He took this work with tremendous seriousness, much like an elephant hunting for peanuts hidden in a bale of hay.  He saw no humour in the operation.  As a matter of fact, Nature had not intended there should be any humour about it.  Thor’s time was more or less valueless, and during the course of a summer he absorbed in his system a good many hundred thousand sour ants, sweet grubs, and juicy insects of various kinds, not to mention a host of gophers and still tinier rock-rabbits.  These small things all added to the huge rolls of fat which it was necessary for him to store up for that “absorptive consumption” which kept him alive during his long winter sleep.  This was why Nature had made his little greenish-brown eyes twin microscopes, infallible at distances of a few feet, and almost worthless at a thousand yards.

As he was about to turn over a fresh stone Thor paused in his operations.  For a full minute he stood nearly motionless.  Then his head swung slowly, his nose close to the ground.  Very faintly he had caught an exceedingly pleasing odour.  It was so faint that he was afraid of losing it if he moved.  So he stood until he was sure of himself, then he swung his huge shoulders around and descended two yards down the slope, swinging his head slowly from right to left, and sniffing.  The scent grew stronger.  Another two yards down the slope he found it very strong under a rock.  It was a big rock, and weighed probably two hundred pounds.  Thor dragged it aside with his one right hand as if it were no more than a pebble.

Instantly there was a wild and protesting chatter, and a tiny striped rock-rabbit, very much like a chipmunk, darted away just as Thor’s left hand came down with a smash that would have broken the neck of a caribou.

It was not the scent of the rock-rabbit, but the savour of what the rock-rabbit had stored under the stone that had attracted Thor.  And this booty still remained—­a half-pint of ground-nuts piled carefully in a little hollow lined with moss.  They were not really nuts.  They were more like diminutive potatoes, about the size of cherries, and very much like potatoes in appearance.  They were starchy and sweet, and fattening.  Thor enjoyed them immensely, rumbling in that curious satisfied way deep down in his chest as he feasted.  And then he resumed his quest.

He did not hear Langdon as the hunter came nearer and nearer up the broken gully.  He did not smell him, for the wind was fatally wrong.  He had forgotten the noxious man-smell that had disturbed and irritated him an hour before.  He was quite happy; he was good-humoured; he was fat and sleek.  An irritable, cross-grained, and quarrelsome bear is always thin.  The true hunter knows him as soon as he sets eyes on him.  He is like the rogue elephant.

Thor continued his food-seeking, edging still closer to the gully.  He was within a hundred and fifty yards of it when a sound suddenly brought him alert.  Langdon, in his effort to creep up the steep side of the gully for a shot, had accidentally loosened a rock.  It went crashing down the ravine, starting other stones that followed in a noisy clatter.  At the foot of the coulee, six hundred yards down, Bruce swore softly under his breath.  He saw Thor sit up.  At that distance he was going to shoot if the bear made for the break.