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Bruce was looping a buckskin thong about Muskwa's middle, making of it a sort of handle by which he could carry the cub as he would have conveyed a pail of water or a slab of bacon. He stood up, and Muskwa dangled at the end of his string. "We've run up against a killer," he said. "An' a meat-killin' grizzly is the worst animal on the face of the earth when it comes to a fight or a hunt.
Up there he believed he would find Thor. But he was afraid, and he continued to whimper softly to himself as he dug his little claws bravely into the shale. Muskwa did not look up to the crest of the peak again after he had started. To have done that it would have been necessary for him to stop and turn sidewise, for the ascent was steep.
These pools gave Muskwa his first breathing-spells. Now and then Thor would stop and sniff over the edge of them. He was hunting for something, and yet he never seemed to find it; and each time that he started on afresh Muskwa was so much nearer to the end of his endurance.
In the rough places he stumbled and fell frequently; up places that Thor could make in a single step he had to fight desperately to make his way; three times Thor waded through the creek and Muskwa half drowned himself in following; he was battered and bruised and wet and his foot hurt him but he followed. Sometimes he was close to Thor, and at others he had to run to catch up.
To Muskwa it was all a greenish golden haze below him; the depths seemed illimitable; the forest along the stream was only a black streak, and the parklike clumps of balsams and cedars on the farther slopes looked like very small bosks of thorn or buffalo willow. Up here the wind was blowing, too.
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.
Then one of the hunters stood directly in front of the crack in which he was hidden, and he saw his first man. A moment later the men, too, were gone. Later Muskwa heard the shots. After that the barking of the dogs grew more and more distant until finally he could not hear them at all. It was about three o'clock the siesta hour in the mountains, and it was very quiet.
It was fully a week before he passed along the creek-bottom close under the slope where his mother had died. If he had been travelling along the crest of the slope he would have found her bones, picked clean by the wild things. It was another week before he came to the little meadow where Thor had killed the bull caribou and the big black bear. And now Muskwa knew that he was home!
A worse insult or a deadlier challenge could not have been known in the land of Beardom. Even Muskwa sensed that fact. He looked expectantly at Thor. There was going to be another fight, and he licked his little chops in anticipation. Thor came up out of the pool slowly. On the bank he paused. The grizzlies gazed at each other, the newcomer crunching a fish as he looked. Neither growled.
In another second Bruce was after him, and Langdon joined in ten feet behind. Suddenly Muskwa made a sharp turn, and the momentum with which Bruce was coming carried him thirty or forty feet below him, where the lanky mountaineer stopped himself only by doubling up like a jack-knife and digging toes, hands, elbows, and even his shoulders in the soft shale.
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