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

from the valley in which were Thor and Iskwao. He was tired and hungry, and he was utterly lost.
That night he slept in the end of a hollow log. The next day he went on, and for many days and many nights after that he was alone in the big valley. He passed close to the pool where Thor and he had met the old bear, and he nosed hungrily among the fishbones; he skirted the edge of the dark, deep lake; he saw the shadowy things fluttering in the gloom of the forest again; he passed over the beaver dam, and he slept for two nights close to the log-jam from which he had watched Thor throw out their first fish. He was almost forgetting Langdon now, and was thinking more and more about Thor and his mother. He wanted them. He wanted them more than he had ever wanted the companionship of man, for Muskwa was fast becoming a creature of the wild again.
It was the beginning of August before the cub came to the break in the valley and climbed up the slope where Thor had first heard the thunder and had first felt the sting of the white men's guns. In these two weeks Muskwa had grown rapidly, in spite of the fact that he often went to bed on an empty stomach; and he was no longer afraid of the dark. Through the deep, sunless canyon above the clay wallow he went, and as there was only one way out he came at last to the summit of the break over which Thor had gone, and over which Langdon and Bruce had followed in close pursuit. And the other valley--his home--lay under Muskwa.
Of course he did not recognize it. He saw and smelled in it nothing that was familiar. But it was such a beautiful valley, and so abundantly filled with plenty and sunshine, that he did not hurry through it. He found whole gardens of spring beauties and dog-tooth violets. And on the third day he made his first real kill. He almost stumbled over a baby whistler no larger than a red squirrel, and before the little creature could escape he was upon it. It made him a splendid feast.
It was fully a week before he passed along the creek-bottom close under the slope where his mother had died. If he had been travelling along the crest of the slope he would have found her bones, picked clean by the wild things. It was another week before he came to the little meadow where Thor had killed the bull caribou and the big black bear.
And now Muskwa knew that he was home!
For two days he did not travel two hundred yards from the scene of feast and battle, and night and day he was on the watch for Thor. Then he had to seek farther for food, but each afternoon when the mountains began to throw out long shadows he would return to the clump of trees in which they had made the cache that the black bear robber had despoiled.
One day he went farther than usual in his quest for roots. He was a good half-mile from the place he had made home, and he was sniffing about the end of a rock when a great shadow fell suddenly upon him. He looked up, and for a full half-minute he stood transfixed, his heart pounding and jumping as it had never pounded and jumped before in his life. Within five feet of him stood Thor! The big grizzly was as motionless as he, looking at him steadily. And then Muskwa gave a puppy-like whine of joy and ran forward. Thor lowered his huge head, and for another half-minute they stood without moving, with Thor's nose buried in the hair on Muskwa's back. After that Thor went up the slope as if the cub had never been lost at all, and Muskwa followed him happily.
Many days of wonderful travel and of glorious feasting came after this, and Thor led Muskwa into a thousand new places in the two valleys and the mountains between. There were great fishing days, and there was another caribou killed over the range, and Muskwa grew fatter and fatter and heavier and heavier until by the middle of September he was as large as a good-sized dog.
Then came the berries, and Thor knew where they all grew low down in the valleys--first the wild red raspberries, then the soap berries, and after those the delicious black currants which grew in the cool depths of the forests and were almost as large as cherries and nearly as sweet as the sugar which Langdon had fed Muskwa. Muskwa liked the black currants best of all. They grew in thick, rich clusters; there were no leaves on the bushes that were loaded with them, and he could pick and eat a quart in five minutes.
But at last the time came when there were no berries. This was in October. The nights were very cold, and for whole days at a time the sun would not shine, and the skies were dark and heavy with clouds. On the peaks the snow was growing deeper and deeper, and it never thawed now up near the sky-line. Snow fell in the valley, too--at first just enough to make a white carpet that chilled Muskwa's feet, but it quickly disappeared. Raw winds began to come out of the north, and in place of the droning music of the valley in summertime there were now shrill wailings and screechings at night, and the trees made mournful sounds.
To Muskwa the whole world seemed changing. He wondered in these chill and dark days why Thor kept to the windswept slopes when he might have found shelter in the bottoms. And Thor, if he explained to him at all, told him that winter was very near, and that these slopes were their last feeding grounds. In the valleys the berries were gone; grass and roots alone were no longer nourishing enough for their bodies; they could no longer waste time in seeking ants and grubs; the fish were in deep water. 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. In the afternoon of the second day Thor stopped in a dump of jackpines under which the ground was strewn with fallen needles. He began to eat these needles. They did not look good to Muskwa, but something told the cub that he should do as Thor was doing; so he licked them up and swallowed them, not knowing that it was nature's last preparation for his long sleep.
It was four o'clock when they came to the mouth of the deep cavern in which Thor was born, and here again Thor paused, sniffing up and down the wind, and waiting for nothing in particular.
It was growing dark. A wailing storm hung over the canyon. Biting winds swept down from the peaks, and the sky was black and full of snow.
For a minute the grizzly stood with his head and shoulders in the cavern door. Then he entered. Muskwa followed. Deep back they went through a pitch-black gloom, and it grew warmer and warmer, and the wailing of the wind died away until it was only a murmur.
It took Thor at least half an hour to arrange himself just as he wanted to sleep. Then Muskwa curled up beside him. The cub was very warm and very comfortable.
That night the storm raged, and the snow fell deep. It came up the canyon in clouds, and it drifted down through the canyon roof in still thicker clouds, and all the world was buried deep. When morning came there was no cavern door, there were no rocks, and no black and purple of tree and shrub. All was white and still, and there was no longer the droning music in the valley.
Deep back in the cavern Muskwa moved restlessly. Thor heaved a deep sigh. After that long and soundly they slept. And it may be that they dreamed.


THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN
"You are going up from among a people who have many gods to a people who have but one," said Ransom quietly, looking across at the other. "It would be better for you if you turned back. I've spent four years in the Government service, mostly north of Fifty-three, and I know what I'm talking about. I've read all of your books carefully, and I tell you now--go back. If you strike up into the Bay country, as you say you're going to, every dream of socialism you ever had will be shattered, and you will laugh at your own books. Go back!"
Roscoe's fine young face lighted up with a laugh at his old college chum's seriousness.
"You're mistaken, Ranny," he said. "I'm not a socialist but a sociologist. There's a distinction, isn't there? I don't believe that my series of books will be at all complete without a study of socialism as it exists in its crudest form, and as it must exist up here in the North. My material for this last book will show what tremendous progress the civilization of two centuries on this continent has made over the lowest and wildest forms of human brotherhood. That's my idea, Ranny. I'm an optimist. I believe that every invention we make, that every step we take in the advancement of science, of mental and physical uplift, brings us just so much nearer to the Nirvana of universal love. This trip of mine among your wild people of the North will give me a good picture of what civilization has gained."
"What it has lost, you will say a little later," replied Ransom. "See here, Roscoe--has it ever occurred to you that brotherly love, as you call it--the real thing--ended when civilization began? Has it ever occurred to you that somewhere away back in the darkest ages your socialistic Nirvana may have existed, and that you sociologists might still find traces of it, if you would? Has the idea ever come to you that there has been a time when the world has been better than it is to-day, and better than it ever will be again? Will you, as a student of life, concede that the savage can teach you a lesson? Will