time. Since then Thor had denned eight times in that cavern home.

He wanted to go in now. He wanted to lie down in the far end of it and wait
until he felt better. For perhaps two or three minutes he hesitated,
sniffing yearningly at the door to his cave, and then feeling the wind from
down the gorge. Something told him that he should go on.

To the westward there was a sloping ascent up out of the gorge to the
summit, and Thor climbed this. The sun was well up when he reached the top,
and for a little while he rested again and looked down on the other half of
his domain.

Even more wonderful was this valley than the one into which Bruce and
Langdon had ridden a few hours before. From range to range it was a good
two miles in width, and in the opposite directions it stretched away in a
great rolling panorama of gold and green and black. From where Thor stood
it was like an immense park. Green slopes reached almost to the summits of
the mountains, and to a point halfway up these slopes--the last
timber-line--clumps of spruce and balsam trees were scattered over the
green as if set there by the hands of men. Some of these timber-patches
were no larger than the decorative clumps in a city park, and others
covered acres and tens of acres; and at the foot of the slopes on either
side, like decorative fringes, were thin and unbroken lines of forest.
Between these two lines of forest lay the open valley of soft and
undulating meadow, dotted with its purplish bosks of buffalo willow and
mountain sage, its green coppices of wild-rose and thorn, and its clumps
of trees. In the hollow of the valley ran a stream.

Thor descended about four hundred yards from where he stood, and then
turned northward along the green slope, so that he was travelling from
patch to patch of the parklike timber, a hundred and fifty or two hundred
yards above the fringe of forest. To this height, midway between the
meadows in the valley and the first shale and bare rock of the peaks, he
came most frequently on his small game hunts.

Like fat woodchucks the whistlers were already beginning to sun themselves
on their rocks. Their long, soft, elusive whistlings, pleasant to hear
above the drone of mountain waters, filled the air with a musical cadence.
Now and then one would whistle shrilly and warningly close at hand, and
then flatten himself out on his rock as the big bear passed, and for a few
moments no whistling would break upon the gentle purring