night after the fight and the loss of Muskwa he found
Iskwao again. In the twilight of that same evening Pipoonaskoos had died,
and Thor had heard the sharp cracking of Bruce's automatic. All that night
and the next day and the night that followed he spent with Iskwao, and then
he left her once more. A third time he was seeking her when he found
Langdon in the trap on the ledge, and he had not yet got wind of her when
he first heard the baying of the dogs on his trail.

He was travelling southward, which brought him nearer the hunters' camp. He
was keeping to the high slopes where there were little dips and meadows,
broken by patches of shale, deep coulees, and occasionally wild upheavals
of rock. He was keeping the wind straight ahead so that he would not fail
to catch the smell of Iskwao when he came near her, and with the baying of
the dogs he caught no scent of the pursuing beasts, or of the two men who
were riding behind them.

At another time he would have played his favourite trick of detouring so
that the danger would be ahead of him, with the wind in his favour. Caution
had now become secondary to his desire to find his mate. The dogs were
less than half a mile away when he stopped suddenly, sniffed the air for a
moment, and then went on swiftly until he was halted by a narrow ravine.

Up that ravine Iskwao was coming from a dip lower down the mountain, and
she was running. The yelping of the pack was fierce and close when Thor
scrambled down in time to meet her as she rushed upward. Iskwao paused for
a single moment, smelled noses with Thor, and then went on, her ears laid
back flat and sullen and her throat filled with growling menace.

Thor followed her, and he also growled. He knew that his mate was fleeing
from the dogs, and again that deadly and slowly increasing wrath swept
through him as he climbed after her higher up the mountain.

In such an hour as this Thor was at his worst. He was a fighter when
pursued as the dogs had pursued him a week before--but he was a demon,
terrible and without mercy, when danger threatened his mate.

He fell farther and farther behind Iskwao, and twice lie turned, his fangs
gleaming under drawn lips, and his defiance rolling back upon his enemies
in low thunder.

When he came up out of the coulee he was in the shadow of the peak, and
Iskwao had already disappeared in her skyward scramble. Where she had gone
was a wild chaos of rock-slide and the piled-up debris of fal