Muskwa was looking on curiously. He still had his lesson to learn, for the quill he had once picked up in his foot had been a loose quill. But since the porcupine seemed to puzzle Thor, the cub turned and made ready to go back along the slide if it became necessary. Thor advanced another foot, and with a sudden _chuck, chuck, chuck_--the most vicious sound he was capable of making--Porky advanced backward and his broad, thick tail whipped through the air with a force that would have driven quills a quarter of an inch into the butt of a tree. Having missed, he humped himself again, and Thor stepped out on the boulder and circled around him. There he waited for Muskwa. Porky was immensely satisfied with his triumph. He unlimbered himself; his quills settled a bit; and he advanced toward Muskwa, at the same time resuming his good-natured chuckling. Instinctively the cub hugged the edge of the path, and in doing so slipped over the edge. By the time he had scrambled up again Porky was four or five feet beyond him and totally absorbed in his travel. The adventure of the sheep-trail was not yet quite over, for scarcely had Porky maneuvered himself to safety when around the edge of the big boulder above appeared a badger, hot on the fresh and luscious scent of his favourite dinner, a porcupine. This worthless outlaw of the mountains was three times as large as Muskwa, and every ounce of him was fighting muscle and bone and claw and sharp teeth. He had a white mark on his nose and forehead; his legs were short and thick; his tail was bushy, and the claws on his front feet were almost as long as a bear's. Thor greeted him with an immediate growl of warning, and the badger scooted back up the trail in fear of his life. Meanwhile Porky lumbered slowly along in quest of new feeding-grounds, talking and singing to himself, forgetting entirely what had happened a minute or two before, and unconscious of the fact that Thor had saved him from a death as certain as though he had fallen over a thousand-foot precipice. For nearly a mile Thor and Muskwa followed the Bighorn Highway before its winding course brought them at last to the very top of the range. They were fully three-quarters of a mile above the creek-bottom, and so narrow in places was the crest of the mountain along which the sheep-trail led that they could look down into both valleys. To Muskwa it was all a greenish golden haze below him; the depths seemed illimitable; the forest along the stream was only a black streak, and the parklike clumps of balsams and cedars on the farther slopes looked like very small bosks of thorn or buffalo willow.