into his world, a pigmy in size, yet more to be dreaded than any foe he had
ever known, was a miracle which nature alone could explain. It was a
hearkening back in the age-dimmed mental fabric of Thor's race to the
earliest days of man--man, first of all, with the club; man with the spear
hardened in fire; man with the flint-tipped arrow; man with the trap and
the deadfall, and, lastly, man with the gun. Through all the ages man had
been his one and only master. Nature had impressed it upon him--had been
impressing it upon him through a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand
generations.

And now for the first time in his life that dormant part of his instinct
leaped into warning wakefulness, and he understood. He hated man, and
hereafter he would hate everything that bore the man-smell. And with this
hate there was also born in him for the first time _fear_. Had man never
pushed Thor and his kind to the death the world would not have known him as
Ursus Horribilis the Terrible.

Thor still followed the creek, nosing along slowly and lumberingly, but
very steadily; his head and neck bent low, his huge rear quarters rising
and falling in that rolling motion peculiar to all bears, and especially
so of the grizzly. His long claws _click-click-clicked_ on the stones; he
crunched heavily in the gravel; in soft sand he left enormous footprints.

That part of the valley which he was now entering held a particular
significance for Thor, and he began to loiter, pausing often to sniff the
air on all sides of him. He was not a monogamist, but for many mating
seasons past he had come to find his _Iskwao_ in this wonderful sweep of
meadow and plain between the two ranges. He could always expect her in
July, waiting for him or seeking him with that strange savage longing of
motherhood in her breast. She was a splendid grizzly who came from the