where we came into this valley.  It’s about twenty-five miles up an’ down.  He don’t touch the mount’ins west of this valley nor the mount’ins east of the other valleys an’ he’s dead certain to keep on makin’ circles so long as we’re after him.  He’s hikin’ southward now on the other side of the range.