Muskwa, who was growing hungrier and weaker as the
day lengthened. No boy that ever lived was gamer than the little tan-faced
cub. In the rough places he stumbled and fell frequently; up places that
Thor could make in a single step he had to fight desperately to make his
way; three times Thor waded through the creek and Muskwa half drowned
himself in following; he was battered and bruised and wet and his foot hurt
him--but he followed. Sometimes he was close to Thor, and at others he had
to run to catch up. The sun was setting when Thor at last found game, and
Muskwa was almost dead.

He did not know why Thor flattened his huge bulk suddenly alongside a rock
at the edge of a rough meadow, from which they could look down into a small
hollow. He wanted to whimper, but he was afraid. And if he had ever wanted
his mother at any time in his short life he wanted her now. He could not
understand why she had left him among the rocks and had never come back;
that tragedy Langdon and Bruce were to discover a little later. And he
could not understand why she did not come to him now. This was just about
his nursing hour before going to sleep for the night, for he was a March
cub, and, according to the most approved mother-bear regulations, should
have had milk for another month.

He was what Metoosin, the Indian, would have called _munookow_--that is, he
was very soft. Being a bear, his birth had not been like that of other
animals. His mother, like all mother-bears in a cold country, had brought
him into life a long time before she had finished her winter nap in her
den. He had come while she was asleep. For a month or six weeks after
that, while he was still blind and naked, she had given him milk, while she
herself neither ate nor drank nor saw the light of day. At the end of those
six weeks she had gone forth with him from her den to seek the first
mouthful of sustenance for herself. Not more than another six weeks had
passed since then, and Muskwa weighed about twenty pounds--that is, he had
weighed twenty pounds, but he was emptier now than he had ever been in his
life, and probably weighed a little less.

Three hundred yards below Thor was a clump of balsams, a small thick patch
that grew close to the edge of the miniature lake whose water crept around
the farther end of the hollow. In that clump there was a caribou--perhaps
two or three. Thor knew that as surely as though he saw them. The
_wenipow_, or "lying down," smell