The Track of the Cat

by Walter van Tilburg Clark

  "I told you to watch your mouth," the mother said.

  Curt tried to keep it a joke still. "Now, Mother," he said, too loudly, "it’s not Hal that’s the monk. He’s pretty near twenty, and he . . ."

  "Did you hear me, Curtis?"

  The anger gathered suddenly in Curt’s face, and his eyes began a little, blinding dance. "Look," he said, “I’m no kid either. I’m thirty-seven years old. Arthur here’s forty," he said to make an ally. "The old man, for Christ’s sake, is over seventy. And you go bossing the whole bunch of us like we was kids. We can’t even make a little joke, for God’s sake. Well, we ain’t kids, even if you never. . ."

  "You don’t have to shout," the mother said. "My hearing’s as good as it ever was, and the girls is already awake in there. Do you want Gwen Williams to hear the names you’re callin’ her?"

  "Jesus," Curt said, not so loudly, but as if he would burst. He doubled his hands into fists and pressed them down on the table hard enough to lift his shoulders. "What did I call her? Just tell me one thing I called her." He looked at Arthur, and then at Harold. "Did you hear me call her anything?"

  "It didn’t take any fancy guessing to know what you meant."

  "Look," Curt said, "if we’re going to start guessing, then what I’ve thought about Gwen Williams is goddamned brotherly love compared to what you. . ."

  Harold said, "Let it go, Curt, will you?"

  Curt turned on him. "You stickin’ up for her now? You know as well as I do what she thinks of your . . ."

  "I think what I think," the mother said sharply, “and I’ll keep it to myself till there’s some use to say it. If you’re in such a tearin’ hurry to get out there and see what you can see in pitch dark and a blizzard, you better be gettin’ them ponies saddled while I’m puttin’ the breakfast on."

  The veins began to bulge on Curt’s throat and forehead, and he stared at her back with the little, mad dance in his eyes. "By Jesus," he began finally, but got no further before the mother said, turning over the potatoes with a fork as she spoke, "And there’s no need that I can see for your takin’ holy names in vain every time you open your mouth."

  Curt stood up suddenly, pushing his chair back with a loud, scraping noise, but keeping his fists on the table. Arthur waved a hand at him slowly and shook his head in time to the waving, like a man taking his side but saying it had gone far enough for now. Curt turned his head to stare at him, and Arthur pointed at the closed door at the foot of the stairs. Curt set his mouth, but listened, and heard the murmur of women’s voices behind the door. While he listened one voice made a quick, excited laugh. Then the other voice laughed too, a lower sound, full of soft, easy amusement. Curt flushed as if the women had seen through the door how he was checked like a small boy and were laughing at him.

  "To hell with ’em," he said, "If a man. . ." but his voice was only a mutter, and he didn’t finish. He straightened up slowly, and then stood there staring at the other three, one at a time. None of them said anything, or even looked at him. The mother, with her back turned, went on stirring the sizzling potatoes in the pan. Slowly he made a small, angry smile, and looked around at them again, but now as if they were enemies already cowed, and not worth even that much attention. He picked up the lantern and set it on the table and turned the flame a little higher to stop the smoking.

  "That’s not a bad idea at that," he said. "At least, if horses have dreams, they don’t get up sour and talk about them."

  He picked up the lantern and went to the outside door, but stopped there again, and said, "And when I get back, we’re leavin' pronto. Get me?"

  "I’ll have your breakfast on," the mother said. "It’ll be an hour yet before there’s light enough to see what you’re doing anyway."

  “We don’t need any light to get to the creek," Curt said, "and that’s where it come from."

  He opened the door. The roaring of the pines deepened and a gust of cold wind came in, driving a thin serpent of snow across the iloor and nearly blowing the lamp out, so the shadow moths fluttered wildly on the walls.

  "When I get back," he yelled, to be heard over the wind, and went out, slamming the door behind him. The flame of the lamp steadied and rose again, and the moths danced small and gentle in their places. Slowly the fine, white powder on the floor vanished. The high woman’s voice spoke in the north bedroom again.

  Arthur took a jack-knife and the unfinished mountain lion out of his pants pocket. He opened the knife slowly, thinking of something else, and felt along the edge of the blade with his thumb. The blade was worn narrow as a dagger with long use and many sharpenings. He began to cut slowly and carefully at the shoulder of the lion, holding the knife in his left hand and pushing the back of the blade with the thumb of his right hand, curling off small, neat shavings.

  Harold watched him, smiling a little. "No wonder Joe Sam was in such a stew," he said.

  Arthur nodded. "Behind in my whittling."

  The mother set two plates on the lid of the water tank on the end of the stove, and lifted two fried eggs onto each plate and began to scrape the potato and bacon onto them. In the bedroom the high voice said something quickly and gaily, and the other made a short answer and then the soft, easy laughter. Harold turned his head to listen and smiled. "They’re having a good time in there," he said.

  "Aren’t they," the mother said dryly. She drew the boiling coffee pot off the fire, and poured coffee, still hissing and bubbling, into two cups beside the plates.

  "It’s good for Grace, having someone new to talk to for a while," Arthur said.

  "It’s precious little but talk I’ll get out of her, too," the mother said. She brought the two filled plates to the table and set them down in front of Arthur and Harold and laid a knife, spoon and fork beside each plate. She stood there for a moment, staring down at the plates, and then she looked at Harold and said, "Harold, it’d be better if you’d go instead of Arthur, the way Curt’s takin’ on this morning."

  "No, Mother, it’s all right," Arthur said. "He can’t very well go off with Gwen just come, and her first visit, too."

  "There’ll be time enough to see her," the mother said.

  She went to the stove and picked up the two heavy coffee mugs and brought them back and set them down beside the plates. "He wouldn’t be gone a lifetime," she said to Arthur. "Either they’ll find something at the creek, or they won’t. They’ll be back before noon."

  Arthur looked up at her, holding the knife still, and smiled and shook his head. "You know Curt better than that, Mother," he said.

  He looked across at Harold. Harold was staring at the shadow in the middle of the table. His face was quiet, but set. Arthur looked down, and began his careful whittling again.

  "No, I’m going," he said. "Anyway," he added, smiling, "Curt needs me, in case the cat is black."

  He held the little wooden lion up and away from him and studied it, still smiling and then brought it back into his lap again.

  "That heathen nonsense," the mother said.

  "I’m not so sure," Arthur said. "Joe Sam just likes a god he can see."

  "A god," the mother said. "Well, I’m sure, if you’re not. Stupid, childish nonsense."

  "And a black panther," Arthur went on, as if she hadn’t spoken, "is as good a god as any to mean the end of things."

  "You’re worse than Curt and his swearing," the mother said. "Your godless jokes. If you keep it up, you’l1 be believing them, next thing you know."

  "Not godless," Arthur said. "Full of gods, like Joe Sam."

  “Humph," the mother said, and went back to the stove and took up the coffee pot again. The wind returned against the house, and she stood with the coffee pot in her hand and listened to it. The wind pressed briefly and without thunder, only making that hollow beating of big wings under the eaves. Before it let the dry snow off the little window over the sink, Grace and Gwen laughed together again in the north bedroom, and Grace said something after the laughter, with that same high gaiety in her
voice.

  "If I’d had my way," the mother said angrily, "I’d of turned that no-good old Indian off the place the day he come. Him and his creeping ways and his crazy notions. But no, your father had to be smart. He had to get him a hired hand for nothing but his keep. Hired hand," she said scornfully. "Less use than nigger help, and dirtier too. I’d ruther have a fool nigger around. They’re mostly cheerful anyway."

  Harold looked across at Arthur, and then pulled his chair in closer and began slowly to eat his breakfast. Arthur stopped the knife again, and looked at the mother from under his eyebrows. The mother took a deep breath and stood there for a moment, as if to steady herself against her own anger, and then let the breath out and poured coffee into a third mug. Arthur looked down and began to whittle again.

  “Joe Sam has his own jokes," he said.

  “Jokes," the mother said, coming to the table. "We’l1 be lucky if one of his jokes don’t wind up with us all layin’ in our beds with our throats cut." She sat down and set her coffee mug on the table in front of her.

  "He’s planning it pretty carefully," Arthur said, holding the wooden lion out again to study it, and smiling at what he was thinking. "It’s about eighteen years he’s been here now, isn’t it?"

  "Do you know what he’s thinking when he gets this way?" the mother asked. "No more’n I do, for all your gossipin’ with him. Or all your heathenish readin’ either." She spoke quietly, but the little fury was dancing in her eyes the way it did in Curt’s.

  Arthur went on carefully whittling at the lion, and didn’t answer. Finally the mother looked away from him, and sighed and put her hands up to the sides of her face and pressed hard at her temples with her fingertips.

  "Was it a bad dream you had, Mother?" Arthur asked.

  "Never you mind my dreams," the mother said, but not angrily. "I don’t take no stock in them either." She took her hands down from her face and laid one in her lap, limply, palm up, and lifted her coffee mug with the other. She blew slowly across the coffee twice, and then sipped at it twice.

  "If you’re going hunting painters," she said to Arthur, "even black ones, you’d better get some breakfast in you." Arthur made four more careful little cuts on the shoulder of the lion, and then reached around back of him and slipped it into the pocket of the cowhide parka, with the other two carvings. He closed the knife and put it in his pants pocket and drew his chair in. He picked up his fork, but then just held it while he looked at the mother’s face. She was staring down across the mug into the center of the shadow on the table.

  "Only coffee again?" Arthur asked gently.

  She turned her head finally, and looked at him and smiled a little. "I have to get waked up some way," she said. "You know how it is if you have a bad dream last thing before you wake up."

  Arthur nodded, and they were quiet for a time, Harold eating and Arthur picking at his food with the fork and the mother blowing on her coffee and sipping it. The quick, cheerful conversation of the two voices went on in the north bedroom.

  The mother put her coffee cup down finally, and looked into it, and said, "Harold, have you thought any how you’ll live when you get married?"

  Harold glanced at her, but she kept studying her coffee, and he looked back at his plate. "It hasn’t gone that far,"

  "It’s what you want, isn’t it?" the mother asked. "It’s for sure what them Williams think you want, all the time you’ve spent sittin’ in their kitchen, with more’n twenty miles of ridin’ to get there."

  Harold’s neck grew red, and the color rose slowly into his cheeks. Without looking up, he got himself ready to say something but then didn’t say it after all, but just closed his mouth again.

  "Isn’t it what you want?"

  "I guess it is," Harold said slowly. "If she does."

  "You needn’t to worry too much about that," the mother said. "Not with the money this ranch can make, and that gopher hole the Williams is livin’ in."

  Harold lifted his head quickly and stared at her this time. Arthur peered at her too, squinting as if he were trying to see something a long way off, or through a blinding light. The mother didn’t look up. Harold drew a short breath and worked the muscles of his jaws three or four times, and then looked down again. "She’s not that kind," he said.

  "Maybe not," the mother said, "but whether she is or not, it’s high time you thought what you’re going to do. Was you expecting to bring her here, into this house?"

  "No," Harold said, "I wouldn’t think so."

  "No, I wouldn’t think so either." She looked at him for the first time, and studied him for a moment as he sat bent over his plate but not eating. "What was you figurin’ on doin’ then?" she asked.

  Arthur said softly, "It doesn’t have to be settled right now, does it, Mother?"

  "Now’s as good a time as any. I don’t see there’s anything to be gained puttin’ it off."

  "It’1l work out," Arthur said. "Just give it time."

  "Things won’t be any different a year from now, or ten years from now, for that matter. Nothin works out by itself, that I ever see."

  "They do when they matter enough," Arthur said.

  "Even if they did, what’s to be hurt talkin’ them over sensible beforehand?"

  "Some times are better than others," Arthur said.

  "It’s not me that’s hurryin’ things," the mother said. "It don’t seem likely to me that Gwen Williams thinks she’s been asked over just to keep an old maid like Grace company. I’d be glad enough to let it wait if it would. Harold’s too young to be gettin’ married. Nineteen’s too young to get married. And to an older woman at that."

  "You talk as if she was fifty," Harold said. "She’s not two years older’n I am."

  "She’s a woman, the mother said, "and that’s as good as ten years extra any time. You’re a child comparin’ to Gwen Williams. And them Welsh minin’ people grows old ahead of their time anyway. I know. I’ve seen a-plenty of ’em, from Hangtown to Virginia City."

  "That’s not the people; it’s the work," Arthur said. "And the Williams aren’t mining now. They’re living the same way we do."

  "I wouldn’t say so," the mother said. "In that little black shack, and runnin’ a handful of half-starved stock."

  Arthur didn’t reply this time, and Harold began to eat again.

  "But the matter’s out of my hands now," the mother said. "If it was ever in ’em, which I didn’t notice it was. All I’m askin’ is, do you have any sensible plan made?"

  "We’ll work it out," Harold said stubbornly.

  "Not without some notion how, you won’t. You wasn’t plannin’ on movin’ in with the Williams, was you?"

  "I can take care of myself, I’m no kid."

  "I don’t know what else you are. You was born in this valley, in that very room where they’re so busy chatterin’ now, and you never been out of it, more’n to drive stock to Reno or sit in the Williams' kitchen. You don’t know nothing but ranchin’ this valley. What would you do anywhere e1se?"

  "This isn’t the only ranch in the world," Harold said.

  "It’s the only one you’re ever likely to see, though. Or was you figurin’ on keepin’ a wife on a cow hand’s wage?"

  "I wouldn’t be the first that started that way."

  "I know," the mother said. "It was simple once. All they had to do was make ’em an iron with the right curves to fit over somebody else’s brand, and they was set. But the country you could do that on’s all took up now, all that’s any use for anything. And the open range has got outfits runnin' on it that ain’t exactly honin’ to share it with rustlers, not that I’ve heard tell of."

  Harold sat staring at his plate and didn’t answer.

  "It’s practical facts I’m tryin’ to get straight," the mother said, "not dreams."

  Still Harold didn’t say anything, and finally, before the mother could speak again, Arthur said, "This is a big valley. It could carry a lot more stock than we’ve ever run on it."

  The mother
looked at him, and smiled tightly, and the triumph was already in her eyes. "I had a notion that’s where we was headin’," she said.

  "Well, why not?" Arthur asked mildly. "We could all help with a house-raising, like old times."

  "And divide up the valley, maybe?" the mother asked, before he could go on.

  Arthur smiled, seeing how she followed her planned line, and shook his head. "We wouldn’t any of us like to see the valley fenced, I guess. There’s no need of it. We could have one roundup and one drive, the same as ever, only let Hal take his share out, that’s all."

  "Like you been takin’ yours out the last twenty years," the mother said.

  "It doesn’t matter to me," Arthur said. “I’d just as soon see mine in the kitty. But it does matter to Hal now, and Dad owes him the start."

  "It’s some time since your pa’s had anything to say about it," the mother said dryly. "Or cared anything about it either, for that matter." She finished her coffee and set the cup down. "He never did care, far as that goes," she said. "The money don’t come sudden enough in ranchin’ to suit him. Not around here, anyway. Your pa’s a man to think in big figures. But if he did have any say," she concluded, "he wouldn’t be for splittin’ up the holdin’s. Nor I wouldn’t neither. Once the splittin’ up starts, there’s no end to it."

  "There’s no need to split, Mother," Arthur said. "Hal takes his share of every sale separate; that’s all the change there’d be."

  The mother made the thin, concluding smile again. "Have you spoke to Curt about that yet?" she asked.

  Harold spoke suddenly and angrily. "Sure, that’s where it sticks, all right. That’s where it always sticks. Everything."

  "Curt has big ambitions," Arthur said softly. He stood up. "More coffee, Mother?" he asked.

  The mother nodded. "Thank you," she said. She looked at his plate. "You ain’t ate hardly anything," she said.

  Arthur grinned down at her. "Look at your plate," he countered.

  "It’s this wakin’ up so early," she said, "I ain’t ready to eat yet."

  Arthur shook his head at her. "When did you last have anything but coffee for breakfast?" he asked.