hich lead can scarcely stop, and which has given to his kind their
terrible name.

But the breath of air passed, and there followed a peaceful calm. The
valley was filled with the purr of running water; from their rocks the
whistlers called forth their soft notes; up on the green plain the
ptarmigan were fluting, and rising in white-winged flocks. These things
soothed Thor, as a woman's gentle hand quiets an angry man. For five
minutes he continued to rumble and growl as he tried vainly to catch the
scent again; but the rumbling and growling grew steadily less, and finally
he turned and walked slowly toward the coulee down which he and Muskwa had
come a little while before. Muskwa followed.

[Illustration: "'Come on!' he cried. 'The black's dead! If we hustle we can
get our grizzly!'"]

The coulee, or ravine, hid them from the valley as they ascended. Its
bottom was covered with rock and shale. The wounds Thor had received in the
fight, unlike bullet wounds, had stopped bleeding after the first few
minutes, and he left no telltale red spots behind. The ravine took them to
the first chaotic upheaval of rock halfway up the mountain, and here they
were still more lost to view from below.

They stopped and drank at a pool formed by the melting snow on the peaks,
and then went on. Thor did not stop when they reached the ledge on which
they had slept the previous night. And this time Muskwa was not tired when
they reached the ledge. Two days had made a big change in the little
tan-faced cub. He was not so round and puffy. And he was stronger--a great
deal stronger; he was becoming hardened, and under Thor's strenuous
tutelage he was swiftly graduating from cubhood to young bearhood.

It was evident that Thor had followed this ledge at some previous time. He
knew where he was going. It continued up and up, and finally seemed to end
in the face of a precipitous wall of rock. Thor's trail led him directly to
a great crevice, hardly wider than his body, and through this he went,
emerging at the edge of the wildest and roughest slide of rock that Muskwa
had ever seen. It looked like a huge quarry, and it broke through the
timber far below them, and reached almost to the top of the mountain above.

For Muskwa to make his way over the thousand pitfalls of that chaotic
upheaval was an impossibility, and as Thor began to climb over the first
rocks the cub stopped and whined. It was the first time he had given up,
and when he saw