s and screechings at
night, and the trees made mournful sounds.

To Muskwa the whole world seemed changing. He wondered in these chill and
dark days why Thor kept to the windswept slopes when he might have found
shelter in the bottoms. And Thor, if he explained to him at all, told him
that winter was very near, and that these slopes were their last feeding
grounds. In the valleys the berries were gone; grass and roots alone were
no longer nourishing enough for their bodies; they could no longer waste
time in seeking ants and grubs; the fish were in deep water. It was the
season when the caribou were keen-scented as foxes and swift as the wind.
Only along the slopes lay the dinners they were sure of--famine-day dinners
of whistlers and gophers. Thor dug for them now, and in this digging Muskwa
helped as much as he could. More than once they turned out wagonloads of
earth to get at the cozy winter sleeping quarters of a whistler family, and
sometimes they dug for hours to capture three or four little gophers no
larger than red squirrels, but lusciously fat.

Thus they lived through the last days of October into November. And now the
snow and the cold winds and the fierce blizzards from the north came in
earnest, and the ponds and lakes began to freeze over. Still Thor hung to
the slopes, and Muskwa shivered with the cold at night and wondered if the
sun was never going to shine again.

One day about the middle of November Thor stopped in the very act of
digging out a family of whistlers, went straight down into the valley, and
struck southward in a most businesslike way. They were ten miles from the
clay-wallow canyon when they started, but so lively was the pace set by the
big grizzly that they reached it before dark that same afternoon.

For two days after this Thor seemed to have no object in life at all.
There was nothing in the canyon to eat, and he wandered about among the
rocks, smelling and listening and deporting himself generally in a fashion
that was altogether mystifying to Muskwa. In the afternoon of the second
day Thor stopped in a dump of jackpines under which the ground was strewn
with fallen needles. He began to eat these needles. They did not look good
to Muskwa, but something told the cub that he should do as Thor was doing;
so he licked them up and swallowed them, not knowing that it was nature's
last preparation for his long sleep.

It was four o'clock when they came to the mouth of the deep cavern