The Grizzly King by James Oliver Curwood (read aloud books TXT) 📕

He was going on--because to go on was his business. He was not seeking trouble; he had no desire even to defend his possession of the meadow and the little lake under the mountain. There were other meadows and other lakes, and he was not naturally a lover of fighting. But he was ready to fight.
He continued to rumble ominously, and in him there was burning a slow and sullen anger. He buried himself among the rocks; he followed a ledge with Muskwa slinking close at his heels; he climbed over a huge scarp of rock, and twisted among boulders half as big as houses. But not once did he go where Muskwa could not easily follow. Once, when he drew himself from a ledge to a projecting seam of sandstone higher up, and found that Muskwa could not climb it, he came down and went another way.
The baying of the dogs was now deep down in the basin. Then it began to rise swiftly, as if on wings, and Thor knew that the pack was coming up the green slide. He stopped again, and this time the wind brought their scent to him full and strong.
It was a scent that tightened every muscle in his great body and set strange fires burning in him like raging furnaces. 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. Thor did not do this. He fronted the danger that was coming, and reared himself up on his hind quarters.
Twenty feet away the trail he had followed swung sharply around a projecting bulge in the perpendicular wall, and with eyes that were now red and terrible Thor watched the trap he had set.
The pack was coming full tongue. Fifty yards beyond the bulge the dogs were running shoulder to shoulder, and a moment later the first of them rushed into the arena which Thor had chosen for himself. The bulk of the horde followed so closely that the first dogs were flung under him as they strove frantically to stop themselves in time.
With a roar Thor launched himself among them. His great right arm swept out and inward, and it seemed to Muskwa that he had gathered a half of the pack under his huge body. With a single crunch of his jaws he broke the back of the foremost hunter. From a second he tore the head so that the windpipe trailed out like a red rope.
He rolled himself forward, and before the remaining dogs could recover from their panic he had caught one a blow that sent him flying over the edge of the precipice to the rocks a hundred feet below. It had all happened in half a minute, and in that half-minute the remaining nine dogs had scattered.
But Langdon's Airedales were fighters. To the last dog they had come of fighting stock, and Bruce and Metoosin had trained them until they could be hung up by their ears without whimpering. The tragic fate of three of their number frightened them no more than their own pursuit had frightened Thor.
Swift as lightning they circled about the grizzly, spreading themselves on their forefeet, ready to spring aside or backward to avoid sudden rushes, and giving voice now to that quick, fierce yapping which tells hunters their quarry is at bay. This was their business--to harass and torment, to retard flight, to stop their prey again and again until their masters came to finish the kill. It was a quite fair and thrilling sport for the bear and the dogs. The man who comes up with the rifle ends it in murder.
But if the dogs had their tricks, Thor also had his. After three or four vain rushes, in which the Airedales eluded him by their superior quickness, he backed slowly toward the huge rock beside which Muskwa was crouching, and as he retreated the dogs advanced.
Their increased barking and Thor's evident inability to drive them away or tear them to pieces terrified Muskwa more than ever. Suddenly he turned tail and darted into a crevice in the rock behind him.
Thor continued to back until his great hips touched the stone. Then he swung his head side wise and looked for the cub. Not a hair of Muskwa was to be seen. Twice Thor turned his head. After that, seeing that Muskwa was gone, he continued to retreat until he blocked the narrow passage that was his back door to safety.
The dogs were now barking like mad. They were drooling at their mouths, their wiry crests stood up like brushes, and their snarling fangs were bared to their red gums.
Nearer and nearer they came to him, challenging him to stay, to rush them, to catch them if he could--and in their excitement they put ten yards of open space behind them. Thor measured this space, as he had measured the distance between him and the young bull caribou a few days before. And then, without so much as a snarl of warning, he darted out upon his enemies with a suddenness that sent them flying wildly for their lives.
Thor did not stop. He kept on. Where the rock wall bulged out the trail narrowed to five feet, and he had measured this fact as well as the distance. He caught the last dog, and drove it down under his paw. As it was torn to pieces the Airedale emitted piercing cries of agony that reached Bruce and Langdon as they hurried panting and wind-broken up the slide that led from the basin.
Thor dropped on his belly in the narrowed trail, and as the pack broke loose with fresh voice he continued to tear at his victim until the rock was smeared with blood and hair and entrails. Then he rose to his feet and looked again for Muskwa. The cub was curled up in a shivering ball two feet in the crevice. It may be that Thor thought he had gone on up the mountain, for he lost no time now in retreating from the scene of battle. He had caught the wind again. Bruce and Langdon were sweating, and their smell came to him strongly.
For ten minutes Thor paid no attention to the eight dogs yapping at his heels, except to pause now and then and swing his head about. As he continued in his retreat the Airedales became bolder, until finally one of them sprang ahead of the rest and buried his fangs in the grizzly's leg.
This accomplished what barking had failed to do. With another roar Thor turned and pursued the pack headlong for fifty yards over the back-trail, and five precious minutes were lost before he continued upward toward the shoulder of the mountain.
Had the wind been in another direction the pack would have triumphed, but each time that Langdon and Bruce gained ground the wind warned Thor by bringing to him the warm odour of their bodies. And the grizzly was careful to keep that wind from the right quarter. He could have gained the top of the mountain more easily and quickly by quartering the face of it on a back-trail, but this would have thrown the wind too far under him. As long as he held the wind he was safe, unless the hunters made an effort to checkmate his method of escape by detouring and cutting him off.
It took him half an hour to reach the topmost ridge of rock, from which point he would have to break cover and reveal himself as he made the last two or three hundred yards up the shale side of the mountain to the backbone of the range.
When Thor made this break he put on a sudden spurt of speed that left the dogs thirty or forty yards behind him. For two or three minutes he was clearly outlined on the face of the mountain, and during the last minute of those three he was splendidly profiled against a carpet of pure-white snow, without a shrub or a rock to conceal him from the eyes below.
Bruce and Langdon saw him at five hundred yards, and began firing. Close over his head Thor heard the curious ripping wail of the first bullet, and an instant later came the crack of the rifle.
A second shot sent up a spurt of snow five yards ahead of him. He swung sharply to the right. This put him broadside to the marksmen. Thor heard a third shot--and that was all.
While the reports were still echoing among the crags and peaks something struck Thor a terrific blow on the flat of his skull, five inches back of his right ear. It was as if a club had descended upon him from out of the sky. He went down like a log.
It was a glancing shot. It scarcely drew blood, but for a moment it stunned the grizzly, as a man is dazed by a blow on the end of the chin.
Before he could rise from where he had fallen the dogs were upon him, tearing at his throat and neck and body. With a roar Thor sprang to his feet and shook them off. He struck out savagely, and Langdon and Bruce could hear his bellowing as they stood with fingers on the triggers of their rifles waiting for the dogs to draw away far enough to give them the final shots.
Yard by yard Thor worked his way upward, snarling at the frantic pack, defying the man-smell, the strange thunder, the burning lightning--even death itself, and five hundred yards below Langdon cursed despairingly as the dogs hung so close he could not fire.
Up to the very sky-line the blood-thirsting pack shielded Thor. He disappeared over the summit. The dogs followed. And after that their baying came fainter and fainter as the big grizzly led them swiftly away from the menace of man in a long and thrilling race from which more than one was doomed not to return.


CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In his hiding-place Muskwa heard the last sounds of the battle on the ledge. The crevice was a V-shaped crack in the rock, and he had wedged himself as far back in this as he could. He saw Thor pass the opening of his refuge after he had killed the fourth dog; he heard the click, click, click of his claws as he retreated up the trail; and at last he knew that the grizzly was gone, and that the enemy had followed him.
Still he was afraid to come out. These strange pursuers that had come up out of the valley had filled him with a deadly terror. Pipoonaskoos had not made him afraid. Even the big black bear that Thor killed had not terrified him as these red-lipped, white-fanged strangers had frightened him. So he remained in his crevice, crowded as far back as he could get, like a wad shoved in a gun-barrel.
He could still hear the tongueing of the dogs when other and nearer sounds