It was the sheep-path over the range.

The first band of bighorn may have blazed the way before Columbus discovered America; surely it had taken a great many years for hoofs to make that smooth road among the rocks.
Thor used the path as one of his highways from valley to valley, and there were other creatures of the mountains who used it as well as he, and more frequently.

As he stood waiting for Muskwa to get his wind they both heard an odd chuckling sound approaching them from above.

Forty or fifty feet up the slide the path twisted and descended a little depression behind a huge boulder, and out from behind this boulder came a big porcupine.
There is a law throughout the North that a man shall not kill a porcupine.
He is the "lost man's friend," for the wandering and starving prospector or hunter can nearly always find a porcupine, if nothing else; and a child can kill him.

He is the humourist of the wilderness--the happiest, the best-natured, and altogether the mildest-mannered beast that ever drew breath.