Not once in the two hours after they left the sunrock did Thor pay any apparent attention to 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 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.