CHAPTER FIVE


Thor had gone up the gorge at daybreak. He was stiff when he rose from the
clay wallow, but a good deal of the burning and pain had gone from his
wound. It still hurt him, but not as it had hurt him the preceding evening.
His discomfort was not all in his shoulder, and it was not in any one place
in particular. He was _sick_, and had he been human he would have been in
bed with a thermometer under his tongue and a doctor holding his pulse. He
walked up the gorge slowly and laggingly. An indefatigable seeker of food,
he no longer thought of food. He was not hungry, and he did not want to
eat.

With his hot tongue he lapped frequently at the cool water of the creek,
and even more frequently he turned half about, and sniffed the wind. He
knew that the man-smell and the strange thunder and the still more
inexplicable lightning lay behind him. All night he had been on guard, and
he was cautious now.

For a particular hurt Thor knew of no particular remedy. He was not a
botanist in the finer sense of the word, but in creating him the Spirit of
the Wild had ordained that he should be his own physician. As a cat seeks
catnip, so Thor sought certain things when he was not feeling well. All
bitterness is not quinine, but certainly bitter things were Thor's
remedies, and as he made his way up the gorge his nose hung close to the
ground, and he sniffed in the low copses and thick bush-tangles he passed.

He came to a small green spot covered with kinnikinic, a ground plant two
inches high which bore red berries as big as a small pea. They were not red
now, but green; bitter as gall, and contained an astringent tonic called