stood alert, eyes, ears, and nostrils seeking for
danger-signals; at his heels the younger animal nibbled less suspiciously
at the grass. Then lowering his head until his antlers swept back over his
shoulders the old bull started slowly toward the lake for his evening
drink. The two-year-old followed--and Thor came out softly from his
hiding-place.

For a single moment he seemed to gather himself--and then he started.
Fifty feet separated him from the caribou. He had covered half that
distance like a huge rolling ball when the animals heard him. They were off
like arrows sprung from the bow. But they were too late. It would have
taken a swift horse to beat Thor and he had already gained momentum.

Like the wind he bore down on the flank of the two-year-old, swung a little
to one side, and then without any apparent effort--still like a huge
ball--he bounded in and upward, and the short race was done.

His huge right arm swung over the two-year-old's shoulder, and as they went
down his left paw gripped the caribou's muzzle like a huge human hand. Thor
fell under, as he always planned to fall. He did not hug his victim to
death. Just once he doubled up one of his hind legs, and when it went back
the five knives it carried disembowelled the caribou. They not only
disembowelled him, but twisted and broke his ribs as though they were of
wood. Then Thor got up, looked around, and shook himself with a rumbling
growl which might have been either a growl of triumph or an invitation for
Muskwa to come to the feast.

If it was an invitation, the little tan-faced cab did not wait for a
second. For the first time he smelled and tasted the warm blood of meat.
And this smell and taste had come at the psychological moment in his life,
just as it had come in Thor's life years before. All grizzlies are not
killers of big game. In fact, very few of them are. Most of them are
chiefly vegetarians, with a meat diet of smaller animals, such as gophers,
whistling marmots, and porcupines. Now and then chance makes of a grizzly a
hunter of caribou, goat, sheep, deer, and even moose. Such was Thor. And
such, in days to come, would Muskwa be, even though he was a black and not
of the family Ursus Horribilis Ord.

For an hour the two feasted, not in the ravenous way of hungry dogs, but in
the slow and satisfying manner of gourmets. Muskwa, flat on his little
paunch, and almost between Thor's huge forearms, lapped up the blood and
snarled like a