The Grizzly King Part 9

"You was right in your guess, Jimmy," he said. "Our grizzly is a meat-eater. Last night he killed a caribou out there in the meadow. I know it was the grizzly that killed 'im an' not the black, because the tracks along the edge of the timber are grizzly tracks. Come on. I'll show you where 'e jumped the caribou!"

He led the way back into the meadow, and pointed out where Thor had dragged down the young bull. There were bits of flesh and a great deal of stain where he and Muskwa had feasted.

"He hid the carca.s.s in the balsams after he had filled himself," went on Bruce. "This morning the black came along, smelled the meat, an' robbed the cache. Then back come the grizzly after his morning feed, an' that's what happened! There's yo'r story, Jimmy."

"And--he may come back again?" asked Langdon.

"Not on your life, he won't!" cried Bruce. "He wouldn't touch that carca.s.s ag'in if he was starving. Just now this place is like poison to him."

After that Bruce left Langdon to meditate alone on the field of battle while he began trailing Thor. In the shade of the balsams Langdon wrote for a steady hour, frequently rising to establish new facts or verify others already discovered. Meanwhile the mountaineer made his way foot by foot up the coulee. Thor had left no blood, but where others would have seen nothing Bruce detected the signs of his pa.s.sing. When he returned to where Langdon was completing his notes, his face wore a look of satisfaction.

"He went over the mount'in," he said briefly.

It was noon before they climbed over the volcanic quarry of rock and followed the Bighorn Highway to the point where Thor and Muskwa had watched the eagle and the sheep. They ate their lunch here, and scanned the valley through their gla.s.ses. Bruce was silent for a long time. Then he lowered his telescope, and turned to Langdon.

"I guess I've got his range pretty well figgered out," he said. "He runs these two valleys, an' we've got our camp too far south. See that timber down there? That's where our camp should be. What do you say to goin' back over the divide with our horses an' moving up here?"

"And leave our grizzly until to-morrow?"

Bruce nodded.

"We can't go after 'im and leave our horses tied up in the creek-bottom back there."

Langdon boxed his gla.s.ses and rose to his feet. Suddenly he grew rigid.

"What was that?"

"I didn't hear anything," said Bruce.

For a moment they stood side by side, listening. A gust of wind whistled about their ears. It died away.

"Hear it!" whispered Langdon, and his voice was filled with a sudden excitement.

"The dogs!" cried Bruce.

"Yes, the dogs!"

They leaned forward, their ears turned to the south, and faintly there came to them the distant, thrilling tongue of the Airedales!

Metoosin had come, and he was seeking them in the valley!

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Thor was on what the Indians call a _pimootao_. His brute mind had all at once added two and two together, and while perhaps he did not make four of it, his mental arithmetic was accurate enough to convince him that straight north was the road to travel.

By the time Langdon and Bruce had reached the summit of the Bighorn Highway, and were listening to the distant tongueing of the dogs, little Muskwa was in abject despair. Following Thor had been like a game of tag with never a moment's rest.

An hour after they left the sheep trail they came to the rise in the valley where the waters separated. From this point one creek flowed southward into the Tacla Lake country and the other northward into the Babine, which was a tributary of the Skeena. They descended very quickly into a much lower country, and for the first time Muskwa encountered marshland, and travelled at times through gra.s.s so rank and thick that he could not see but could only hear Thor forging on ahead of him.

The stream grew wider and deeper, and in places they skirted the edges of dark, quiet pools that Muskwa thought must have been of immeasurable depth.

These pools gave Muskwa his first breathing-spells. Now and then Thor would stop and sniff over the edge of them. He was hunting for something, and yet he never seemed to find it; and each time that he started on afresh Muskwa was so much nearer to the end of his endurance.

They were fully seven miles north of the point from which Bruce and Langdon were scanning the valley through their gla.s.ses when they came to a lake. It was a dark and unfriendly looking lake to Muskwa, who had never seen anything but sunlit pools in the dips. The forest grew close down to its sh.o.r.e. In places it was almost black. Queer birds squawked in the thick reeds. It was heavy with a strange odour--a fragrance of something that made the cub lick his little chops, and filled him with hunger.

For a minute or two Thor stood sniffing this scent that filled the air. It was the smell of fish.

Slowly the big grizzly began picking his way along the edge of the lake.

He soon came to the mouth of a small creek. It was not more than twenty feet wide, but it was dark and quiet and deep, like the lake itself. For a hundred yards Thor made his way up this creek, until he came to where a number of trees had fallen across it, forming a jam. Close to this jam the water was covered with a green sc.u.m. Thor knew what lay under that sc.u.m, and very quietly he crept out on the logs.

Midway in the stream he paused, and with his right paw gently brushed back the sc.u.m so that an open pool of clear water lay directly under him.

Muskwa's bright little eyes watched him from the sh.o.r.e. He knew that Thor was after something to eat, but how he was going to get it out of that pool of water puzzled and interested him in spite of his weariness.

Thor stretched himself out on his belly, his head and right paw well over the jam. He now put his paw a foot into the water and held it there very quietly. He could see clearly to the bottom of the stream. For a few moments he saw only this bottom, a few sticks, and the protruding end of a limb. Then a long slim shadow moved slowly under him--a fifteen-inch trout. It was too deep for him, and Thor did not make an excited plunge.

Patiently he waited, and very soon this patience was rewarded. A beautiful red-spotted trout floated out from under the sc.u.m, and so suddenly that Muskwa gave a yelp of terror, Thor's huge paw sent a shower of water a dozen feet into the air, and the fish landed with a thump within three feet of the cub. Instantly Muskwa was upon it. His sharp teeth dug into it as it flopped and struggled.

Thor rose on the logs, but when he saw that Muskwa had taken possession of the fish, he resumed his former position. Muskwa was just finis.h.i.+ng his first real kill when a second spout of water shot upward and another trout pirouetted sh.o.r.eward through the air. This time Thor followed quickly, for he was hungry.

It was a glorious feast they had that early afternoon beside the shaded creek. Five times Thor knocked fish out from under the sc.u.m, but for the life of him Muskwa could not eat more than his first trout.

For several hours after their dinner they lay in a cool, hidden spot close to the log-jam. Muskwa did not sleep soundly. He was beginning to understand that life was now largely a matter of personal responsibility with him, and his ears had begun to attune themselves to sound. Whenever Thor moved or heaved a deep sigh, Muskwa knew it. After that day's Marathon with the grizzly he was filled with uneasiness--a fear that he might lose his big friend and food-killer, and he was determined that the parent he had adopted should have no opportunity of slipping away from him unheard and unseen. But Thor had no intention of deserting his little comrade. In fact, he was becoming quite fond of Muskwa.

It was not alone his hunger for fish or fear of his enemies that was bringing Thor into the lower country of the Babine waterways. For a week past there had been in him a steadily growing unrest, and it had reached its climax in these last two or three days of battle and flight. He was filled with a strange and unsatisfied yearning, and as Muskwa napped in his little bed among the bushes Thor's ears were keenly alert for certain sounds and his nose frequently sniffed the air. He wanted a mate. It was _puskoowepesim_--the "moulting moon"--and always in this moon, or the end of the "egg-laying moon," which was June, he hunted for the female that came to him from the western ranges. He was almost entirely a creature of habit, and always he made this particular detour, entering the other valley again far down toward the Babine. He never failed to feed on fish along the way, and the more fish he ate the stronger was the odour of him. It is barely possible Thor had discovered that this perfume of golden-spotted trout made him more attractive to his lady-love. Anyway, he ate fish, and he smelled abundantly.

Thor rose and stretched himself two hours before sunset, and he knocked three more fish out of the water. Muskwa ate the head of one and Thor finished the rest. Then they continued their pilgrimage.

It was a new world that Muskwa entered now. In it there were none of the old familiar sounds. The purring drone of the upper valley was gone. There were no whistlers, and no ptarmigan, and no fat little gophers running about. The water of the lake lay still, and dark, and deep, with black and sunless pools hiding themselves under the roots of trees, so close did the forest cling to it. There were no rocks to climb over, but dank, soft logs, thick windfalls, and litters of brush. The air was different, too. It was very still. Under their feet at times was a wonderful carpet of soft moss in which Thor sank nearly to his armpits. And the forest was filled with a strange gloom and many mysterious shadows, and there hung heavily in it the pungent smells of decaying vegetation.

Thor did not travel so swiftly here. The silence and the gloom and the oppressively scented air seemed to rouse his caution. He stepped quietly; frequently he stopped and looked about him, and listened; he smelled at the edges of pools hidden under the roots; every new sound brought him to a stop, his head hung low and his ears alert.

Several times Muskwa saw shadowy things floating through the gloom. They were the big gray owls that turned snow white in winter. And once, when it was almost dark, they came upon a pop-eyed, loose-jointed, fierce-looking creature in the trail who scurried away like a ball at sight of Thor. It was a lynx.

It was not yet quite dark when Thor came out very quietly into a clearing, and Muskwa found himself first on the sh.o.r.e of a creek, and then close to a big pond. The air was full of the breath and warmth of a new kind of life.

It was not fish, and yet it seemed to come from the pond, in the centre of which were three or four circular ma.s.ses that looked like great brush-heaps plastered with a coating of mud.

Whenever he came into this end of the valley Thor always paid a visit to the beaver colony, and occasionally he helped himself to a fat young beaver for supper or breakfast. This evening he was not hungry, and he was in a hurry. In spite of these two facts he stood for some minutes in the shadows near the pond.

The beavers had already begun their night's work. Muskwa soon understood the significance of the s.h.i.+mmering streaks that ran swiftly over the surface of the water. At the end of each streak was always a dark, flat head, and now he saw that most of these streaks began at the farther edge of the pond and made directly for a long, low barrier that shut in the water a hundred yards to the east.

This particular barrier was strange to Thor, and with his maturer knowledge of beaver ways he knew that his engineering friends--whom he ate only occasionally--were broadening their domain by building a new dam. As they watched, two fat workmen shoved a four-foot length of log into the pond with a big splash, and one of them began piloting it toward the scene of building operations, while his companion returned to other work. A little later there was a crash in the timber on the opposite side of the pond, where another workman had succeeded in felling a tree. Then Thor made his way toward the dam.

Almost instantly there was a terrific crack out in the middle of the pond, followed by a tremendous splash. An old beaver had seen Thor and with the flat side of his broad tail had given the surface of the water a warning slap that cut the still air like a rifle-shot. All at once there were splas.h.i.+ngs and divings in every direction, and a moment later the pond was ruffled and heaving as a score of interrupted workers dove excitedly under the surface to the safety of their brush-ribbed and mud-plastered strongholds, and Muskwa was so absorbed in the general excitement that he almost forgot to follow Thor.