He could not place it. He
could not picture it. Yet he knew that it was a menace and a threat.
For ten minutes he sat like a carven thing on his haunches. Then the wind
shifted, and the scent grew less and less, until it was gone altogether.
Thor's flat ears lifted a little. He turned his huge head slowly so that
his eyes took in the green slope and the tiny plain. He easily forgot the
smell now that the air was clear and sweet again. He dropped on his four
feet, and resumed his gopher-hunting.
There was something of humour in his hunt. Thor weighed a thousand pounds;
a mountain gopher is six inches long and weighs six ounces. Yet Thor would
dig energetically for an hour, and rejoice at the end by swallowing the fat
little gopher like a pill; it was his _bonne bouche_, the luscious tidbit
in the quest of which he spent a third of his spring and summer digging.
He found a hole located to his satisfaction and began throwing out the
earth like a huge dog after a rat. He was on the crest of the slope. Once
or twice during the next half-hour he lifted his head, but he was no longer
disturbed by the strange smell that had come to him with the wind.
CHAPTER TWO
A mile down the valley Jim Langdon stopped his horse where the spruce and
balsam timber thinned out at the mouth of a coulee, looked ahead of him for
a breathless moment or two, and then with an audible gasp of pleasure swung
his right leg over so that his knee crooked restfully about the horn of his
saddle, and waited.
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