"Sure enough--if you feel you can stand it. It's only a hundred yards or so up the hill. I'd like to take old Bruin's hide, but I don't see how we could handle it. I believe we'd better leave him with all his clothes on, in the snow. And Heaven knows I'd like to find out what the old boy was doing out--at a time when all the other bears are hibernating." They continued on up the creek until the grade of the hill was less, then clambered slowly up. Fifty yards up the slope they encountered the old caribou trail, but none of these wilderness creatures had been along in recent days. They followed it a short distance, however, back in the direction they had come and above the scene of their battle with the bear. "No profit here," Bill said at last. "We might as well go down to the creek bed and find better walking." They turned, and in an instant more came back to their own tracks. And suddenly Bill stopped and stared at them in dumb amazement. He looked so astonished, so inexpressibly baffled, that for a moment his two companions were stricken silent. Virginia's heart leaped in her throat. Yet the tracks contained no message for her. "What's the matter?" Harold asked. "What do you see?" Bill caught himself and looked up. "Nothing very important--but mighty astonishing at that. We've just walked in a two-hundred-yard circle, up the creek to where we climbed the hill, back along the hill in this direction, and then down. And we haven't crossed that grizzly's tracks anywhere." "Well, what of it?" "Man, this snow has been here for weeks, with very little change. Do you mean to tell me that a lively, hungry bear is going to stay that long in one place unless he's asleep? Virginia, as sure as you live we--or somethin'--wakened that bear out of hibernation. And his den is somewhere in that two-hundred-yard circle." "There's probably a cave in the rock," Harold suggested. "And I'm more interested in the cabin and dinner than I am in it." "Nevertheless, I've never looked into a den of hibernation, and I've always wanted to know what they're like. It will only take a minute. Come on--it will be worth seeing." But Harold had very special and particular reasons why such a course appealed to him not at all. "Yes--and maybe find a couple of other bears in there, in the dark and no chance to fight. I'm not interested, anyway. Go and look, if you like." "I will, if you don't mind. Do you want to come too, Virginia? There's no danger--really there isn't. If this had been an old she-bear we might have found some cubs, but these old males travel around by themselves." "I certainly wouldn't stay away," the girl replied. And her interest was real: the study of the forest life about her had been an ever increasing delight. She felt that she would greatly like to peer into one of those dark, mysterious dens where that most mysterious American animal, the grizzly, lies in deep coma through the long, winter months.