ar, for,
like all grizzlies, his eyes were small and far apart, and his vision was
bad. At a distance of a third or a half a mile he could make out a goat or
a mountain sheep, but beyond that his world was a vast sun-filled or
night-darkened mystery through which he ranged mostly by the guidance of
sound and smell.

It was the sense of smell that held him still and motionless now. Up out of
the valley a scent had come to his nostrils that he had never smelled
before. It was something that did not belong there, and it stirred him
strangely. Vainly his slow-working brute mind struggled to comprehend it.
It was not caribou, for he had killed many caribou; it was not goat; it
was not sheep; and it was not the smell of the fat and lazy whistlers
sunning themselves on the rocks, for he had eaten hundreds of whistlers. It
was a scent that did not enrage him, and neither did it frighten him. He
was curious, and yet he did not go down to seek it out. Caution held him
back.

If Thor could have seen distinctly for a mile, or two miles, his eyes would
have discovered even less than the wind brought to him from down the
valley. He stood at the edge of a little plain, with the valley an eighth
of a mile below him, and the break over which he had come that afternoon an
eighth of a mile above him. The plain was very much like a cup, perhaps an
acre in extent, in the green slope of the mountain. It was covered with
rich, soft grass and June flowers, mountain violets and patches of
forget-me-nots, and wild asters and hyacinths, and in the centre of it was
a fifty-foot spatter of soft mud which Thor visited frequently when his
feet became rock-sore.

To the east and the west and the north of him spread out the wonderful
panorama of the Canadian Rockies, softened in the golden sunshine of a June
afternoon.

From up and down the valley, from the breaks between the peaks, and from
the little gullies cleft in shale and rock that crept up to the snow-lines
came a soft and droning murmur. It was the music of running water. That
music was always in the air, for the rivers, the creeks, and the tiny
streams gushing down from the snow that lay eternally up near the clouds
were never still.

There were sweet perfumes as well as music in the air. June and July--the
last of spring and the first of summer in the northern mountains--were
commingling. The earth was bursting with green; the early flowers were
turning the sunny slopes into coloured s