22
Far below, Kentuck moved into the shadow of the pines again. The red coat across his saddle darkened and vanished, and did not reappear. When a minute had passed in the increasing light, in the slow settling of the flakes, and nothing else had moved, Curt drew a deep breath, let it out slowly, and looked down at his bare hand holding the sombrero, as if surprised to see it. Then he turned and climbed back up to where the cowhide parka lay on the snow, with the snow-shoes beside it, and the little pile of things he had taken out of the red coat. He laid the sombrero down carefully, like something brittle, and picked up the parka. He spread the parka in front of him between his two hands and looked at it. He moved the torn fiap on the shoulder of it with his forefinger. Except for the fierce black moustache, which seemed alive by itself, his face was that of a sleep walker.
Finally he slipped the parka on over his head, knotted the belt around his waist, and drew up the hood. The coat was very heavy, but the sleek, quilted lining felt warm and kind. He didn’t like the hood up though, blinding him on both sides. After a moment he pushed it back and let it hang between his shoulders. Then in the same way, slowly and dreamily, he stuffed the oilskin packet into his left pocket, slid the knife into its sheath and dropped it and the cartridges and the matches into the right pocket, slung the bear-paws onto his back, and drew on his mittens. The black sombrero with the rattlesnake band was left alone on the snow. He picked it up, bending stiffly because of the bear-paws, and stood holding it and staring at it as he had stared at the parka. Finally he rolled it until he could hold it in one hand, and turned and looked down through the stone gate again, at the edge where he had sent Kentuck over. Once the wind moved, making soft flutings in the rocks above him, and the pines down there stirred and whispered and dropped clots of snow, which broke and thinned away into little veils over the ravine. There was no other sound or motion. Once more he took a deep breath and sighed, as if reluctant to move, and then he turned and started up the trail.
He stopped under the wall of the Cathedral Rock and pushed the rolled sombrero into a crevice in the granite, thinking, from the surface of his closed mind, and without interest, I’ll get it when I come back.
He went on up to where the carbine leaned against the rock, and picked it up and stood looking at it. Finally he took off his right mitten and stuffed it into the left pocket of the parka, beside the oilskin packet. Then he stood staring again, at the marks of the scuflle in the snow, with sand and brittle manzanita leaves strewn over them, and the long, bare place across the center where Arthur’s body had melted through. Finally he looked slowly around at the confused circle of the big cat prints, like broken flowers.
"No matter what color you are," he said softly. "No matter what color, or how big, or how long it takes."
Once more the oath released him. He cradled the carbine in his right arm, and began to climb again. Out of old habit, for he wasn’t really thinking about anything now, he climbed slowly but steadily, keeping each step short enough to be easy, and flat-footed and a trifle pigeon-toed, so that the soft pacs gripped firmly in the snow or on stone. The same habit made him walk carefully beside the tracks of the cat and not in them, and glance up ahead every now and then, to guard against ambush, and to be sure the trail made no big swing within sight. Unless the cat had been badly hurt, it would be a long hunt. He’d been sure of that as soon as he’d seen the long fork of the trail going up and north, and taking its time. The thing was to keep the bastard moving until you got a good shot; don’t give him a chance to rest, don’t give him a chance to hunt. Keep him feeling the pressure all the time. If he’d been hurt bad, it would be different, of course. You might come up with him in an hour or two. It all depended on how much of a head start he had. And he might have been hurt bad, at that. There were still flecks of blood showing sometimes between the flower prints. Maybe Arthur had hit him with that one shot. But you couldn’t count on that. You had to count on a long hunt, and take it slow and steady, just keeping the pressure on the bastard all the time, only keeping your eyes open too, because if he was hurt so he couldn’t keep running, he’d be waiting for you somewhere, up on a ledge, as he had for Arthur.
His mind didn’t really consider these possibilities, which were all familiar from many hunts. It merely tabulated them, turned the tracking over to his body, and closed around the little fears and the flights about the black panther, and about finding Arthur that way, and having to send him home face down over a saddle. The slow, steady motion of his climbing lulled him, and the floating mists slowly parting above him and the diffused radiance that filtered through them, made it like climbing in a dream on a mountain that wasn’t real.
Even in the upper woods, the dream persisted for a while. The light was only a half light, and the shadows of the trees were only half shadows, the moving vapors blending and transforming them. The sleep thinned out when the track of the cat disappeared among the trees up ahead, or when a sudden sound of movement near him demanded attention, but his eyes quickly found the track again, always farther up and a little farther north, or at once explained the interruption: a bough had dropped its burden of snow and sprung back higher, or a junco had launched off a chinkapin twig and flitted away downslope, and his attention withdrew from the world again. He had no sense at all of the time that was passing, either. It was transformed like the shapes of the mist, seeming now to be none at all, and now to be half a lifetime, a kind of sum of all the winter hunting he had ever done.
As he approached the crest of the first ridge, however, the timber thinned out, and the wind, drawing down at him out of the northwest, grew colder and stronger. It broke the mist open in many places, making little, spasmodic blizzards over an acre or two of the mountain, and clearing the air between them and after them. Where it had passed, the light entered in full strength, and was painfully bright on the snow. The cold and the dazzle fretted him, and after two of the small whirling blizzards had sucked over him, nicking his face and making him close his eyes and bow his head, he drew up the hood of the parka, and that woke him still more. His eyes didn’t trust themselves to watch alone in such a narrow range. He saw too that the blown snow was powdering over the cat’s tracks, and felt a little alarm, and a need to climb faster. So it was that he saw the cat, where he might have missed it half an hour before.
The trail led him out to the edge of a deep ravine, and then turned almost straight up toward the crest. The trees below him in the ravine, and over on the far wall too, were larger than those about him, all old, twisted growth in an insecure rooting of sand and boulders among patches of brush. He paused on the edge, with no purpose except to look down, and the tiny movement on the far side, high up, near the head of the ravine, a movement less than that of a fly on a window rubbing its wings, caught his eye. In an instant he was wide awake. The cat was distinct in tiny, black silhouette against the snow, just below the skyline. It must have moved, for the movement was what he’d seen first, but now it was perfectly still, and broadside to him, though above him. The north wing was higher than the one he stood on, with a bald ridge, clear of timber and broken only by shapes of rock. He believed the cat was standing with its head turned at him, but he couldn’t be sure. It was too far across the airy upper spread of the ravine. The sudden pain of guilt and loss his mind let out into him moved him as if his insides were being twisted, but he didn’t know it. He believed the catch in his breath came from excitement, for he was trembling, as he slowly turned the carbine in his hands. The weakness angered him.
God Almighty, he thought, I’m like a kid on his first time out, and forced himself to move slowly and attentively. Even so a tiny dancing remained in his hands and his knees, and there wasn’t time to wait it out.
Shaking like a goddam girl, he thought, and didn’t raise the carbine to attempt a standing shot, but let himself down behind it instead, bracing his left elbow upon his raised left knee and bringing his eye over behind the sight in the same movement.
He
’s above me, he thought, and the wind’s a little down-canyon, though mostly from him to me, and made allowance for those variations even while he was drawing the breath to hold.
The cat moved, advancing a step or two and starting to turn up. Curt held himself with difficulty, and didn’t make the quick useless shot he wanted to. The cat stopped again. He was sure it was looking across at him now. He let his breath half out and held it, lifting his sight again toward the center he had chosen, just above and ahead of the shoulder, and slowly squeezing the trigger to slip home just when the least tip of the sharp front sight came there.
Only a guess how far, he thought. Hard to guess over a canyon, like this. The cat and the tip of the sight drew together.
The cat moved again, though only slightly, just as the trigger’s tension broke. While Curt was still enveloped in the roar of the report, the tiny black cat on the point of the sight jerked visibly, a twin jerk, it seemed to him, with that of the butt in his shoulder.
Hit, the black bastard, he thought, like a white flash of joy in his head. But at once the flash dimmed while the report was spreading, for the tiny cat turned above the sight and went up in leaps toward the place where the north ridge became the mountain.
Moved, the bastard, he thought fiercely, while he was leaping to his feet and springing the lever of the carbine, and lifting it to his shoulder again. The echoes fired back the first shot from the far wall, twice sharply, once more slowly and thickly, and finally, just as he thought, Nearly stern on, and bobbing; high, left, and come down to meet the jump, in a final, deep, prolonged roaring below. The carbine leapt again, but while the blow of the new report still closed his ears, and without a hitch in its smooth bounding, the cat became an instant hair upon the bald summit, and was gone. The thin receding scream of the ricochet went into the sky behind it.
Clean miss, the bastard, the goddam bastard, Curt raged, pumping a new cartridge home with the words. But then he held the carbine lowered, and the ravine returned his fire multiplied, exactly as before, two sharp, one muffled and slower, and the roaring like a rockslide down out of sight. Still hearing the ricochet, like a white rocket streak up across the black roaring, he knew there had been none after the first shot.
The thunder dimmed away among the boulders below, and he thought, more slowly, Maybe fleshed it at that. Or got sand, he warned himself.
He turned up along the edge of the ravine, walking quickly, and sometimes half running, replacing the used cartridges as he climbed, and then carrying the carbine free in his right hand to lengthen his stride. He didn’t even look at the tracks now, but only quickly picked out his footing ahead. If he didn’t catch sight of the cat at the summit, he could pick up the trail where it had gone over.
Gained on the bastard all the way, he exulted, and it’s still going up. It’s hurt. It wants to rest. No rest, you black bastard, he exulted.
The exultation sank away as he saw what he’d been thinking all this time. Not black, he corrected himself. It only looked black that far away and against snow. He was troubled, nonetheless, by a swift, superstitious passage of the black flight, and by half a notion that this cat wasn’t even the one he had started to track; that this one was black, and was leading him, with a purpose like a man’s, a thinking enemy’s, into a trap. He didn’t stop climbing, but there was a moment when he wanted to stop, when something in him wanted to turn and go back down.
"Black painter," he said loudly and scornfully, against this impulse. "Didn’t you see it jump, you son of a bitch? It can feel lead, all right. And it’s running. It’s hurt, and it’s running. Black painter, my eye."
He went on up, now striding swiftly from rock to rock under the snow, now half-running where the footing was better. From up on top, with only thin timber all around, he’d be able to spot the cat a long way off. He might even get another shot. At any rate, no tricks were going to do it any good. From a lookout like that, he could see the whole map of the range. He could guess in one look what it was up to, whether he saw the cat or only its trail. Then it wouldn’t be just a stem chase, a long dogging. They would begin to match wits, and that was his game, not the cat’s. You’ll have to be a spook then, you bastard, he thought, exulting.
Suddenly the bright snow he climbed on was darkened. The light just faded away downward, behind him, and the whole ridge came under a shadow. He glanced up, and saw the new snow mist reaching up out of the ridge like smoke. It was coming up without a break in it. The farther west he looked, the thicker and more shapeless it was. The wind felt colder under the shadow too, and heavier.
It won’t help you now, though, you black butcher, he thought savagely. It’s way up still. It won’t snow for hours. Maybe it won’t snow at all, he thought. Just the tail end of the storm blowing over. It can’t snow forever, this early.
Nevertheless, he felt hurried. He realized suddenly that he had no real idea how long he’d been out, and then it felt late under the shadow of the cloud, past the middle of the afternoon. The sun had been way west of the ridge, that was sure. The arms of the snow mist had cut it off long before they came over him. They were just coming over him now, for that matter.
When he came among the last, stunted, wind-bent trees, with all their branches reaching east like tattered banners, he went up carefully, just the same, with the carbine held ready. He let himself down onto his knees against the granite backbone of the ridge, and crawled up slowly, not to appear suddenly against the sky, and at the very top crawled on his belly. If it was really so late, if there was really snow in the new darkness, it was all the more important not to miss a shot now, and not to make himself a running target by carelessness if he had a chance for a sitting one. He eased his way up to where he could see all along that end of the ridge. There was only the long, gray stone, swept almost clean of snow by the wind, and west of him, clearly separate from here, the big range, with the snow much deeper on it, its upper fields an unbroken white, and over the big range, and west of it as far as he could see, a dark, moving sky of snow clouds. Here and there the white wall of the big range was already veiled by falling snow bent a little southward by the wind.
He stood up then, and came onto the ridge with one of the leaning trees behind him, so he wouldn’t show. From there he could see the whole long blade of the ridge, clear to the sky on the north, and even farther south, two or three miles, perhaps, to where a long dragging screen of snow already falling came through a pass in the big range, and, sweeping slowly up the one he stood on; shut off everything beyond. He could see down the ridge on the west side too, clear into heavier timber and the whitened forest on the valley floor. The cat wasn’t in sight anywhere, nor was there a single track that he could see anywhere in the snow below him.
For a moment the cat became more than natural again. There was no cover on the ridge, and there couldn’t have been time for it to get down into timber below. With nothing there, with only the wind streaming over the rock ledges, and far across, only half seen as his eyes searched nearer him, the gigantic, slowly changing drama of the storm in the big range, it was as if the cat had turned the joke on him after all, and really vanished, dissolved, become wind itself.
Then he thought, It wouldn’t go down yet. It's deep snow down there, hard going, and a deep trail behind him. It’s gone north, the other side of the height of the ridge.
Leaning a little against the strong wind, feeling it fill the hood and belly it out, he went north swiftly on the good rock footing, and down toward the head of the ravine, where the cat had come up. He found the track there, already dim with blown snow, but it only led him back up onto the trackless rock. On the ridge again, he stood for a moment, looking all about quickly, and then went north once more, half running. At the skyline the granite shelved down steeply, and only a little below him the snow had banked against the ledges. There were no tracks in it. He let himself down to the edge of the snow, and then followed it around to the west and south again until he was opposite the tree he had first
stood up against. The snow edge wasn’t broken anywhere, except by gray rock or the curving blade shapes the wind had given it. Once again, for a moment, the cat formed and was able to vanish in his mind, and its first form was big as a horse and black. Then first the white snow showed faintly through it, and then the twisted tree, and finally even the gray ledges, before it was not there at all. His waking mind, now angry and hurried, pressed the brief vision aside at once, as less than the enemy shapes a child makes for himself in a dark room.
"Must have gone south, then," he said aloud. "Nowhere else it could have gone."
With a moment of fear, half made up of the time he had already lost on the ridge, he thought, But the bastard must have plenty left to move that fast. He couldn’t have been hurt too bad; not bad enough to do any good.
He climbed back onto the ridge, and turned south where he met his own tracks. With the wind behind him, or quartering down over his right shoulder, so he felt it finger in now and then through the tear in the parka, he was warmer, and moved faster and more easily, and saw more clearly. He pushed the hood back impatiently, so he could see all around him, and traveled quickly along the crest of the ridge, watching for any place among the ledges where the cat might have crouched to hide or to wait for him, and scanning the edge of the snow on both sides.
Twice he saw breaks in the stone where the cat might have hidden, and held the carbine ready, and worked up to them carefully. In the first there was a little slanting drift of snow the wind had dropped over the edge, but no mark in it.
The second was sheltered by an overhang, and the stone floor was bare. Standing above it, and looking south as far as he could see, without finding any break in the snow below the ridge, he thought, The bastard waited here till I went up the north end. It has to be that. Then he could of got clear down there where it’s snowing before I got back around.
He went down and around and into the flat, long, shallow cave, and stooped and looked carefully at the thin scattering of sand over the granite, and the lines of sand caught in the crevices. There was nothing that was clearly a track, but in three places there were breaks, the sand spread a little and across its natural line, as wind couldn’t have moved it.
The Track of the Cat Page 29