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 of hoofed game was as different from the
_nechisoo_, or "grazing smell," to Thor as day from night. One hung
elusively in the air, like the faint and shifting breath of a passing
woman's scented dress and hair; the other came hot and heavy, close to the
earth, like the odour of a broken bottle of perfume.

Even Muskwa now caught the scent as he crept up close behind the big
grizzly and lay down.

For fully ten minutes Thor did not move. His eyes took in the hollow, the
edge of the lake, and the approach to the timber, and his nose gauged the
wind as accurately as the pointing of a compass. The reason he remained
quiet was that he was almost on the danger-line. In other words, the
mountains and the sudden dip had formed a "split wind" in the hollow, and
had Thor appeared fifty yards above where he now crouched, the keen-scented
caribou would have got full wind of him.

With his little ears cocked forward and a new gleam of understanding in his