Three times in descending into the other valley they found where Thor had stopped, and each time they saw where a pool of blood had soaked into the earth or run over the rock.
They passed through the timber and came to the creek, and here, in a strip of firm black sand, Thor's footprints brought them to a pause. Bruce stared. An exclamation of amazement came from Langdon, and without a word having passed between them he drew out his pocket-tape and knelt beside one of the tracks.
“Fifteen and a quarter inches!” he gasped.
“Measure another,” said Bruce.
“Fifteen and—a half!”
Bruce looked up the gorge.
“The biggest I ever see was fourteen an' a half,” he said, and there was a touch of awe in his voice. “He was shot up the Athabasca an' he's stood as the biggest grizzly ever killed in British Columbia. Jimmy,this one beats 'im !”
They went on, and measured the tracks again at the edge of the first pool where Thor had bathed his wounds. There was almost no variation in the measurements. Only occasionally after this did they find spots of blood. It was ten o'clock when they came to the clay wallow and saw where Thor had made his bed in it.
“He was pretty sick,” said Bruce in a low voice. “He was here most all night.”
Moved by the same impulse and the same thought, they looked ahead of them. Half a mile farther on the mountains closed in until the gorge between them was dark and sunless.
“He was pretty sick,” repeated Bruce, still looking ahead. “Mebbe we'd better tie the horses an' go on alone. It's possible—he's in there.”
They tied the horses to scrub cedars, and relieved Dishpan of her pack.
Then, with their rifles in readiness, and eyes and ears alert, they went on cautiously into the silence and gloom of the gorge.

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 wassick , 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.