st.

He did not hear Langdon as the hunter came nearer and nearer up the broken
gully. He did not smell him, for the wind was fatally wrong. He had
forgotten the noxious man-smell that had disturbed and irritated him an
hour before. He was quite happy; he was good-humoured; he was fat and
sleek. An irritable, cross-grained, and quarrelsome bear is always thin.
The true hunter knows him as soon as he sets eyes on him. He is like the
rogue elephant.

Thor continued his food-seeking, edging still closer to the gully. He was
within a hundred and fifty yards of it when a sound suddenly brought him
alert. Langdon, in his effort to creep up the steep side of the gully for a
shot, had accidentally loosened a rock. It went crashing down the ravine,
starting other stones that followed in a noisy clatter. At the foot of the
coulee, six hundred yards down, Bruce swore softly under his breath. He saw
Thor sit up. At that distance he was going to shoot if the bear made for
the break.

For thirty seconds Thor sat on his haunches. Then he started for the
ravine, ambling slowly and deliberately. Langdon, panting and inwardly
cursing at his ill luck, struggled to make the last ten feet to the edge
of the slope. He heard Bruce yell, but he could not make out the warning.
Hands and feet he dug fiercely into shale and rock as he fought to make
those last three or four yards as quickly as possible.

He was almost to the top when he paused for a moment and turned his eyes
upward. His heart went into his throat, and he started. For ten seconds he
could not move. Directly over him was a monster head and a huge hulk of
shoulder. Thor was looking down on him, his jaws agape, his finger-long
fangs snarling, his eyes burning with a greenish-red fire.

In that moment Thor saw his first of man. His great lungs were filled with
the hot smell of him, and suddenly he turned away from that smell as if
from a plague. With his rifle half under him Langdon had had no opportunity
to shoot. Wildly he clambered up the remaining few feet. The shale and
stones slipped and slid under him. It was a matter of sixty seconds before
he pulled himself over the top.

Thor was a hundred yards away, speeding in a rolling, ball-like motion
toward the break. From the foot of the coulee came the sharp crack of
Otto's rifle. Langdon squatted quickly, raising his left knee for a rest,
and at a hundred and fifty yards began firing.

Sometimes it happens that an hour--a m