The Track of the Cat

by Walter van Tilburg Clark

  "Still not asleep, old medicine man," he said.

  The two tracks running together made him feel that whatever had happened must have happened close ahead. He watched about him constantly among the trees and then among the first boulders, and twice he reached into his pocket to make sure the knife was haft up and easy to get hold of. He felt more than ever empty-handed without a rifle, but he was cold about it now. He didn’t blame Arthur, either. It was his own fault. He should have made Arthur bring a rifle when they first came out, even knowing he wouldn’t use it. Not having done that, he should have thought of bringing another with him this trip, instead of making whoring lies in his head about Gwen, and then working on her as if they were the truth. No use thinking about that either, now.

  "Don’t think at all; it makes you blind. Just keep your eyes open."

  Where the double track turned straight up beside the little north creek and then became a triple track, the deep incisions of Arthur’s boot heels showing clearest of all, he was forced to dismount too, and lead Kentuck. He climbed easily in the soft, flat pacs, going up step by step in the mare’s prints, and the drag of the laboring stallion irritated him, but he kept a close watch just the same. He would be an easy prey on foot. There was no doubt in his mind by now, that the lion, besides being a giant, was crazy, a killer without reason. He thought of Arthur standing beside the dead steer in the box canyon, looking at him solemnly and curiously, and speaking of how bold the cat was. The warning had a power now that it had lacked then. Each time it made him remember Arthur’s quiet reluctance in the bunk-room while they were getting dressed, and then many different times back through eighteen years, when they had joked about the black panther, but Arthur always with the little serious undertone, never really making fun of the notion as much as he did of Curt. The chain of quick, small memories passing through his mind, like black birds flying over him again and again in identical formation, began to impress him in spite of his scornful denials. After all, Arthur didn’t really believe in the black panther any more than he did, certainly not in one as big as a horse and transparent as a shadow, that started roaming the Sierra every year just when the first snow came. Because each memory returned embodied, and framed in familiar reality, himself speaking, Arthur speaking, Joe Sam watching, Harold listening, at breakfast or supper in the kitchen or out in the sun by the corral fence, it had the strength in his mind of something that had happened.

  When the trail turned south across the mountain and passed under a thicket of manzanita with a heap of rounded, half-joined boulders standing up out of it, Curt thought, Going back already, sure as hell. Going in from the top, and for a moment felt what was as bad as fear, that Arthur, for all his dreamy hanging back, had made the better guess about what the cat would do.

  "Just what the old monk thought," he said aloud.

  He was up in the edge of the waiting clouds now. The air about him was full of a fine suspended snow, like fog, with a pale shining beginning to spread in it. Objects near him were clear enough, but the ravine ahead of him showed only as a great milky blue shadow, except when a cold breath from the mountain above whirled the snow into long serpents that swam in the chasm, and let the rocks and pines and clumps of brush on the far wall show through dark and clear for a minute or two. He went very carefully in this mist, pausing often to be sure what made some shadow he thought for an instant had moved.

  He came to where the cat had rested at the turn on the edge of the ravine, and stood there to read the record. Watching its own back-trail, he thought. Already got half a mind to do the hunting itself. It took its time, too. Had a long lead. It just sat here and watched him coming up. He was shaken even more than before, so that even his breathing changed a little, by the belief that whatever had happened couldn’t have happened far from there. He could feel how the cat had hated the retreat, growing nettled, wanting to stop it.

  When he went around the castle of boulders to climb beside the ravine, Kentuck dragging at the end of the reins behind him again, the wind swung down at him strongly for a moment, so he had to stop and turn away from the snow in it. He wanted to duck his head and shield his face with a raised arm too, but held himself against the wish, and only narrowed his eyes. The wind roared in the pines above, and then below him, and made a soft, hollow singing in the boulders beside him, and fell away again, bearing the curtain of snow aside with it. The Cathedral Rock stood up big and clear above him, and he scanned it carefully, especially the half-dome rock that stood over the trail. There was nothing moving except here and there the brush that jerked as if alive in the brief after-gusts. He tugged at the reins to start Kentuck again and went on up. The mist settled slowly around him once more, with the first sunlight spreading in it. It made an unreal place of the mountainside, a region that hung in space and unworldly silence, and Curt set his teeth against the sudden, loud sounds the stallion made

  scrambling up behind him as they came off the sand onto the granite shelves below the rocks.

  Another gust halted them, and then, as it sighed away down the ravine, he saw, and all at once, as if it had just that instant fallen there, the spread form, like a dark, irregular star, lying on the incline under the half-dome rock. The white patches of the parka looked like snow, but even so, the ghosts gathered in him at once, making a single, big fear that filled him and shut off his breath. The flight of dark birds started over him again, but he stopped it, and looked warily all around over the rocks and brush with attentive eyes and an empty mind. After a moment he scrambled on up, jerking and cursing at Kentuck without knowing it. Then the stallion nickered softly and swung back, almost upsetting him, and wouldn’t go up any farther for anything he could do.

  But you won’t run out on me, damn you, Curt thought, and took the rope from the saddle and looped it around Kentuck’s neck, high behind the ears, and knotted the other end around a thick manzanita stem. While he worked at the rope, he glanced up often at the spread figure on the trail and quickly about among the brush and up at the pinnacles of the rock. Once or twice, tricked by a movement of the snow veil in the wind, he believed that the star-shaped figure stirred.

  He yanked the knot tight against the manzanita and tested it twice, and then went up the slope half running, telling himself, the mare threw him; she spooked and threw him and he got knocked out on the rock. But even while he hoped, he didn’t believe it. The mare had been gone too long, for one thing, showing up way out on the meadow there. When he was close enough to see Arthur’s bare left hand clutching at the rock in the snow, he also saw the carbine gleaming in the brush beyond. He didn’t even pause beside Arthur then, but peering once more up at the half-veiled rock above, stepped over him and worked into the brush and drew the carbine up out of it, and examined it, first one side and then the other. It wasn’t damaged to matter, a few sliding scratches, no more. He felt much better with it in his hands. He came up to the edge of the track again, trying the trigger, ejecting the empty shell, and feeling the newly tightened trigger with pleasure.

  At the same time he thought, He saw something, though. He got one shot at something.

  When he stood where his soft' boot could have touched Arthur, he looked quickly up over the shadowy rocks once more, at the ghostly edge of forest farther above, and then knelt and gripped the right shoulder in its stiff, cowhide sleeve, and drew at it gently, as one might start to waken a sleeper. More than the shoulder moved to his tug, but not even one linger of the bare, left hand by itself. The out-stretched arm slipped suddenly across the rock. He let the shoulder back down, and the arm slid out again. He withdrew his hand and gripped his own knee with it. Squatting there, using the carbine as a prop, he saw that the bare hand reaching onto the rock was blue, and that a thin sifting of the little snow fflakes lay unmelted on it, and on the hood and back of the cowhide coat. He saw also what his hand had told him first, that there was a wide, ragged tear in the shoulder of the parka. There were three parallel marks below it, scraped through the red hair an
d into fine grooves in the leather underneath. For a moment the panther in his mind, possessed of purpose and malice and cunning like a man’s, was an enormous black one in spite of him.

  Then he stood up slowly to do what he should have done first thing. There were many of the great flower prints in a confused circle around the body. Then they went up from it along the base of the half-dome rock, two sets of tracks, but both clearly made by the same cat. He followed them up, constantly watching around and over him as he went. Beyond the rock, where the open path turned back slightly from the edge of the ravine, the two patterns changed. One went on by single prints at regular intervals, an unhurried walk. The other gathered suddenly into the clusters with wide spaces between that meant running leaps. The two trails still lay together though, and he followed them on up until, ten or fifteen yards above the rock, they separated. There he stopped and peered along the leisurely track which continued upslope, but bending a little north now, away from the ravine, and vanished nnally in the fog of snow at the edge of timber. Then he turned and traced the leaping tracks. They curved back into the upper side of the rock, and there took on the slower pattern again, and showed only here and there, a print or two at a time in the snow in the crevices. The scattered signs were enough, though. They led back around to the down-slope face of the big boulder that stood over the trail.

  Jumped him from the rock, Curt thought.

  He felt an unwilling awe of the cat that would conceive this trick before he was on the rock and then use it. There passed through his mind, quick and incomplete, like the bird fears again, many tales he’d heard of the cunning and treachery of mountain lions. They were better stories now, more real, things to remember and think about and learn from.

  Looking once more up along the climbing track that vanished in the mist and woods he said aloud, "But he changed his mind about going back for breakfast, the murdering bastard," and turned and went down again to Arthur’s body. Propping the carbine carefully against the base of the big rock, he knelt and drew the body over toward him. It turned stiffly at first, all in one piece, but then loosened a little, the right arm giving, and turned against the stretched left arm as against a pivot. Tightening his mouth a little, making a faint grimace of distaste, Curt forced the left arm down, put his own arm under the head, and turned the body onto its back. As it turned the legs twined on one another and the head fell limply back to one side over the crotch of his elbow, and stopped his breath. When he let the shoulders down into the snow, the head remained bent back and turned that way. The hood was pulled off the face, and the dark beard, stiffened with ice, jutted sideways at the sky, with beads of earth and sand frozen into it and the mouth in it a little and rigidly open.

  It was as if this first glimpse of the face made real what had happened.

  Jesus, Curt thought, half outside himself, and with something of the nature of prayer in the word too, Jesus, it even got him. He conceived Arthur, for the moment, as a creature made up of his dreams, and beyond any hazards of flesh.

  He straightened the head from the shoulders, so that the face looked up directly out of the shelter of the hood. Then, kneeling there, carefully not looking at the mouth, he gazed at the face above the beard. It was quiet and unchanging. The shadowed lids were closed over the eyes, and the long, black lashes, like a woman’s, lay curved on the high cheek bones. The lines of time and thought had grown a little fainter already, the weathered cheeks and bleached forehead smoother. It seemed, looking at that face, that even violent death must have entered slowly and easily, like a pleasant dream or a long, engrossing thought for which there was plenty of time. Grains of fine quartz sand, shallowly sunk in the skin along the left side of the nose and up onto the cheek, and the faint red scrapings they’d made were the only visible blemish. Curt reached down his bare hand and gently brushed out the sand. The daze that guarded him was broken by the act, and all at once he was filled by a rush of love and pity for the face. A few tears came, and he was no longer able to see the features clearly. He stood up slowly, and at this movement, anger rose to help him against the weakness.

  "The goddam cat," he said aloud. He wiped at his eyes ' quickly with the back of his bare hand. "The goddam, son-of-a-bitchin’ cat."

  He was a little relieved, and saw the face clearly again, and knelt and carefully worked the beads of sand and dirt out of the beard. He tried gently to close the mouth, but the jaw was set, and he couldn’t. He knelt a moment longer, just looking at the face, with nothing for his hand to do. "Don’t you worry, Art," he said. "I’ll get the son-of-a-bitch if I have to chase him to the Pacific."

  This oath, and the thought of the deed it promised, released him. He lifted the body, propping the head in the hollow of his shoulder, and staggered to his feet, and went slowly down toward the tethered stallion. Kentuck nickered softly and swung away on the end of the rope as he saw the strange shape coming, and perhaps already felt the death in it. Curt stopped and spoke to him, but still he pulled away, watching him with his head high, and the white showing above the dark center of his eyes. Curt spoke again, a little longer, and then once more began to approach. Each time the stallion strained away, he waited again, holding the long body across both arms. At last Kentuck let him come alongside, although he trembled and kept his head high and turned to watch.

  Curt lifted the body and slid it onto the saddle slowly. Holding it there with one arm, he patted Kentuck’s shoulder with his free hand. But when he judged it safe, and drew his arm from under the cowhide hood, the dead man’s head swung down within it as if it had come loose. Curt’s lips writhed back from his teeth, and quickly he propped the head again with his arm.

  After a moment he lifted the whole body down, moving as carefully as if it had been a living man badly hurt, and laid it on the ground. He removed his other mitten and stuffed it into his pocket with the first. Then he carefully worked the cowhide parka off the body, so Arthur lay in his dark blue shirt, with his long hair spread on the snow. He removed his own red mackinaw, and took the mitten and food packet and matches, and the cartridges and the knife and its sheath, out of the pockets, and made a neat little pile of them to one side. Slowly he worked the mackinaw onto Arthur, and took off his own sombrero and unwound the long black scarf from around his head, and raising the stiff collar of the mackinaw till it stood up about Arthur’s head, bound it in place with the scarf, to make a supporting sling.

  He lifted the body onto the saddle again, talking to Kentuck all the time he worked. The stallion, having stood for it once, stirred only a little. Balancing the body across the saddle so it hung there without his holding it, he began to work down the tether rope to the knot, watching the body all the time, prepared to leap and catch it if the horse jerked, and talking steadily to Kentuck, though only with his mouth. When he got to the knot, he untied it hastily, tugging and muttering, and came back up to the stallion quickly. He felt much better when he could hold the body again with one hand, while the other loosened the slip-knot and lifted the loop over Kentuck’s head. He bound the body securely to the saddle with the rope. Once he lessened the indignity he felt in the position of the body and in the act of binding it, by promising again, out loud, "I’ll get the son-of-a-bitch, Art, if I have to chase him to the Pacific."

  He knotted the end of the rope in the cinch ring, took the bear-paws off the saddle horn and dropped them beside the cowhide parka in the snow, and tied the reins to the horn, leaving them loose enough to give the stallion head-room. Then he stood there, holding the reins at the bit, trying to think of something to do or say that would make the trifle of ceremony he needed for the parting. The wind came down, bugling in the rocks and whirling the floating snow about him and the burdened stallion.

  Final1y he said, "If I’m out all winter, I will, so help me God."

  That wasn’t enough; it didn’t fill the bill. There was a long past it didn’t make up for, and a lonely journey home. Nothing else came, though. He hadn’t got close to this man while he was al
ive, and he couldn’t now.

  He picked up his sombrero, but didn’t put it on, and led Kentuck down the track to the place where the panther had sat to look back, and a little over the edge. There he released him, slapping him sharply over the rump with the hat, crying, "Get home now; get home with you."

  The big stallion plunged at the blow, but slipped in the snow and sand and old pine needles, and catching himself, went on down slowly, picking his way among the trees. The body lay firm in its ties, head down on one side and feet on the other, moving only with the roll of the saddle. Far below, the black stallion came into a bar of clear sunlight, and for a moment the red coat made a spot of bright color on the snow.

  PART TWO

  9

  The noon meal was late because the mother kept it for a long time on the back of the stove, waiting for Arthur.

  Finally she said, "We better eat, I guess. Everything’s dryin’ out," and served the plates and handed them around.