was like most
grouchy old bachelors: he did not like small folk. He tolerated a little
cub as a cross-grained old woman-hater might have tolerated a pink baby;
but he wasn't as cruel as Punch, for he had never killed a cub. He had
cuffed them soundly whenever they had dared to come within reach of him,
but always with the flat, soft palm of his paw, and with just enough force
behind it to send them keeling over and over like little round fluffy
balls.

This was Thor's only expression of displeasure when a strange mother-bear
invaded his range with her cubs. In other ways he was quite chivalrous. He
would not drive the mother-bear and her cubs away, and he would not fight
with her, no matter how shrewish or unpleasant she was. Even if he found
them eating at one of his kills, he would do nothing more than give the
cubs a sound cuffing.

All this is somewhat necessary to show with what sudden and violent
agitation Thor caught a certain warm, close smell as he came around the end
of a mass of huge boulders. He stopped, turned his head, and swore in his
low, growling way. Six feet away from him, grovelling flat in a patch of
white sand, wriggling and shaking for all the world like a half-frightened
puppy that had not yet made up its mind whether it had met a friend or an
enemy, was a lone bear cub. It was not more than three months
old--altogether too young to be away from its mother; and it had a sharp
little tan face and a white spot on its baby breast which marked it as a
member of the black bear family, and not a grizzly.

The cub was trying as hard as it could to say, "I am lost, strayed, or
stolen; I'm hungry, and I've got a porcupine quill in my foot," but in
spite of that, with another ominous growl, Thor began to look about the
rocks for the mother. She was not in sight, and neither could he smell her,
two facts which turned his great head again toward the cub.

Muskwa--an Indian would have called the cub that--had crawled a foot or two
nearer on his little belly. He greeted Thor's second inspection with a
genial wriggling which carried him forward another half foot, and a low
warning rumbled in Thor's chest. "Don't come any nearer," it said plainly
enough, "or I'll keel you over!"

Muskwa understood. He lay as if dead, his nose and paws and belly flat on
the sand, and Thor looked about him again. When his eyes returned to
Muskwa, the cub was within three feet of him, squirming flat in the sand
and whimpering