ear so old he is about to die. They let him go unharmed; other
bears tolerate him and let him eat their meat if he chances along; the
white man kills him.

This old bear was famished. His claws were gone; his hair was thin, and in
some places his skin was naked, and he had barely more than red, hard gums
to chew with. If he lived until autumn he would den up--for the last time.
Perhaps death would come even sooner than that. If so, _Kuyas Wapusk_
would know in time, and he would crawl off into some hidden cave or deep
crevice in the rocks to breathe his last. For in all the Rocky Mountains,
so far as Bruce or Langdon knew, there was not a man who had found the
bones or body of a grizzly that had died a natural death!

And big, hunted Thor, torn by wound and pursued by man, seemed to
understand that this would be the last real feast on earth for _Kuyas
Wapusk_--too old to fish for himself, too old to hunt, too old even to dig
out the tender lily roots; and so he let him eat until the last fish was
gone, and then went on, with Muskwa tagging at his heels.

CHAPTER TWELVE

For still another two hours Thor led Muskwa on that tiresome jaunt into the
north. They had travelled a good twenty miles since leaving the Bighorn
Highway, and to the little tan-faced cub those twenty miles were like a
journey around the world. Ordinarily he would not have gone that far away
from his birthplace until his second year, and very possibly his third.

Not once in this hike down the valley had Thor wasted time on the mountain
slopes. He had picked out the easiest trails along the creek. Three or four
miles below the pool where they had left the old bear he suddenly changed
this procedure by swinging due westward, and a little later they were once
more climbing a mountain. They went up a long green slide for a quarter of
a mile, and luckily for Muskwa's legs this brought them to the smooth
plainlike floor of a break which took them without much more effort out on
the slopes of the other valley. This was the valley in which Thor had
killed the black bear twenty miles to the southward.

From the moment Thor looked out over the northern limits of his range a
change took possession of him. All at once he lost his eagerness to hurry.
For fifteen minutes he stood looking down into the valley, sniffing the
air. He descended slowly, and when he reached the green meadows and the
creek-bottom he _mooshed_ along straight in the face of the wi