that Thor gave no attention to his whine, terror seized
upon him and he cried for help as loudly as he could while he hunted
frantically for a path up through the rocks.

Utterly oblivious of Muskwa's predicament, Thor continued until he was
fully thirty yards away. Then he stopped, faced about deliberately, and
waited.

This gave Muskwa courage, and he scratched and clawed and even used his
chin and teeth in his efforts to follow. It took him ten minutes to reach
Thor, and he was completely winded. Then, all at once, his terror vanished.
For Thor stood on a white, narrow path that was as solid as a floor.

The path was perhaps eighteen inches wide. It was unusual--and
mysterious-looking, and strangely out of place where it was. It looked as
though an army of workmen had come along with hammers and had broken up
tons of sandstone and slate, and then filled in between the boulders with
rubble, making a smooth and narrow road that in places was ground to the
fineness of powder and the hardness of cement. But instead of hammers, the
hoofs of a hundred or perhaps a thousand generations of mountain sheep had
made the trail. It was the sheep-path over the range. The first band of
bighorn may have blazed the way before Columbus discovered America; surely
it had taken a great many years for hoofs to make that smooth road among
the rocks.

Thor used the path as one of his highways from valley to valley, and there
were other creatures of the mountains who used it as well as he, and more
frequently. As he stood waiting for Muskwa to get his wind they both heard
an odd chuckling sound approaching them from above. Forty or fifty feet up
the slide the path twisted and descended a little depression behind a huge
boulder, and out from behind this boulder came a big porcupine.

There is a law throughout the North that a man shall not kill a porcupine.
He is the "lost man's friend," for the wandering and starving prospector or
hunter can nearly always find a porcupine, if nothing else; and a child can
kill him. He is the humourist of the wilderness--the happiest, the
best-natured, and altogether the mildest-mannered beast that ever drew
breath. He talks and chatters and chuckles incessantly, and when he travels
he walks like a huge animated pincushion; he is oblivious of everything
about him as though asleep.

As this particular "porky" advanced upon Muskwa and Thor, he was communing
happily with himself, the chuckling notes he made