The grizzly king : $b a romance of the wild — John Shaqi
The grizzly king : $b a romance of the wildCurwood, James Oliver
General
The grizzly king : $b a romance of the wild
Curwood, James Oliver
Grizzly bear -- Fiction; Wilderness areas -- Fiction
His huge right arm swung over the two-year-old's shoulder, and as they went
down his left paw gripped the caribou's muzzle like a huge human hand. Thor
fell under, as he always planned to fall. He did not hug his victim to
death. Just once he doubled up one of his hind legs, and when it went back
the five knives it carried disembowelled the caribou. They not only
disembowelled him, but twisted and broke his ribs as though they were of
wood. Then Thor got up, looked around, and shook himself with a rumbling
growl which might have been either a growl of triumph or an invitation for
Muskwa to come to the feast.
If it was an invitation, the little tan-faced cab did not wait for a
second. For the first time he smelled and tasted the warm blood of meat.
And this smell and taste had come at the psychological moment in his life,
just as it had come in Thor's life years before. All grizzlies are not
killers of big game. In fact, very few of them are. Most of them are
chiefly vegetarians, with a meat diet of smaller animals, such as gophers,
whistling marmots, and porcupines. Now and then chance makes of a grizzly a
hunter of caribou, goat, sheep, deer, and even moose. Such was Thor. And
such, in days to come, would Muskwa be, even though he was a black and not
of the family Ursus Horribilis Ord.
For an hour the two feasted, not in the ravenous way of hungry dogs, but in
the slow and satisfying manner of gourmets. Muskwa, flat on his little
paunch, and almost between Thor's huge forearms, lapped up the blood and
snarled like a kitten as he ground tender flesh between his tiny teeth.
Thor, as in all his food-seeking, hunted first for the tidbits, though the
_sapoos oovin_ had made him as empty as a room without furniture. He pulled
out the thin leafs of fat from about the kidneys and bowels, and munched
at yard-long strings of it, his eyes half closed.
The last of the sun faded away from the mountains, and darkness followed
swiftly after the twilight. It was dark when they finished, and little
Muskwa was as wide as he was long.
Thor was the greatest of nature's conservators. With him nothing went to
waste that was good to eat, and at the present moment if the old bull
caribou had deliberately walked within his reach Thor in all probability
would not have killed him. He had food, and his business was to store that
food where it would be safe.
He went back to the balsam thicket, but the gorged cub now made no effort
to follow him. He was vastly contented, and something told him that Thor
would not leave the meat. Ten minutes later Thor verified his judgment by
returning. In his huge jaws he caught the caribou at the back of the neck.
Then he swung himself partly sidewise and began dragging the carcass toward
the timber as a dog might have dragged a ten-pound slab of bacon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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