erent here. The smell of man and iron was there,
but not of that maddening kind, and he missed the pungent odor that even
yet brought back the dark days of his cubhood.

The men did not move, so Wahb rumbled a subterranean growl, dropped down on
his four feet, and went on.

Late the same year Wahb ran across the red-nosed Blackbear. How that Bear
did keep on shrinking! Wahb could have hurled him across the Graybull with
one tap now.

[Illustration]

But the Blackbear did not mean to let him try. He hustled his fat, podgy
body up a tree at a rate that made him puff. Wahb reached up nine feet from
the ground, and with one rake of his huge claws tore off the bark clear to
the shining white wood and down nearly to the ground; and the Blackbear
shivered and whimpered with terror as the scraping of those awful claws ran
up the trunk and up his spine in a way that was horribly suggestive.

What was it that the sight of that Blackbear stirred in Wahb? Was it
memories of the Upper Piney, long forgotten; thoughts of a woodland rich
in food?

[Illustration]

Wahb left him trembling up there as high as he could get, and without any
very clear purpose swung along the upper benches of the Meteetsee down to
the Graybull, around the foot of the Rimrock Mountain; on, till hours later
he found himself in the timber-tangle of the Lower Piney, and among the
berries and ants of the old times.

He had forgotten what a fine land the Piney was: plenty of food, no miners
to spoil the streams, no hunters to keep an eye on, and no mosquitoes or
flies, but plenty of open, sunny glades and sheltering woods, backed up by
high, straight cliffs to turn the colder winds.

There were, moreover, no resident Grizzlies, no signs even of passing
travelers, and the Blackbears that were in possession did not count.

Wahb was well pleased. He rolled his vast bulk in an old Buffalo-wallow,
and rearing up against a tree where the Piney Canyon quits the Graybull
Canyon, he left on it his mark fully eight feet from the ground.

In the days that followed he wandered farther and farther up among the
rugged spurs of the Shoshones, and took possession as he went. He found the
sign-boards of several Blackbears, and if they were small dead trees he
sent them crashing to earth with a drive of his giant paw. If they were
green, he put his own mark over the other mark, and made it clearer by
slashing the bark with the great pickaxes that grew on his toe