The Track of the Cat

by Walter van Tilburg Clark

  He was surprised to hear himself asking, in a worried voice, "Where is the wooden Indian?" He hadn’t intended to ask any such foolish question. Joe Sam wasn’t wooden.

  "No," Arthur said. "I killed him. I had to," and opened his eyes. They were enormous and frightened. He stared down at Curt, and said, "Years ago," and held out his hands for Curt to look at, as if that would explain what he meant. Curt saw that his hands were red to the wrists, and that the red was fresh, and dripped between his fingers.

  "It was the painter," Arthur said unhappily.

  That’s it, Curt thought. The painter’s wooden, and that’s just paint on his hands too.

  "Don’t say that, Curt," Arthur cried, so suddenly, and in such a terrified voice, that Curt leapt up. Then he was alone, and in complete darkness. Even the little fire was gone.

  "What?" he cried anxiously, but his voice was all alone, and closed in against him, and thick. But he knew what the danger was now. It was himself, not Arthur, the panther was going to kill. Arthur had somehow escaped after all, but he, Curt, was lying down there against the fir tree, under the boulder, and the black panther was waiting for him on the snow above. It couldn’t get down to him, but it knew he was there, and it knew he’d have to come out sooner or later. It was going to wait for him. He could hear it sniffing up there, at the edge of the snow around the tree. Then, all at once, he was greatly relieved.

  “Not black, the son-of-a-bitch," he said aloud, and remembered everything clearly.

  He lit a match just the same, and felt much better to see the fir bough over him, and the carbine leaning against the rock, and the arrow and the 48 scratched beside it, just as they had appeared by the last glow of the cigarette the night before. To see the whole little hollow just as it had been, completely separated the dream from what had really happened. He still couldn’t entirely free himself of the feeling that the cat was waiting for him above, but he knew better than to believe it. There wasn’t a sound up there, when he really listened, and besides, the snow wouldn’t hold the bastard up.

  "I’ll really put something in the old belly this morning,” he said aloud. "I’ll have to chase the son-of-a-bitch again, God knows how far."

  He stretched himself, and worked his shoulders inside the parka and his feet inside the pacs, doing everything he could in that low, narrow space, to break the cold that had hold of him, and to reduce his stale weariness. He didn’t spend long at it, though. He had a feeling that it might be hours after daybreak already, up there on top of the snow, and if it was, the cat would have a long start on him. As soon as his body felt usable again, he got out the food packet and ate two slices of the bread and butter and six of the strips of jerky. After that he packed two snowballs and sucked them down to nothing. He considered making and smoking a cigarette, thinking, Take your time and feel right; gets there fastest in the end, but decided against it after all.

  Waste too much time, he thought. Gotta get up there and take a look around.

  He didn’t admit to himself his other objection, that he didn’t want to make a smell of tobacco smoke down there in his hole.

  He rolled the food packet up again, stuffed it into the left pocket of the parka, and took the carbine, covering the trigger with his hand again, and started slowly up through the branches. At first he began to repeat to himself, "Forty-eight steps north," but shortly he couldn’t spare the breath for it, and then he wasn’t even thinking it. It was much harder going up than it had been coming down. The limber branches wouldn’t support him very well, and the ones above kept pressing him down, so that he had to squirm among them at each whorl to discover an opening through which he could get up to the next level. He didn’t allow himself to curse or thrash in his irritation, however, because he wanted to hear anything there was to hear, and he didn’t want to make any loud sound himself, in case there should be something up there listening. When the trunk of the fir became noticeably smaller, and he began, vaguely, to see the shapes of the branches around him, he went still more slowly, and stopped after every gain to listen. He also worried a little now, about how he could get the carbine free in all that limber tangle, if he had to use it.

  He bumped his head on the snowshoes before he saw them, and was briefly alarmed because they were so much harder than the branches, and yet were dangling free. Then he was alarmed because he had found them there, so far down under cover. A lot of new snow must have fallen in the night. He wondered if the tree would support him far enough up its tapering trunk to get out of the snow. He worked the webs free of their branch and slung them around his neck.

  I’ll be breakin’ out any time now, he thought. Gotta keep around against the rock as much as I can. Have one side of me covered anyway.

  He worked his way around and up through one more whorl, and then, suddenly, a shower of snow poured down on him, a lot of it falling coldly inside the hood. When it stopped falling, his head was up out of the snow, and he could see clearly. For a moment he clung there, motionless with alarm because he had been exposed so suddenly, and without time to prepare himself. There was nothing in sight, however, except the slope of deep snow and the terraces of snow-laden trees, and the new snow falling, but in big, quiet flakes now, coming straight down. He was relieved about time, too, for there was only a blue, very early daylight among the trees.

  It was impossible to get his bear-paws on in the tree, and when he reached a foot out into the bastion of snow, it broke up and fell away through the branches below him in little, whispering showers. Finally, furious after struggling against something like that, something with no weight and no solidity, which crumbled away at every touch, he scrambled recklessly up on the boulder side until he could get hold on the edge of the rock, under the snow. He flailed some of the snow off the top with the stock of the carbine, and threw the carbine up, well back from the edge, and scrambled up himself, pitching forward into the snow. The short fury, and the little triumph that came with getting off the tree onto the solid granite, did him good, washing out the last of the closed-in dream notions, and leaving him wide awake and out free in the daylight.

  He crawled up safely away from the edge, knelt in the snow his body had packed, and laced on the bear-paws. Then he put on his mittens, recovered the carbine from the bottom of the deep, carbine-shaped well it had made in the snow, and brushed it off, and cradled it in his arm, and turned north. Going as straight as the trees would let him, and making his steps short, to match the tired, plowing steps he had taken the night before, he counted the forty-eight, and stopped and looked around. There were no signs of tracks. The new snow and the wind had smoothed the mountainside perfectly, save for the curving dykes around the trees. This didn’t matter too much for his start, but it worried him about the chances of the cat having left any kind of a trace. His only hope was that it had holed up for the night, and broken a fresh trail out this morning, a trail he could get to before any wind came up, or the new storm filled it.

  He turned upslope, and climbed as rapidly as he could with the webs sinking a foot into the snow at every step. He couldn’t see far through the heavy, floating snowfall, and everything within the circle of his vision was changed by daylight and the new depth of the snow. The dwarf trees at timberline, when he came among them, were only a field of small, white domes, and some of them didn’t even make domes, but had vanished completely under wind-flattened drifts. It was easy to tell when he reached the fish-shaped ridge, though. There was snow on it too, now, but the wind had kept it shallow, and he could kick through to the dark rock anywhere on it.

  He turned south and began to move faster, the shallow snow supporting him at once, and the light, steady, south-eastward suck of the summit wind helping him along. He still moved in a small, snowed-in circle by himself, though. The trees below him faded down quickly into a white bank, and when he looked out straight above them, there was only the gray-streaked curtain of falling snow. He could barely make out the constant, gray wall of shadow above him on the right, that to
ld him that he hadn’t got quite to the top of the ridge the night before. He watched the snow in front of the webs attentively, until he felt sure he’d gone well past the place where he’d found the tracks in the evening, and after that he watched all around him, the best he could, for any remnant of a mark in the snow that the wind hadn’t made.

  It was hard, though, in that small, all white world, to keep his mind working with his eyes. The whiteness everywhere made as good a screen for his memory to work on as the darkness of night or of his shelter under the fir tree, and the steady drifting away before him of the falling flakes was hypnotic. He almost missed the retreat in the ledge above him because his eyes saw it inattentively through Gwen in the yellow blouse sitting across the kitchen table from him, and coffee and hash-brown potatoes and ham in front of him. He had gone several yards beyond it before his mind, changing to show him Arthur’s body in the red coat going down over the edge across the saddle, let him know for a moment what his eyes had just seen.

  "Geez," he said aloud. "Now who’s dreamin’?" and the little fears stirred in him again.

  "Keep your eyes open, stupid," he warned himself. "The bastard could of had you any time the last half hour."

  And then the fears stirred once more because he realized that he had no trustworthy impression of the passage of time either. It might have been a half hour, but it might just as well have been ten minutes, or two hours.

  "We’ll take a look," he said aloud and boldly, and turned up toward the cave, watching it attentively, and holding the carbine ready. It showed at first only as a long, narrow, blue shadow in the snowing, almost at the end of his vision. As he came closer, it darkened, and he could see that it was larger than he’d thought, because he’d only seen the higher south end of it. The drifting snow had made a long, curving dyke in front of the north end. He couldn’t tell how deep the cave was, and he climbed at it slowly, stopping every few feet and trying to peer into the shadow behind the dyke. When he could see clear to the back of the open end, and knew it was empty, he circled a little to the south to make his final approach at an angle that would let him see in behind the drift. There was nothing in the cave.

  When he had made sure of this, he climbed over the drift and knelt and worked in under the ledge. There was a sifting of sand on the stone floor, and again he believed that the sand had been disturbed as the wind couldn’t have disturbed it.

  "He was here, all right, damn him," he said aloud and cheerfully.

  He laid the carbine down and took off the bear-paws, and used one of them to shovel out the snow fill and let more light into the low, sheltered, north end. Then he crept in on his belly and peered very closely at the wall and the door, and even took off his right mitten and searched them with his hand. Finally he found it, more with his fingers than with his eyes, a little tuft of hairs caught on the rock at the back. He crawled around into the light with them, and examined them closely. They were short hairs, just the right length, and properly coarse and wiry too, but they were very dark. They could have been called black without stretching things much. The swift, numerous flight started across his mind again, but he cut it off by grinning and speaking aloud.

  "Real hair, and it came off," he said. "He’s a dark one, all right. Maybe Joe Sam brought his old friend south with him after all, but he sheds, and he bleeds, the bastard."

  And, he thought, standing up and letting the little tuft of hairs go out of his fingers into the wind, After eighteen years, he must be a son, or even a grandson. Spook stock must be shrinking some these days, too. He was a good deal short of the size of a horse, that one, to get in there at all.

  He picked up the webs and the carbine, and scrambled back over the drift onto the open ledge, and stood there looking at the snow all around him. The swift, chittering flight went over his mind unchecked, this time, for he was thinking about what he saw. There were no tracks anywhere in the snow except his own. He stood the bear-paws on edge in the drift and circled the cave, crossing the overhang that made its roof, and coming back around the north end. There were no tracks anywhere, but only the wind-smooth snow.

  He stopped the birds this time, by saying aloud, with a little chuckle, "Must be light enough on his feet to see through, for a fact." It was not a successful joke.

  "Hell," he said, arguing boldly against the stone and the snow and the easy wind, "he just got off too early for me, that’s all. They been rubbed out."

  He laced on the webs again, and took the carbine and stood up with it cradled in his arm, and peered all around, thinking, But if he waited for daylight, there hasn’t been much wind. It wouldn’t cover up for him, anywhere but up here. And he didn’t double back, or I’d of met him, or seen where he went down. He could of gone over the top, but it’s ten to one against it, or he’d of done it last night. This must be about the end of his territory. So it has to be

  south again.

  "But you’re chasin’ spooks for a fact now, Bridges," he told himself aloud. "And there’s gotta be a strict time limit to that sorta fun. Let’s see where we are."

  He went carefully over the course of the hunt so far, and tried to estimate the distances roughly by the over-all time. He couldn’t be very sure of his guess, because his pace had changed so often, and because he was so uncertain about the time he’d left Cathedral Rock and about what time it was now. He believed, however, that he must have come back south along the two ridges even farther than he’d gone north on the first tack.

  "Hell," he said cheerfully, "the bastard’s practically leadin’ me home."

  And less than half my grub gone, he thought. Half the bread, and less than half the jerky.

  "You’re not out of this yet, brother," he announced. "You gotta start back down somewhere," he went on, commencing to shuffle south again, and down the ledge to keep an eye on the deeper snow below it. "And when you start down this time," he said happily, "you’ll leave a track like a flash-flood."

  Snow’s lettin’ up some too, he thought, a little later. He was seeing farther and more easily, and with the shadowy shapes of the trees and ledges to hunt among, his mind was resisting the moving whiteness better. He watched all about him, pushing the hood part way back on his head to increase the span of his vision.

  Nevertheless, the notion persisted in his mind, though he didn’t allow it to become more than a notion, that the cat had outguessed him, that some time before daylight, so the wind and snow had erased its trail, it had circled back north and waited for him, and that now it was trailing him. Several times he stopped and turned all the way around, to take a good look behind him, but there was never anything but the long spears of snow floating at him across snow.

  As time went on, and he did nothing but drag along at the same slow, steady pace, even the opening mountainside could not prevent the monotony from lulling him. He was still tired from yesterday’s run, and from the cold sleep. Several times he came to suddenly, and realized that he had been moving for a long time, how long he couldn’t guess, without really seeing anything around him. Then the little fears would stir again, though now they seemed to move less within him that at some distance behind him, and either above him, among the ledges of the summit rock, or below him, in the edge of timber. After each startled waking, he would stop and look all around him, but particularly north, and when he went on again, he would move in a shuffling, spread-legged trot for a while, to get warm and to wake himself up.

  The most alarming of these starts came when he woke to realize that it wasn’t even snowing around him any longer. The heights were still shadowy dark, and the wind was up again, so that at times the flurries of ground snow around him were thicker than the real snowing had been, but there was no new snow falling where he was. The effect wasn’t encouraging, however. The wind had divided the storm for a while, that was all, and the ridge he stood on was aloft and clear between two forces, with only a thin veil of gray high above it, torn here and there so the blue showed faintly through. On his left the lower range
and the valley between the two ranges were completely hidden by the base of a great wall of cloud, which rose until its paler, billowing top towered into the sky far above the ridge. On the other side, separate reaches of cloud, like rolling smoke, were already advancing obliquely down the slope, and behind them, though at some distance still, came the dark main body of the new storm of which they were the scouting columns.

  Once he had clearly seen that storm upon the west, Curt, though he continued to go south along the ridge, and to watch below him on the left, went much more quickly, often breaking into that shuffling trot, and he watched at least as much for some opening in the cloud below him that would let him guess where he was, as he did for tracks.

  The break didn’t come. The front storm remained trapped in the valley, only drifting southward and changing shape within itself, while the dark storm above him in the west continued to advance, though sliding mostly along the blade of the ridge, and only slowly working over it.

  Trotting almost constantly now, until he was panting with his hurry, and glancing up more and more often at the near, moving darkness, he came to a place where the ridge began to slope gradually downward ahead of him. Here and there the ragged tops of dwarf trees showed through the snow again, and as he descended, they became more numerous. The wind lost its full force behind him, too, and turned gusty, so that instead of moving with his feet invisible in the long tide-rip of surface snow, he was repeatedly caught in whirling clouds of it that forced him to stand for several seconds with his head bent and his arm across his face, until they had passed on over him and were skirmishing and twisting a hundred feet in the air out over the hollow.

  It didn’t look like a true pass he was coming down into, but only a wide, shallow depression, a scoop at the south end of the long col he had been following. If he knew the place, he didn’t recognize it now, in his hurry and confusion, and under all the snow that had drifted into it, and with the first, long scouting tendril of the storm sucking darkly down into it from the west. He had never hunted this high when there was anywhere near so much snow, and he could remember a lot of hollows that might have come to look like this one when they got drifted in. If it was the one he thought most likely, though, he was still way north of the ranch. He must have gone much farther north from Cathedral Rock than he’d realized.