was a
touch of awe in his voice. "He was shot up the Athabasca an' he's stood as
the biggest grizzly ever killed in British Columbia. Jimmy, _this one beats
'im_!"

They went on, and measured the tracks again at the edge of the first pool
where Thor had bathed his wounds. There was almost no variation in the
measurements. Only occasionally after this did they find spots of blood. It
was ten o'clock when they came to the clay wallow and saw where Thor had
made his bed in it.

"He was pretty sick," said Bruce in a low voice. "He was here most all
night."

Moved by the same impulse and the same thought, they looked ahead of them.
Half a mile farther on the mountains closed in until the gorge between them
was dark and sunless.

"He was pretty sick," repeated Bruce, still looking ahead. "Mebbe we'd
better tie the horses an' go on alone. It's possible--he's in there."

They tied the horses to scrub cedars, and relieved Dishpan of her pack.

Then, with their rifles in readiness, and eyes and ears alert, they went on
cautiously into the silence and gloom of the gorge.

CHAPTER FIVE

Thor had gone up the gorge at daybreak. He was stiff when he rose from the
clay wallow, but a good deal of the burning and pain had gone from his
wound. It still hurt him, but not as it had hurt him the preceding evening.
His discomfort was not all in his shoulder, and it was not in any one place
in particular. He was _sick_, and had he been human he would have been in
bed with a thermometer under his tongue and a doctor holding his pulse. He
walked up the gorge slowly and laggingly. An indefatigable seeker of food,
he no longer thought of food. He was not hungry, and he did not want to
eat.

With his hot tongue he lapped frequently at the cool water of the creek,
and even more frequently he turned half about, and sniffed the wind. He
knew that the man-smell and the strange thunder and the still more
inexplicable lightning lay behind him. All night he had been on guard, and
he was cautious now.

For a particular hurt Thor knew of no particular remedy. He was not a
botanist in the finer sense of the word, but in creating him the Spirit of
the Wild had ordained that he should be his own physician. As a cat seeks
catnip, so Thor sought certain things when he was not feeling well. All
bitterness is not quinine, but certainly bitter things were Thor's
remedies, and as he made his way up the gorge his nose hung close to the
ground, an