“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 glasses 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 grass 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 glasses 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 shore.  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.