The Track of the Cat

by Walter van Tilburg Clark

  The mother said, still watching the lines of her Bible, "You’ll have to put the pan on again, Grace. I didn’t keep anything for you, not knowing when you’d want it."

  "All I want is some coffee," Grace said.

  She went to the sink, in the corner between the stove and the north bedroom, where her back was to the rest of them, and took a white wash basin down from the wall and filled it with cold water from the noisy pump. Then she leaned over the basin and began to douse her face with the cold water, lifting it with both hands and rubbing hard and quickly.

  The mother got up and filled a coffee mug at the stove and brought it back to the table. Then she picked up her Bible and went around the table behind Gwen and sat down in the big, leather platform rocker by the front window. She worked the rocker around to one side, to get it out of the father’s shadow, and leaned forward to put the light on the pages, and began to read again.

  Grace emptied the basin, and wiped her face hard in the rough roller towel. She stood for a moment, just holding the towel over her face with both hands. Then she lifted her head, wiped her hands quickly, and came to the table, and sat down where her mother had been sitting.

  "I’m sorry I made such a scene," she said.

  "It’s all been one big scene this morning, as far as I can see," the father said. "There’s no need to apologize for any particular part of it. It seems to me," he said, smiling at Gwen, "that all the beds in the house, except Gwendolyn’s and mine, had two bad sides this morning."

  Gwen made her quick smile for him.

  "Grace," he said, more cheerfully, "let me pour you a little drink. Best thing in the world for the nerves, and for this unseasonable cold as well."

  "No, thank you, Father. The coffee’s all I need."

  "Well, I shall have one, I think," the father said. "Such a turmoil about nothing."

  He poured his glass a third full again, corked the bottle with careful dignity, and raised the glass a little at Gwen.

  Gwen made the smile for him once more, and then, after a moment, looked at Grace and asked, "You feel better now?"

  "I’m all right, thanks," Grace said. "I shouldn’t let Curt make me so mad. Goodness knows his teasing’s nothing new."

  She smiled at Gwen, though not easily, and lifted the mug and began to sip the coffee.

  "Harold was telling me about Joe Sam’s black panther."

  Grace stiffened her shoulders and shivered. "The poor old man," she said. "No wonder he has these spells."

  "We don’t have to talk about it now, though," Gwen said.

  "Oh, it won’t bother me," Grace said. "Curt jokes about it all the time. Go ahead, Harold."

  "Well," Harold said, rubbing his hand slowly over his fist on the table again, "there isn’t much to it really. I mean to tell about. Near as we can make out, they were camped by some creek or other, and one day, about sunset it was, he heard his wife scream down by the creek. He got down there as fast as he could, but he just got a glimpse of this big cat sneaking off through the willows on the other side, and there was his wife and his oldest daughter, dead by the creek. His wife was dragged half into the water and her neck was broken, and the girl was farther up the bank, and pretty much torn up, I guess. He says the cat was black, and its tracks were a lot the biggest he’d ever seen. It happened in the first snowstorm that year. It was snowing when he found them. Now he always thinks the black cat’s around again when the first snow comes."

  Gwen made a little grimace of pain and looked from the corners of her eyes into Joe Sam’s corner by the stove. Then she turned her head and looked there directly.

  "Where did he go?" she asked quickly.

  Harold was still studying his hands on the table. "He stayed up there for quite a while, hunting for that cat."

  "N0, I mean now," Gwen said. "He’s gone."

  The others looked at the corner too. The coffee mug and the plate, with all the food still on it, were there on the door, and there was the wood-box, with the white, split, pine sticks piled high in it, but that was all.

  "He went out while you was squabbling about Arthur'," the mother said.

  "I didn’t hear a thing," Gwen said.

  "It’s those moccasins he wears," Harold said. "He won’t wear anything else, even when there’s snow down. In the summer he goes barefoot half the time.”

  "It scared me," Gwen said, laughing a little. "He’d been there all the time, and then I looked, and he just wasn’t, and I hadn’t heard a thing. I thought for a minute I’d only imagined him in the first place."

  “He probably went back to the bunk-house," Grace said. "He sleeps out there, and he stays there most of the time, when he isn’t outside. He doesn’t like it in here with us."

  "He didn’t eat anything," Gwen said.

  The mother looked up from her book. "You have to spoon feed him like a baby when he gets took with one of these spells. But I wouldn’t worry my head about him any, if I was you. He’s lasted a good while on his own system. You better go out and see he’s got a fire, though, Harold. He’s just as like as not to set there all day beside that stove with no fire in it."

  Harold stood up. "I didn’t get the chores finished anyway," he said. "I had to help Curt with the horses."

  "He never got the black panther then?" Gwen asked.

  "No," Harold said. "And he didn’t shake his bad luck, either. He saw the cat once more that winter, and right after that another of his kids died. It was pneumonia, I guess, from what he told Arthur about it, but by that time he was blaming everything on the black panther, and it wasn’t just an ordinary cat any more. And the next winter one of his sons died, starvation, probably; it was a tough winter. Long snow, as he says. But he’d seen the cat’s tracks only a day or two before, and right close to his camp."

  "A cat’s," the father said.

  "All right, a cat’s. Though Joe Sam would know if he’d seen them before."

  "I don’t believe it," the father said. "By then it was as big as a horse." He laughed. The laugh was too long and too loud for his joke. "So he gave up hunting it, and moved out. What happened to the number-four papoose we don’t know. He was all alone when he got here, and half starved to death. But he’s kept the black painter, and it keeps getting bigger, too. It would probably be as big as an elephant by now, if he’d ever seen an elephant. And no doubt it’s out this morning."

  "He told me it was." Harold said, taking down his coat. While he put the coat on, he said to Gwen, "He thinks it’s trying to clear everybody out of this country."

  "Especially white men now," the father said, and laughed.

  "Especially white men now," Harold agreed.

  He opened the outside door and stood in the doorway, looking at the sky over the valley. "No stars," he said.

  "We’re in for more snow at that, I guess," and went out, closing the door behind him.

  Grace got herself another cup of coffee, and the father poured his glass a third full of whisky again. The mother remained in the big chair, bent forward over Matthew, following the words with her finger and shaping them with her lips. The wind moved only occasionally outside, and then with a soft and faraway hollowness. In the room only the fire and the lamp and the slow clock spoke.

  Finally the father looked at Gwen again and cleared his throat.

  "So you’ve been in San Francisco recently, young lady?"

  Gwen made the little smile and nodded.

  "We talked all about it before we got up this morning," Grace said quickly, but it didn’t help.

  "Ah," said the father, leaning back and looking up at the small, bright circle of light in the middle of the whitewashed ceiling, and drawing another cigar from his vest. "Ah," he said again, "there is a wonderful city."

  He spoke briefly about the beauty of San Francisco on its hills, and with the blue bay inside it, and the green, soft mountains across the bay.

  "However," he said, after a meditative pause during which he stared at the ceiling, "it’s not the place it u
sed to be."

  Grace sighed, gripped the handle of her mug tightly, and sat staring down into the coffee. The father clipped the end off the cigar, set it between his teeth, and lit it, slowly and ceremoniously, allowing them to wait for the words to come.

  "There is a spirit gone out of it," he said, with round solemnity, when the air about the lamp was full of slowly turning, blue smoke. "Something vital is missing now, a hopefulness, an enterprise that was in its very atmosphere once, as heady as champagne. You should have known San Francisco in the sixties and seventies, my dear," he said, bringing his gaze down out of the smoke clouds and looking at Gwen.

  "It must have been exciting then," Gwen said, making the little smile.

  "Ah, yes," the father said slowly, and as if turning the word over and over and considering its every possibility. "It was that at times, to be sure. But it was also more than that, much more. Excitement, after all, is a matter of moments, and what the old city had then was no such brief and periodic thing. It was going to be the Babylon of the world, the new Jerusalem, the capital of the Pacific, the very shrine of wealth and beauty and fashion. In short, it had a soul, for it had faith, and what, after all, is a soul, save the product of such a faith. Why, I can remember. . ."

  He went on happily describing for Gwen the soul of San Francisco in its good days. He spoke proudly and in detail, as one who was himself, in part at least, responsible for the magnificence and the activity and the promise. In one tale of gigantic manipulation, he spoke of Ralston. The name reminded him of his own meeting with Ralston. He had met him at a bar. He described the bar, and the meeting, and spoke the words Ralston had spoken to him about the stock of the Savage Mine in Virginia City as the words of a prophet are repeated at a safe interval after'his death. The quotation took him to Virginia City for a time, but the water problem of Virginia City carried him back to San Francisco, where there had been some most enlivening speculation in water also. The water problem reminded him of a race horse of Ralston’s. The race horse reminded him of a famous dancer. Because of some stocks on which the famous dancer had profited abundantly, he was drawn back to Virginia City and what President Grant had said about the heat in the lower levels of the mines. He quoted resident Grant also with the care and awe of a disciple. He continued to branch intricately and happily into this near past until the twenty or thirty years since the events he spoke of seemed live thousand.

  Gwen looked at him when she had to, and smiled and nodded and made little sounds of agreement. Grace sat there with them, but after a little while she wasn’t listening. Gray daylight appeared faintly and at a distance in the front window. It increased until the lamplight on the table turned yellow. The mother sat back in her chair then and read by the light from the window.

  5

  When daylight began to spread under the clouds, Curt and Arthur were north almost to the foothill that hid the creek. The snow covered its long whale shape smoothly, only the sagebrush, and the few, small, lonely pines farther up, showing dark on it. A fine, thinned-out snow was still falling. As the light increased, Curt pressed his pony, a small, nervous red, and in his mind cursed Gwen and then used her violently, with anger, not pleasure, making a whole quick story of it, because he had wasted time waiting for her.

  When he came onto the whaleback, he turned the red out toward the nose of it, and only a little up, and heeled him to a lope, meaning to circle wide and come into the canyon mouth. He turned in his saddle and angrily signaled Arthur after him, sweeping his right arm forward twice. Arthur pressed his gray mustang mare up to the red’s pace, but shook his head and pointed up and west toward the high ridge of the whaleback where it joined the mountain.

  Curt said softly, fiercely, "Now what crazy notion, priest?" but pulled in the red and turned him and waited.

  Arthur came alongside, so the horses stood tail to nose, and said, "You could see pretty near the whole ravine from up there. Get a good shot without starting him, if he’s still in there. He’ll be jumpy, now it’s daylight. He’d hear us long before we got up to him."

  Curt stared at him, and smiled with one side of his mouth and said, "You’d just as soon not meet him coming down, eh, priest?" but looked up at the ridge and thought about it. “If you’d ever shoot a gun," he said angrily, "if you’d brought a gun too, we could cover both sides. Well, we’ll take a look," he said, making it his decision, not Arthur’s.

  He spun the red back again, forcing Arthur’s mustang to shy off, and rode up on the whaleback at a slant out toward the valley, weaving through the brush. Arthur waited to steady the gray, stroking its shoulder, and saying softly, "Easy Smudge, easy," and then turned up after him. The unshod hoofs of the two ponies, slicked with soap to keep the snow from balling in the frogs, made a soft, muffled counterpoint. Before they would show over the taper of the whaleback, Curt reined the red sharply back and climbed along the upper slope toward the mountain. The angle was steeper, and the ponies began to labor. At the first dwarf pine, Curt let the red down to a walk, signaling Arthur angrily, with an open, mittened hand beating rapidly on the air, to come slowly too, and keep quiet. The creaking of the saddles and the blowing of the ponies sounded too loud. Their breath made little jets of quickly vanishing steam in the cold air.

  Up ahead only the broken base of the mountain, where trees were taller and began to fill ranks, showed clearly. Above that, the trees became spired shadows, dimming as they rose, until there were no trees, but only one great, uncertain shadow of mountains, and then only the gray snow mist, in which the mountain could be imagined reaching any height into the sky. Arthur was pleased with this mountain that couldn’t be seen, feeling it revive the dream that was not worked out of him yet. He watched the drifting mist, trying to see into it to rocks and trees until Curt, up ahead, swung down from his saddle. They were close under the crest of the reach, and early onto the mountain too. The small pines were more numerous around them, and there was a feeling of being watched, as if the trees had eyes, or creatures with eyes were hidden among them. Arthur swung down too, and they climbed a little farther on foot, one behind the other, leading the ponies, until a little fort of broken rock stood over them on the north. There Curt halted, and imperiously signed Arthur up to him, and when he came alongside said quickly, but keeping his voice low, "Hold them while I take a 1ook."

  Arthur nodded and took the red’s bridle and stood between the two horses, smiling a little in his beard in the shadow of the cowhide hood.

  "And hang on, will you," Curt said, "or you’ll lose them when I shoot."

  He drew the mitten off his right hand and stuffed it into his pocket, and began to climb by short switchbacks, jerking impatiently when he slipped in the snow or on the broken rocks moving under it. Arthur stood below, watching him grow smaller until, like a tiny, jerking toy, he clambered into a break in the rock fort, stooping already, so he wouldn’t show over the top. There the miniature figure lay forward, the red coat making a bright spot on the stone and snow, and crawled up, a little on its side, to keep the carbine free, and lay still, with spread legs, looking through the notch into the canyon beyond. There was no shot. The tiny red figure lay motionless up there for two or three minutes, searching the canyon carefully, and then stood up, and after looking down a moment longer, turned and began its descent. It came slowly at first, on the rock of the ridge, and then with long strides straight down the slope, growing rapidly larger, until the shape of the sombrero became clear, and then until the face showed in the black circle of the scarf bound around the head, and the fierce moustache stretched across it like small, black wings.

  When he had come down to Arthur, Curt said, still breathing hard from his almost running, "Damn your advice. I should have known. He’s in there, all right, but you can’t see him. He’s clear up at the head, in the box canyon. The cliff hangs over there, hides him. But he’s in there. There’s a little bunch of steers down in the bottom by the willows; all headed up-canyon, taking the wind right in their faces. We’d of
had him by now, if we’d gone on in, goddamit. If only he don’t run out. . ."

  He took the red’s bridle from Arthur and swung up into the saddle, turning the pony in the same move, and led off upslope and toward the valley, commencing the top stroke of the great, uptilted Z their tracks made on the flank of the hill. Arthur turned the gray, mounted more slowly, and followed. Ahead of him Curt’s back bent forward eagerly to the climb. The thin, dark line of the carbine across the saddle in front of him was like a spear through him that he carried in his body, Arthur thought, and then thought, smiling in the hood, Them that live by the ride.

  Curt turned the red still more steeply up, and crossed the ridge, well below the rock fort, but almost as far above their first turn. Arthur saw him and the red show dark against the milky sky for a moment, and then, turning west again, sink behind the ridge.

  The gray came onto the ridge blowing, and of her own accord turned down after Curt’s pony. Arthur felt the wind that moved up there, not strong, but cold and heavy with the promise of more snow, and saw the base of the north wall sloping up white to a greater height than he rode on, and then crowned with the long, dark fort of the rimrock. Curt was already far down the slope ahead of him. Arthur saw him look back up, and then point down with his bare right hand. He looked where the hand pointed, and saw the tiny steers in the bottom, out against the screen of red willows that hid the creek. There were five steers, standing in half a circle, with their rumps in the willows and their faces out and turned up-canyon. Two of them had their heads raised now, testing the air. Most of the yellow leaves still clung on the willows behind them.

  Curt was putting the red down the slope recklessly, but kept his arm pointing, and swung it along the course of the willows. Looking there, Arthur saw, like a faint, dotted line in the snow, the tracks climbing the bottom beside the willows and then beside the aspens. The aspen leaves were bright even under the clouded sky and in the ravine, and danced with a fine, continuous shivering in the cold down-draft along the creek. The trail went up into the broken rock under the platform of the box canyon, and was lost there, where the creek came down over terraces of ice.