With the dogs came also the _man-smell_! He travelled upward a little faster now, and the fierce and joyous yelping of the dogs seemed scarcely a hundred yards away when he entered a small open space in the wild upheaval of rock.

On the mountainside was a wall that rose perpendicularly.

Twenty feet on the other side was a sheer fall of a hundred feet, and the way ahead was closed with the exception of a trail scarcely wider than Thor's body by a huge crag of rock that had fallen from the shoulder of the mountain.

The big grizzly led Muskwa close up to this crag and the break that opened through it, and then turned suddenly back, so that Muskwa was behind him.

In the face of the peril that was almost upon them a mother-bear would have driven Muskwa into the safety of a crevice in the rock wall.