They stopped and drank at a pool formed by the melting snow on the peaks,
and then went on. Thor did not stop when they reached the ledge on which
they had slept the previous night. And this time Muskwa was not tired when
they reached the ledge. Two days had made a big change in the little
tan-faced cub. He was not so round and puffy. And he was stronger--a great
deal stronger; he was becoming hardened, and under Thor's strenuous
tutelage he was swiftly graduating from cubhood to young bearhood.
It was evident that Thor had followed this ledge at some previous time. He
knew where he was going. It continued up and up, and finally seemed to end
in the face of a precipitous wall of rock. Thor's trail led him directly to
a great crevice, hardly wider than his body, and through this he went,
emerging at the edge of the wildest and roughest slide of rock that Muskwa
had ever seen. It looked like a huge quarry, and it broke through the
timber far below them, and reached almost to the top of the mountain above.
For Muskwa to make his way over the thousand pitfalls of that chaotic
upheaval was an impossibility, and as Thor began to climb over the first
rocks the cub stopped and whined. It was the first time he had given up,
and when he saw that Thor gave no attention to his whine, terror seized
upon him and he cried for help as loudly as he could while he hunted
frantically for a path up through the rocks.
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