CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Thor heard the dogs when they were a mile away.  There were two reasons why he was even less in a mood to run from them now than a few days before.  Of the dogs alone he had no more fear than if they had been so many badgers, or so many whistlers piping at him from the rocks.  He had found them all mouth and little fang, and easy to kill.  It was what followed close after them that disturbed him.  But to-day he had stood face to face with the thing that had brought the strange scent into his valleys, and it had not offered to hurt him, and he had refused to kill it.  Besides, he was again seeking Iskwao, the she-bear, and man is not the only animal that will risk his life for love.

After killing his last dog at dusk of that fatal day when they had pursued him over the mountain Thor had done just what Bruce thought that he would do, and instead of continuing southward had made a wider detour toward the north, and the third night after the fight and the loss of Muskwa he found Iskwao again.  In the twilight of that same evening Pipoonaskoos had died, and Thor had heard the sharp cracking of Bruce’s automatic.  All that night and the next day and the night that followed he spent with Iskwao, and then he left her once more.  A third time he was seeking her when he found Langdon in the trap on the ledge, and he had not yet got wind of her when he first heard the baying of the dogs on his trail.

He was travelling southward, which brought him nearer the hunters’ camp.  He was keeping to the high slopes where there were little dips and meadows, broken by patches of shale, deep coulees, and occasionally wild upheavals of rock.  He was keeping the wind straight ahead so that he would not fail to catch the smell of Iskwao when he came near her, and with the baying of the dogs he caught no scent of the pursuing beasts, or of the two men who were riding behind them.

At another time he would have played his favourite trick of detouring so that the danger would be ahead of him, with the wind in his favour.  Caution had now become secondary to his desire to find his mate.  The dogs were less than half a mile away when he stopped suddenly, sniffed the air for a moment, and then went on swiftly until he was halted by a narrow ravine.

Up that ravine Iskwao was coming from a dip lower down the mountain, and she was running.  The yelping of the pack was fierce and close when Thor scrambled down in time to meet her as she rushed upward.  Iskwao paused for a single moment, smelled noses with Thor, and then went on, her ears laid back flat and sullen and her throat filled with growling menace.

Thor followed her, and he also growled.  He knew that his mate was fleeing from the dogs, and again that deadly and slowly increasing wrath swept through him as he climbed after her higher up the mountain.

In such an hour as this Thor was at his worst.  He was a fighter when pursued as the dogs had pursued him a week before—­but he was a demon, terrible and without mercy, when danger threatened his mate.