Couldn’t have been there long, either, he thought, or the wind would of straightened them out again. He watched them for a moment, and saw the grains stirring now, moving bit by bit, a few here, a few there, back into their lines with the wind.
"It’s you, you damn spook," he said aloud, eagerly, and straightened up quickly, and climbed back onto the ridge again, and turned south. He went at a dog-trot now, glancing along the edges quickly, and as far ahead as he could, and looking up and beyond that now and then too, worried by the snow cloud spreading along the ridge. Still there were no tracks.
As the first flakes of the snow began to move across him, he said aloud, "So you made it, you lucky bastard. But it won’t cover for you yet."
The snow thickened, though. He couldn’t see anything distinctly in it, and had to go more slowly, peering to find the white edges, sometimes waiting out the heavier flurries in order to see at all. And again, as it became suddenly darker in the blown snow, time jumped away from him, all the way to the edge of evening.
"Oh, you lucky devil," he said. "But it’s not done yet, you son of a bitch," he vowed angrily. "This goddamned ledge can’t go all the way to Mexico. You’ll have to show some time."
Then, after all, in his anxiety, in the ever-thickening pall of the snow, he almost missed what he was looking for. It was only chance that he saw it. A gust of wind uncovered it for a moment, and before his eyes lost it again, he guessed what it must be. Standing there peering toward it, waiting for another break in the whirling of flakes about him, which had already whitened the parka, and now was beginning to hold on the rocks too, he felt the little fear again, the cold, slight thrill of being outwitted, as he realized that what he’d seen wasn’t at all what he’d been watching for. He’d been watching right along the edge for the flower prints and the groove of a tail drag. These marks were far down from the edge and just holes in the snow. The wind broke the snowing open for him again, and he saw them clearly, only one
group, all hunched together, and twenty feet or more below the bare granite ledge.
He went down to them, partly blinded by the snow driving against his face. It was the cat, all right. In the bottom of the little pits the legs had made, he could still see the broken flowers of the pads. He couldn’t see out of the snowing in any direction now. He worked on down slowly, and found another cluster of marks, and then a third, and a fourth, each many feet farther down. Then the incline lessened, and the tracks closed a little. He drew up the hood to shelter his eyes, and followed the descending clusters, forcing himself to go slowly and carefully in spite of his impatience, and his fear of the storm and the coming darkness.
"You can’t go any farther than I can in this," he said aloud, but now less as a threat than to encourage himself. Farther down the slope, where the wind-bent timber closed in again, the tracks became single and evenly spaced, and now and then a short crescent of tail-drag showed. The cat was sure of itself again, trusting the cover of the storm, and the bare ridge and the long leaps behind it.
"Give me one look, just one," Curt said softly, half exulting again, but continued to work his way carefully down among the trees, pausing and peering, and sometimes flaring angrily inside against the snow and all the hiding places which made him go so slowly and kept him from seeing any distance around him. It was quieter down there though. The wind passed high above him, and the snow fell gently under it, making only occasional mild eddies.
Toward the bottom of the ridge, the snow grew rapidly deeper. The cat had floundered several times, leaving long, deep belly troughs, with dark holes in them where its legs had sunk.
Been snowing here all day, Curt thought. On and off, anyway.
And a little later he thought, And all night too.
The cat marks floundered on, though, going as straight down into the valley as they could among the trees. No tricks now, he thought. Thinks it’s clean away. Just traveling. It’ll hole up by dark, and lick its scratches. When the snow came almost to his hips, and it was difficult just to push through it, he stopped long enough to lace on the bear-paws. Then he went down again, clumsily, with the little side-swing of each leg the bear-paws made necessary, but even so, faster and more easily.
The trail led straight across the high valley between the two ranges, first through a reaching peninsula of timber, and then across a wide, open meadow, where the snow was blown into sharp, curving drifts over the earth humps and along the turns of the creek that meandered south through the middle of it. The creek was frozen over and then covered with snow.
By the time Curt came among trees again, on the west edge of the meadow, real darkness was spreading into the gray gloom of the snowing. The snow was the deepest yet there, and light and evenly spread. The cat had dragged badly in it, and floundered from side to side, hunting for solid footing underneath. Even in the dusk and among the trees, the big trail was still easy to follow, going up through the terraced pines in long, irregular switchbacks. Curt was encouraged, thinking how he gained here, going nearly straight up from point to point of the cat’s slow zigzags. He climbed as fast as he could, but it was exhausting work. The webs sank in, and a little burden of the snow had to be lifted and shaken off at each step, and often he had to dig into the white slope to keep from slipping. He was breathing quickly and loudly, and beginning to feel shaky and a little lightheaded from the steep pitch and the height, and painfully empty from his long fast.
Also, as the darkness increased, he began to mistrust his eyes. The burdened trees loomed ominously all about him, and sometimes seemed to be closing in. He couldn’t be sure of distances among them. He was high enough now, too, for broken gusts of wind to reach down to him sometimes, whirling the snow and moving the trees jerkily, so that he stopped several times, with the carbine held ready against the shadowy jumping. The snow was falling more heavily all the time, and he had to give up cutting across the cat’s long detours for fear of losing the trail altogether.
He’d hardly been thinking at all for a long time now, only watching, when all at once, like a warning from outside, as sharply as if somebody had called to him, he thought, Cats can see in the dark.
The thought stopped him at once, right where he was. Mountain lions can see in the dark, of course, he thought. They hunt at night all the time.
He was almost as much alarmed because he had gone so long without thinking of this obvious fact as he was by the fact itself. His confidence was shaken again, as it had been shaken when he came onto the first ridge, and couldn’t see the cat or any tracks. Now it was getting to where he had to be almost within reach of a tree to pick it out of the moving darkness of snow and nightfall and wind together. But the cat could see him as well as ever, if it was in the right place. The snow would blind it a little, perhaps, but hardly more than in daylight. Again he quickly remembered stories of the malice and cleverness of mountain lions, and also what the tracks had told him at first hand about this one, doubling back and waiting above the trail for Arthur, and then gaining all that time using the granite ridge. In the darkness, his mind made very clear pictures, too. He saw Arthur’s dead face, the way it had looked when he first turned him over. Then he saw Arthur coming up the trail under Cathedral Rock, alive, but not watching and not thinking about what he was doing either, and the cat crouched on the ledge above him, working its hind legs carefully, nervously under itself for the leap, the tip of its long, serpent tail slowly curling and uncurling. At once, after that, he imagined it preparing in the same way now for him, on a ledge he couldn’t even see.
After a moment, though, he made himself go on up. He had sworn to get that cat. He had repeatedly made a vow to a dead brother for whom he had wept his first tears since he was a little kid that he would get that cat if he had to follow it all the way to the ocean. And he had said something to the little Welshy about a lion skin too. It had been a foolish boast, but he’d made it, and when he thought of going back without the hide now, the boast became a vow more compelling than the one t
o Arthur, because others had heard him make it. If he stopped here, and the snow kept falling, he wouldn’t even be able to make a guess, by morning, where the cat had gone. He knew this range. He knew exactly where he was on it now. If he could just keep tracking until the cat holed up, or set a clear course from the ridge, he could guess his way back onto the track in the morning.
He had to stoop to see the trail now, and he climbed more and more slowly and guardedly. He was nearing the real timberline. The trees became smaller and smaller around him. He couldn’t really see them, but he knew what they looked like, low and flat and one-sided, with loose fibered, twisted trunks, like sagebrush, the tough misshapen little dwarfs of height and cold and wind and rocky footholds. The darkness seemed to be holding oil to be giving him a little more time up in the open among them, but the wind was constant and icy, and the snow it carried pelted him like fine shot.
At last he came up onto the dark rock ledges of the crest. The wind was so strong he had to stoop against it, and sometimes hold onto the rock to steady himself. It blew the snow at him like weapons, in long spear lines out of the dark northwest. He couldn’t see the tracks at all now, but only make out the long, blackish shape of the wind-swept rock m the snow. This was where he had to quit. The long rock would have to do as a starting point in the morning.
Standing still for a moment to think about that, he felt the sweat in the hollows of his knees and running slowly from his arm pits down along his ribs, although his face and his trigger hand were numb. Also he realized for the first time how tightly he was holding the carbine, and the tiny, glancing tricks of their own his tired eyes were playing on him.
When his breath was evener, he moved slowly along the edge of the dark rock, feeling with his bare hand for the tracks his eyes kept making in the snow when they weren’t really there. Sometimes he got down on his hands and knees and put his face close to the snow because he couldn’t trust the numb hand either. He was luckier on this rock, though. He’d started south along the edge, because he couldn’t see at all going north, with the blizzard in his face, and the cat must have made its choice the same way. He found the tracks going off the south point of the rock. He made sure of them, taking off his left mitten and trying them with the fingertips of his warmer hand. There was no question about them. Through the thin sifting of new snow, he could feel the little pattern of hollows and ridges made by the pads.
You weren’t far ahead, you cocky bastard, he thought, to leave them that fresh. And sure you’d done it, too, just walking off, like taking a Sunday stroll
He stood up and put on his mittens, both of them now, and leaning over, bracing his back against the wind, peered south down the funnel of the streaming darkness. He could see nothing but the ghostly, slanting spears of the snow.
"We’re not done yet, you murdering bastard," he said aloud, addressing the enviable panther his mind made, which was curled up, its nose buried in its own warmth, in some sheltered crevice not very far south.
He went slowly back down among the tough little trees. He fell several times, because it was impossible to judge the pitch and because of his trembling knees. When the trees were bigger and closer together, and the wind was more a roaring overhead than a power, he hunted, almost by touch, and with the dogged overcarefulness of exhaustion, for just the kind of tree he wanted. He hunted all in one direction, south, and he counted his steps. He had taken forty-eight deep, dragging steps which he hoped would still show in the morning, when he found the tree. It was a fir tree, tall and thick for that altitude, and it stood flat sided against a low cliff. The snow had drifted deeply below the rock, burying the tree far up. It had drifted into a firm wall too, where the wind had sucked down around the rock, a curved wall with the tree inside it.
He worked his way into the fir until he could hold its main stem. Clinging there, he laid the carbine across two branches, took off his mittens and stuffed them into his pocket, and slowly, because his fingers were stiff and cold and tired, unharnessed the bear-paws and strapped them together, and bound them to the joint of a branch. Then, pulling the hood far forward over his face and holding the carbine, muzzle up, against his shoulder, one hand covering the trigger guard against twigs, he let himself slowly, spirally, down through the branches onto the bed of old needles. No wind at all got down there and no snow. The needles and twigs at the foot of the rock had only a thin powdering of snow on them. It was very good to be down there, and able to give up until daylight came again. It was as good as a homecoming after a long time away.
He leaned the carbine carefully against the rock, memorizing where it was by hand. Lying there on one elbow, under the lowest branches, he drew the knife and the container of matches out of his right pocket, and took the knife out of its sheath. Holding them, he carefully went over in his mind the turns he had made coming down through the branches. Then he lit a match and began to scratch with the point of the knife on the rock wall beside the carbine. The rock was granite, and made a fine tinsel glittering in the light of the match. It was so hard that only a faint scratch appeared on it, no matter how he dug at it. He burned six matches while he scratched an arrow pointing north that he could really see, and eight more matches to make a little 48 above it.
In the thick darkness again, he closed the match container and put it back in his pocket, and pulled the oilskin packet out of his other pocket, and unfolded it carefully on the needles between him and the rock. There were six slices of bread in the packet, his fingers told him, and a roll of stripped jerky as long as the packet and as solid as a cut off a side of bacon.
Three meals at least, he thought. Maybe four. And I’ll need it more by tomorrow night than I do now.
He allowed himself one slice of the bread, and three of the thin strips of jerky. There was butter on the bread, and the butter tasted wonderful. He was very grateful to Grace for putting butter on the bread. He ate the buttered bread slowly, a small bite at a time. Then he chewed the jerky even more slowly, not swallowing it until it practically ran down by itself. The chewiness of it was pleasing, and the juice it made in his mouth was very good. It was salty, though. He’d only chewed a little of it before he was thirsty, and realized that he’d been thirsty for a long time.
When he’d finished the jerky, he carefully rolled up the rest of the food in the oilskin again, and pushed it well down into the left pocket of the parka. He returned the knife to its sheath, and slid it back into the other pocket. Then he began to draw snow, a handful at a time, in from under the edge of the branches and press it together. He worked at it patiently until he had a dripping ice ball that nearly filled his hand. He stretched out on his back, letting his body feel its weariness completely for the first time, smiling a little at its twitching, which once or twice even jerked his heels on the slick needles, and sucked the ice ball slowly down to nothing. The snow water had a faint, stinging taste of granite and dead needles, but it washed down the saltiness of the jerky, and slaked his thirst enough to let his body rest better. He wiped his hands dry on his pants, and reached inside the parka and got the pad of cigarette papers and the little sack of tobacco out of his shirt pocket. He had trouble rolling the cigarette by touch, and it came out nearly empty at one end and limp in the middle. Holding it between his lips by the empty end, he returned the papers and tobacco to his shirt pocket, and got out one match, and put the match container back too. Then he lit the cigarette, defending the flame of the match with both hands, although there was not a breath of air to move it, and carefully pinched the match out, and lay back again, drawing slowly and deeply on the cigarette. Its glow made a surprising amount of light in the closed darkness. The shining points of the granite appeared faintly at each drag and he could see every needle of the bough above him. He blew the smoke out against the base of the rock, and held the cigarette there too, when he wasn’t drawing on it. The smoke thinned out to nothing before it rose very far along the granite. He was sure that not the least whiff of it could get all the way up through t
he tree and the snow. He considered that carefully. He was so tired that he had to consider with care and determination every detail of each act he performed.
When the cigarette burned his thumb, he extinguished the limp butt of it against the rock, put on his mittens, rolled onto his side, with his back in the shallow cave at the base of the cliff, and drew his knees up into the long shirt of the parka. Lying so, he pillowed his head on one arm, and almost at once fell deeply asleep.
23
He was kneeling beside a small fire, with his hands held close over it. He was trying to warm himself, and at the same time trying hard to remember something. It disturbed him greatly that he could not remember, because he was alone in the middle of a darkness in which not a single star or mountain shape could be seen. He was lost, and he believed that what he couldn’t remember had to do with where he was, or with some danger which threatened him there.
Then he saw that he wasn’t alone. Arthur was standing on the other side of the fire, looking down across it at him. It comforted him enormously, after the first start of fear at seeing him so unexpectedly, to have Arthur there too.
"It's Joe Sam. You know that, don’t you?" Arthur said.
Curt didn’t understand this remark, but he knew it was important. Arthur spoke loudly for him, and very seriously, even urgently, as if he intended the remark to be a warning. Curt looked at him intently, trying to understand what he meant, and then he was no longer comforted by his presence. There was something bad the matter with Arthur. His eyes weren’t open at all. Curt had mistaken the blue, shadowy lids in the deep sockets for open eyes looking at him. Also, his face was too hollow and still, and there were four long, deep scratches across it, diagonally from the left temple to his mouth, and his beard was full of twigs and clots of earth and yellow willow leaves.
The Track of the Cat Page 30