The wind was variable, and all at once he caught the scent plain. He lurched forward, crashed again through the brush, and walked out into the snow-swept open. Linda saw his vague outline, and at first she hung perfectly motionless, hoping to escape his gaze. She had been told many times that grizzlies cannot climb, yet she had no desire to see him raging below her, reaching, possibly trying to shake her from the limbs. Her muscles were stiff and inactive from the cold, and she doubted her ability to hold on. Besides, in that dread moment she found it hard to believe that the Killer would not be able to swing into the lower limbs, high enough to strike her down. He didn't seem to see her. His eyes were lowered; besides, it was never the grizzly way to search the branches of a tree. The wind blew the message that he might have read clearly in the opposite direction. She saw him walk slowly across the snow, head lowered, a huge gray ghost in the snow flurries not one hundred feet distant. Then she saw him pause, with lowered head. In the little second before the truth came to her, the bear had already turned. Bruce's tracks were somewhat dimmed by the snow, but the Killer interpreted them truly. She saw too late that he had crossed them, read their message, and now had turned into the clouds of snow to trace them down. For an instant she gazed at him in speechless horror; and already the flurries had almost obscured his gray figure. Desperately she tried to call his attention from the tracks. She called, then she rustled the branches as loudly as she could. But the noise of the wind obscured what sound she made, and the bear was already too absorbed in the hunt to turn and see her. As always, in the nearing presence of a foe, his rage grew upon him. Sobbing, Linda swung down from the tree. She had no conscious plan of aid to her lover. She only had a blind instinct to seek him, to try to warn him of his danger, and at least to be with him at the death. The great tracks of the Killer, seemingly almost as long as her own arm, made a plain trail for her to follow. She too struck off into the storm-swept canyon. And the forest gods who dwell somewhere in the region where the pine tops taper into the sky, and who pull the strings that drop and raise the curtain and work the puppets that are the players of the wilderness dramas, saw a chance for a great and tragic jest in this strange chase over the snow. The destinies of Bruce, Linda, and the Killer were already converging on this trail that all three followed,--the path that the runaway horse made in the snow. Only one of the great forces of the war that had been waged at Trail's End was lacking, and now he came also.