It was the
season when the caribou were keen-scented as foxes and swift as the wind.
Only along the slopes lay the dinners they were sure of--famine-day dinners
of whistlers and gophers. Thor dug for them now, and in this digging Muskwa
helped as much as he could. More than once they turned out wagonloads of
earth to get at the cozy winter sleeping quarters of a whistler family, and
sometimes they dug for hours to capture three or four little gophers no
larger than red squirrels, but lusciously fat.
Thus they lived through the last days of October into November. And now the
snow and the cold winds and the fierce blizzards from the north came in
earnest, and the ponds and lakes began to freeze over. Still Thor hung to
the slopes, and Muskwa shivered with the cold at night and wondered if the
sun was never going to shine again.
One day about the middle of November Thor stopped in the very act of
digging out a family of whistlers, went straight down into the valley, and
struck southward in a most businesslike way. They were ten miles from the
clay-wallow canyon when they started, but so lively was the pace set by the
big grizzly that they reached it before dark that same afternoon.
For two days after this Thor seemed to have no object in life at all.
There was nothing in the canyon to eat, and he wandered about among the
rocks, smelling and listening and deporting himself generally in a fashion
that was altogether mystifying to Muskwa.
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