"A long fight, friend," Arthur said softly. "I’m sorry. It’s only to make it quicker."
The first finger of his bare left hand tried the trigger of the carbine gently. It held rigid against his touch, and he felt, like an animal force, the charged powder waiting to be sprung.
Hair trigger, he thought off the top of his mind. No slack at all. The way Curt likes it, I guess. No chance not to, once you’ve started.
He lifted the carbine until the muzzle, only a few inches from the bull’s head, pointed just between the ear and the eye. The barrel wavered for an instant then, but steadied, and he drew, and the butt struck in his shoulder violently The report was a deafening slam, at once deepened, enlarged and multiplied into a confused booming between the high walls of the canyon. The gray mustang started convulsively and wheeled and broke toward the edge of the platform, but snubbed herself twice on the trailing reins and wheeled back, swinging her rump about the pivot of her braced forelegs. The echoes diminished, rolling faintly in the canyon below, and she saw Arthur standing there still, and she stood also, though trembling and staring.
The bull jerked as if stung, and then sank slowly forward and a little to one side, its knees buckling, its muzzle plowing out into the stained snow. Only small, unknowing panics of life moved it a few moments longer, the short, thick-shouldered forelegs stiffening and shaking, single tremors running swiftly here and there in the great muscles of the body. Then the last breath sighed out gustily, spraying the snow with blood, and the chattering dance of the hoofs in the broken rock slowed and stopped. The huge body sank away a little, relaxed, and lay still.
Arthur stood looking down at it, almost in the attitude of a man praying, except for the carbine held across him and still smoking faintly at the muzzle. A trickle of earth and pebbles spilled suddenly down the cliff onto the bull’s shoulder. Arthur started, as if the quick, small touches might waken the bull and bring him lurching to his feet. He saw then that the dark horn that curved into the air now was gummy with blood, with a scattering of short pale hairs stuck in it. His closed mind made nothing of this, however, only seeing and storing it.
He turned, smiling inside his cowl, but fixedly, like a man asleep and dreaming strangely. Bearing the carbine across him in both hands still, and with the empty shell left in the breach, he worked his way out of the broken rock and moved slowly across the platform to the waiting horse. She started at the first touch of his hand but then turned her head to him and nudged his shoulder. He took the reins in his mittened hand, carrying the carbine in the other, and led her down to the creek and slowly through the shallow turmoil of water among stones and ice, turned her down-canyon on the other side, and mounted. He saw Curt’s wavering boot trail, and the evener arc of widely spaced clusters on the slope, where the cat’s speed had forced it up after the crossing. The clusters straightened out below and went down beside the aspens. Sometimes there were little jets of blood stretched between them, and less often, in snow that had drifted deeper against a boulder or the brush, a long serpent curve where the heavy tail had dragged. The mare went down slowly along the marks of the cat, afraid for her footing. Arthur didn’t press her, but just sat the saddle, not looking around, his bare left hand braced against the horn, his right, in the mitten, holding the carbine across his thighs.
The aspens drifted by, making their soft, nervous fluttering, and the red willows began. Where the rim-rock ended against the sky above and the canyon walls became rounded hills sloping steeply into the valley, the tracks turned up. The blood marks between them were heavier for a few jumps, and then faint again, and finally as the tracks became single, there were none. Going at a steep angle, only a little with the length of the hill, they vanished north over the crest. The mare passed their turning and went on down unchecked. She was almost out from between the wings of the canyon before Arthur missed the tracks.
“Dreaming again, Curt would say," he said aloud, smiling a little. He reined the mare in, and, twisting clear about in the saddle to see out of his hood, scanned the slope above him. After a moment, in one place only, high up on the shoulder, he saw the marks of the crossing.
"Dreams are all kinds, though, eh?" he said to the mare or the quiet canyon. "Some we wouldn’t miss too much," and gently urged her down once more.
When he judged the north slope easy enough for her, he stopped her again, dismounted and, leaving her with the reins hanging, shuffled down through the knee-deep snow to the willows and then down-canyon along them to a place where they thinned at the edge of a sandy ford so a horse might pass through them. Here he crossed and went up on the other side onto the open meadow strip between the south reach and the creek. He saw the tracks of steers there, moving close together down toward the valley, and looking that way saw the little bunch, already down on the edge of the meadow. He looked up at the south slope, at the cut the horses had made coming into the canyon. Then he dragged across the steer tracks, with the sides of his boots, a wide, deep mark half the width of the strip of meadow, and on the creek end of it, scraping and stamping, made an arrow head longer than a man. After that he went back across the creek and up to the waiting mare, mounted, and turned her up onto the slope.
On the other side of the spur, a wide draw opened beneath them. The pines came clear down to the grassland in it, though thinning their ranks a little toward the lower edge. The wind had swept them clean, and they showed black against the snow. He turned the mare in toward the mountain and downward only a little. Where the spur became the mountain itself, and the slope of the draw grew steeper, he came on the flower track again. He pulled up to let the mare breath before the new climb, and looked along the cat’s trail as far as he could see it. It went up northwest, weaving no more than the trees made it, and the rosettes were still single and closely spaced. There was one much larger, blurred impression in sight, where the cat had sat down to rest, and perhaps to lick its wound. The wound was doing all right, though, he thought, seeing no blood now anywhere in the line of tracks.
After a minute he turned the mare onto the trail and they climbed along it, slanting north and upward among the trees. Once, well up in the quiet grove, a jay flashed suddenly over them, screaming, its blue brilliant even in that gray light. It perched on a high limb over the trail ahead of them, and kept scolding as they came nearer.
Arthur looked up at it and grinned, thinking, It’s no secret now that the master killer has come out. Everything on the mountain will hole up and keep watch. They passed under the jay, and it flew ahead and perched again. Four times it preceded them, screaming as it flew, and scolding profanely from each perch. Then it was satisfied, and from the last perch, dropped away down-slope, still scolding.
The pitch of the mountain increased and even going across it the mare was forced to stand and blow often, reaching with her head to loosen the lines and breathe easier. Arthur didn’t hurry her. His mind was still resting after what he’d done in the canyon. Notions moved in him idly, by their own small power, all frail and a little unhappy. They made passive overtures to what was around him, the pines, the gray boulders where the mountain itself began to show through the snow, the delicate writing of small tracks on the white slope, the sentinel jay, a chipmunk making its pebbly chittering somewhere out of sight, even the storm filling again, far up among the peaks. He couldn’t complete this slow penance, however, for the full knowledge of his act was still trapped within him, as in a fist, so that he felt it, but couldn’t see it. With that fist closed in him he remained apart from the life of the mountain.
Where another creek, smaller than the Aspen, and the willows thinner along it, went down to the northeast, the cat’s track turned straight up the mountain. As Arthur on the mare came to the turn, there was a sudden crashing in the willows below them. Arthur swung the carbine over to put his left forefinger to the trigger, but then he saw the two young deer, last spring’s fawns, he thought, going up in long bounds on the steep slope beyond the willows, the head of one against the hau
nch of the other. He reined in the mare and watched them until the two came against the sky between dark pines, and vaulted airily, almost in one curve, two bodies long, over a manzanita thicket on the ridge, and vanished.
I smell strong of the curse on my breed right now, he thought, and turned the mare up on the trail beside the creek, but after a few yards had to swing down out of the saddle and lead her, the pitch was so steep.
Just below the crest of the first ridge the pines opened about a pile of great, rounded boulders, hedged along the base by manzanita. The trail turned south there and leveled out. Arthur’s boot heels and the mare’s hoofs made faint, stunted echoes among the boulders, and then only their own sounds again. They came to the edge of a short, deep ravine.
There once more the cat had rested, sitting so it could look back down the slope. Arthur stood for a moment staring at the many overlapping flower tracks, the circle of the haunches and the wide sweep of its tail. Then he turned up again around the boulders and beside the ravine. The trail became so steep here that the mare behind him scrambled and slipped and he had to wait every time for her to catch herself and make a new start. Above the boulders it became easier again up a slope of sand under the snow, and along the edge of a rising thicket of manzanita nearly drifted under. Out of the manzanita there rose abruptly another formation of rock, the true peak of the foothill. This one wasn’t rounded, but tilted up and weathered sharply into three edges, like spires when seen from below, two on the north end, close together, but the northernmost much smaller, like a child at its mother’s shoulder, and one, lower and apart from them, and bulkier, almost a half-dome, swelling over the trail and the edge of the ravine. The new snow marked their sides in gothic fretwork and lay in a narrow triangle, point up, between the two close spires and in a wide, inverted triangle between the highest spire and the half-dome.
Arthur stopped, looked up at the rock, and smiled a little. It was the formation they called Cathedral Rock. He had come there a good many times to sit alone and whittle, and once in a while with Grace, making it a goal for their ride. It was a good place to sit. The rock rose clear of the trees and the whole valley was spread out below. It was high enough to look over the hills on the other side too, and show the desert mountains rolling range beyond range into the east. The mind opened and grew quiet and solitary with that reach before it. Even as he looked up at the rock, though, a shadowy, less happy meaning, even a little fearful, stirred beneath the clear memories. But then he saw the cat's track going up under the half-dome, and the brief darkness passed from his mind while he remembered the shapes of the mountain above the rock.
A nervy brute, for a fact, he thought. Going back already; maybe in at the head of the canyon. He could make it down that creek chimney, maybe, if he couldn’t get up it. Or going to keep an eye on his kill, from the edge. Standing to breathe and let the mare breathe, he looked up at the rock again, and thought of the hours he’d spent there, his mind exploring while the little wooden figures took shape under his knife. In the summer the smell of hot granite, faint and clean, mingled with cooler airs from above, full of pine and cedar. The small, quick sounds of birds and chipmunks busy around him, like notes from an instrument plucked in drowsy inattention, became part of the warmth and sweet air. And everything came together, became bigger and easier and more durable, when he glanced down from his carving into the valley, where tiny, white-marked cattle moved slowly on the meadow stretches, and the tule marshes shone like metal in the sun. Then, always, he was led by the shape of the valley to look away into the northeast too, through the pass to the black, shimmering wall of the first desert mountain, where the road turned south for Reno, and beyond the black wall, farther and wider over the sea of desert hills flowing in the heat, to the narrow white rim on the eastern horizon, that might have been a rear guard of departing clouds, but was really a snow-capped range way out toward the middle of the state.
The extent of the view was great enough to show the curve of the horizon, and give the feeling that the world was floating in space, and sometimes, under its influence, his mind would sweep together, as the hand sweeps together scattered cards on a table, the many troublesome, fragmentary thoughts of weeks, or even months, into the one big answer they had all been looking for, the answer that, like all good answers, was only a beginning of a bigger question. When that happened, so that he finally rode home moving happily, for the time being, in a new and larger realm, he would always keep a particular fondness for the figure he had been carving then. To get that figure out during some closed-in evening of a winter, and finger it, and set it on the kitchen table in the rim of light beyond the shadow of the lamp bowl, like a little idol in the deliberate light of a temple, would be enough to bring the whole afternoon back to him, its near, clean smells and little, plucking sounds, its space and shining, its questions and answer and the new question. He could have made a gallery from among his whittlings that were scattered around everywhere in the house, especially in Grace’s room and on top of the bookcase in the kitchen, that would remind him of fifteen or twenty such afternoons. They were a kind of secret diary, those whittlings, a notebook of his private living and all that was important to him. If he were to set them up in a row, in the order in which they’d been made, they would furnish an encouraging evidence, a proof that he could touch, that he was moving, however erratically and with whatever troubled intervals. The question that went with the last piece mattered more than those before it, as the piece itself was better cut, simpler and meaning more. He never would set them up like that, of course, except in his mind, but he could have.
Those gains had come more often in the fall than in the summer, he thought. The best time of all on the rock was in the Indian summer of late September, or of a better October than this was turning out to be. The mild warmth and the stillness that came then opened him more gently and more widely, without any effort on his part. It removed the last strain of anguish and contest from his thinking, and let his findings assume proportion and perspective almost by themselves. Then was the season of big answers and of resigned, late-afternoon wonder, when the mote-filled roads of light came straight down through the passes onto the yellowing meadows, and the pines and golden aspens stood under them in motionless, smoky blue shadow, and a single hawk, perhaps, wrote his attentive silence widely upon space below.
Looking up at the rock and remembering, he wanted, as a kind of token thanks for these hours, to go up and sit against it now, and maybe finish Joe Sam’s cat for him. He smiled a little at the notion, and shook his head gently within the hood, thinking what Curt would say if he came hurrying up here with his snowshoes and his food and found him sitting on a rock with snow on it, whittling and looking at the valley.
“Well, come on, Smudge," he said, and tugged gently at the reins. The little mare heaved forward and began to move up behind him, and he put the reins over his right shoulder and led her, the carbine in his left hand almost touching the snow as the pitch steepened again. He realized then that just the memories of the rock had served him almost as well as if he had gone up there and sat for a while. The painful fist within him had opened as if his thought had
balanced out the killing, or nearly.
I must tell Hal to bring Gwen up here before she goes home, he thought, and smiling a little added, They'l1 have to get out of that kitchen, anyway.
He was under the half-dome rock, though not there at all in his thoughts, when suddenly the mare neighed shrilly, in extreme terror, and wheeled toward the ravine. Before he could let go of the reins, he was dragged over backwards and to the side. He fell into the stiff springing hedge of brush at the edge, and half entangled there saw the big cat above him, crouched on a slanting ledge of the rock, its hind quarters gathering under it, like pressed springs, for the leap, and its long, heavy tail lifted a little for balance and curling and uncurling slowly at the tip, as if separately alive.
His body, after an instant, struggled fiercely to get free onto the solid
trail, and to pull the carbine up out of the tangle of branches into which its weight had drawn his left arm and shoulder. His mind, though, quite independently and scarcely disconcerted, mocked him gently, saying, The shell in the chamber’s empty, my friend. Dreaming again, Curt would say.
He let go of the gun and tried to roll in the breaking and clinging of the brush, but the panther leapt, spread like a launching bird, and he froze under it, staring up at the great, nervously grinning head bent toward him, fangs bared, between the reaching forelegs, the pale, enormous eyes, lambent within, fixing his own as their target. Even then his mind made one more little jest against him, saying quickly, Not even a black one; not the belly, at least, and then he saw on the pale belly the long, blackened wound the bull had dug. He felt it torn in his own flesh, and made one more convulsive effort to roll free, but got only one hand, the bare one, and one knee onto the trail, and then, with a small moan of surrender, squeezed out of his body without his knowing it, had only time to brace himself and turn his face down from the darkening fall.
Far away, separated from him by the distance between the living and the dead, he heard the terrified mare crash in the thickets below and cry wildly.
7
Curt sat by the table, working the last of the hot beef fat into the buckskin pacs that had dried hard and wrinkled during the summer.
He looked across the table at Gwen again, and said, "Well, if it’s a black one, and that big, we’ll make it into a blanket for your wedding bed. You’ll need it, with a hard winter coming up, and a bashful kid for a husband. And think how peaceful you’d sleep under it, when you got around to sleeping. Why, he’s the cause of all the trouble in the world, that black painter. Joe Sam says so. Arthur says so. Grace says so, though that don’t count so much, because she always says what Arthur says. Even young Hal there, though he don’t spread his opinions quite so easy yet, is beginning to think so. There must be something in it, if all our thinkers think so. Imagine how easy you could rest, with the end of all the troubles in the world right there over you to prove there wasn’t anything could go wrong."
The Track of the Cat Page 9