Thor was on what the Indians call a _pimootao_.

His brute mind had all at once added two and two together, and while perhaps he did not make four of it, his mental arithmetic was accurate enough to convince him that straight north was the road to travel.
By the time Langdon and Bruce had reached the summit of the Bighorn Highway, and were listening to the distant tongueing of the dogs, little Muskwa was in abject despair.

Following Thor had been like a game of tag with never a moment's rest.
An hour after they left the sheep trail they came to the rise in the valley where the waters separated.

From this point one creek flowed southward into the Tacla Lake country and the other northward into the Babine, which was a tributary of the Skeena.

They descended very quickly into a much lower country, and for the first time Muskwa encountered marshland, and travelled at times through grass so rank and thick that he could not see but could only hear Thor forging on ahead of him.
The stream grew wider and deeper, and in places they skirted the edges of dark, quiet pools that Muskwa thought must have been of immeasurable depth.
These pools gave Muskwa his first breathing-spells.