The sun gave him courage and confidence again and he began wandering back through the valley, the scent of the horse-trail growing fainter and fainter until at last it disappeared entirely.  That day Muskwa ate some grass and a few dog-tooth violet roots, and when the second night came he was abreast of the slope over which the outfit had come from the valley in which were Thor and Iskwao.  He was tired and hungry, and he was utterly lost.

That night he slept in the end of a hollow log.  The next day he went on, and for many days and many nights after that he was alone in the big valley.  He passed close to the pool where Thor and he had met the old bear, and he nosed hungrily among the fishbones; he skirted the edge of the dark, deep lake; he saw the shadowy things fluttering in the gloom of the forest again; he passed over the beaver dam, and he slept for two nights close to the log-jam from which he had watched Thor throw out their first fish.  He was almost forgetting Langdon now, and was thinking more and more about Thor and his mother.  He wanted them.  He wanted them more than he had ever wanted the companionship of man, for Muskwa was fast becoming a creature of the wild again.

It was the beginning of August before the cub came to the break in the valley and climbed up the slope where Thor had first heard the thunder and had first felt the sting of the white men’s guns.  In these two weeks Muskwa had grown rapidly, in spite of the fact that he often went to bed on an empty stomach; and he was no longer afraid of the dark.  Through the deep, sunless canyon above the clay wallow he went, and as there was only one way out he came at last to the summit of the break over which Thor had gone, and over which Langdon and Bruce had followed in close pursuit.  And the other valley—­his home—­lay under Muskwa.

Of course he did not recognize it.  He saw and smelled in it nothing that was familiar.  But it was such a beautiful valley, and so abundantly filled with plenty and sunshine, that he did not hurry through it.  He found whole gardens of spring beauties and dog-tooth violets.  And on the third day he made his first real kill.  He almost stumbled over a baby whistler no larger than a red squirrel, and before the little creature could escape he was upon it.  It made him a splendid feast.

It was fully a week before he passed along the creek-bottom close under the slope where his mother had died.  If he had been travelling along the crest of the slope he would have found her bones, picked clean by the wild things.  It was another week before he came to the little meadow where Thor had killed the bull caribou and the big black bear.

And now Muskwa knew that he was home!

For two days he did not travel two hundred yards from the scene of feast and battle, and night and day he was on the watch for Thor.  Then he had to seek farther for food, but each afternoon when the mountains began to throw out long shadows he would return to the clump of trees in which they had made the cache that the black bear robber had despoiled.