He hurried on down the slope, finally no longer even pausing for the most blinding of the snow dervishes that whirled across him, but only putting his head down, and holding the hood across the right side of his face. Even so, the new snow caught him in the bottom of the hollow. Then he was forced to stop. The air darkened around him and the snow drove thickly at him, seeming to come from every direction. He meant only to wait out the first blast, but it didn’t let up. It even seemed to be getting thicker and wilder. Coming down into the hollow, he had only been thinly frosted over by snow crystals, but now, in a moment, the parka was so thickly plastered that its red patches vanished.
And this is only the first of it, he thought slowly, the words coming separately and far apart in his mind. He didn’t dare wait for a lull, but began to push forward, dragging the webs, bracing himself in one direction or another at every step, and half the time with his eyes nearly closed against the black whirl of the snow. He kept twisting his body away from the storm, trying to get it to ride up off him on the blade of the hood. It didn’t work, though, for whenever he got set in one direction, the snow would suddenly be coming from another. The hollow seemed a mile across at least, and it was only by the slower laboring of his legs, and the need to bend forward a little to keep his balance, that he knew when he began to climb out of it on the other side.
As he climbed, the darkness decreased swiftly. He had worked up into the top and south edge of the shadowy advance guard, and soon he could see the tall whirlwinds of snow dancing up the slope ahead of him again. Finally the gray reach of the storm was entirely behind him and below him, pouring on down to reinforce the high cloud that was trapped in the valley. He was on a ridge still, but lower than before. He could make out the near, ghostly spires of evergreen timber in the edge of the valley cloud. The ground snow kept racing across him as he hurried south, and then, after perhaps an hour—it seemed a long time, anyhow—the first thin veils of the new front came down over him, often broken by the gale, so that at one moment he could see only faint, hardly distinguishable shapes, and the next he could see clearly a long way down or ahead. He kept telling himself then, only that he must get farther south and that if the main storm caught him solidly before he found a familiar way out, he could always turn straight down into the lower storm and find shelter under a tree again.
At this lowest ebb of his confidence, however, when he had nearly forgotten that he had started out to hunt, he was suddenly encouraged by an accident of the storm. The mingled ground snow and mist of the new storm, sweeping southeast across him, and very high, was rent, like the parting of gigantic theater drapes, and in the sharp perspective distance took on through that frame, he saw a tiny movement, against the wind, and high on the white wall of a mountain or pass ahead of him. He couldn’t tell whether it was the wall of a mountain or of a pass, for there was only that one region of it revealed, without a top, and without an end in either direction. He didn’t try to guess which it was at that moment, either. He just stood still, shocked out of his numbness, and watched for that tiny movement against the wind to come again. He believed he saw it again, too, but almost at once it vanished. That could be because of snow blowing over it where it was, though, as it had been blowing over him here. He kept peering, blinking frequently to rest his eyes, and tilting his head back to look out narrowly from under the lids, as Joe Sam had taught him to do when he had to look a long distance and for a long time. He believed that he saw the movement twice more, each time a little farther west upon the white wall.
The bastard’s still running, he thought. I’ve really got him going; running hungry, and right into the storm. He’s trying to get over on the other side, clear out of his territory. He’s pretty near done, then. He must be pretty near done to be tryin’ that.
He didn’t, however, feel altogether confident of the truth of these silent and aggressive ords. He couldn’t be sure that what he had seen was the cat, or even, to tell the truth, that he had seen anything at all. Men often saw queer things at high altitudes in snow. They made them up out of nothing, with their eyes. He admitted these reasons for doubt, but the very fact that he perceived them so clearly, that he was still measuring his chances with such calm, was encouraging in itself. He didn’t really believe he was just seeing things. He believed that what he had seen was the cat, still retreating before him. The feeling that he was in undirected flight himself, and with a personal and malignant doom imminent,, abated within him. He was wonderfully restored, as if the discovery that the cat was still retreating from him would in some way enable him to master storm and distance too.
"Right on your tail still, you son-of-a-bitch," he said aloud, and thought, I can stretch the food another day even, if I have to. And maybe I can even pick me off a rabbit or a buck, if he goes down far enough on the other side. The thought of fresh meat filled his mouth with saliva. It seemed to him that he could happily eat the fresh meat raw; that it might even be better raw, still hot and bloody and with the strong, salty, wild taste in it. He might even eat
the cat, if it came to that.
He was already advancing again, and at the same time keeping watch for that tiny movement into the wind on the high, white wall.
"You’ll still get your blanket, you little Welsh bitch," he said aloud, and gleefully. "And I’ll charge you for it, too; don’t you ever think I won’t. My own price, and no tricks."
Then the long chain dance of the wind snow came over him again, and the white wall he had been watching was closed away. He kept peering ahead for it, prepared to use the least instant of its appearance to pick out the tiny movement again. Several times the snow dancers broke their lines before him, or sank away, subsiding along the lower slope in final, spreading curtsies, and he saw the white wall again, the last time astonishingly closer, so that he seemed to be approaching it with the speed and ease of a bird, but he didn’t catch sight of anything moving on it again.
All at once, and quite surprisingly, so completely had his attention been fixed ahead, he was enveloped again in the darkening, blinding whirl of flakes that was not ground snow. Everything else vanished. He was shut in entirely by himself in a motion like a tremendous and infinitely various noise.
In an instant his optimism was gone, and not only because of his present danger. He had been taken unawares again, and not by any little, narrow advance column of the snow either, but by the dark main body of the enemy, which he had been watching for hours as it hung upon the ridge. It was a mile high, and God only knew how deep, yet it had caught him napping, blind with a little, no-account fancy of his own.
After this first panic, which he endured standing still and bowed against the storm, he began to advance across the blast again.
I’ve got to hole up, he thought. That’s all that matters now; hole up and wait this out.
"All the same," he muttered stubbornly, inside the hood, "I saw something, and it wouldn’t be anything else, up this high, in a blizzard like this. The damned cat wouldn’t be up here, even, if I hadn’t chased him up. And if I have to dig in, so does he. And I’ll know that wall he was on, the first good look I get at it."
He was encouraged by the fact that he was still able to argue in this way, but the argument itself was not convincing in that whirling half-darkness. On the contrary he felt, profoundly and unreasonably, and the storm and the panther were now in alliance against him. Shortly, also, it began to grow darker around him in a way he didn’t believe was caused by an increase of the snowing. Once again time leapt ahead in him. He guessed, as soon as he noticed the change, that he must already have overrun his mark badly, that he must be way south of the ranch, as much as ten miles south, maybe. With the growth of this first impression into a belief, all the latter part of the ridge he had followed became increasingly strange in his memory. He had never, until today, seen the white regions he’d caught glimpses of through the curtains of storm, or the shallow pass where the first skirmishers of the new snow had caught him.
; Before the darkness had settled much more about him, he was no longer certain, in the tangled whirling of the flakes, of any direction except up and down. Then even that last safeguard was weakened because he felt himself to be going down steeply. The webs slipped a little sometimes, and the force of the wind was lessened, and the whirling around him was slower. He must have got switched around to the east without knowing it, and be going down between the ranges. Well, there was nothing to do but go on down, and hole up as soon as he could. Not only was he lost, but a new, fierce cold had come down with the second army of the snow, and even in the heavy parka, he was already shivering from it. He had to get cover, and get it quick. Since he was already south of the ranch, it was all to the good, so far as getting home was concerned. It was the end of the last pretense of keeping up the hunt, though, and what was a lot worse, it proved that his sense of direction, that infallible guide that was just in him and to be obeyed, was no more to be trusted now than his deliberate calculations of time and distance, if as much.
Gradually, with the barrier of the slope behind him, it became possible to see a few yards into the dusk around him. He had come among twisted, timberline trees once more, but much bigger ones than those in the shallow pass, standing well up, blue and ghostly, out of the deepening snow. He felt a more wakeful hope that shelter was near, and began to increase his pace. He fell several times, but struggled and floundered to his feet again each time, and hardly gave the falls a thought.
It was only a last-moment glimpse, a something he felt to be wrong, though he couldn’t have said what, that saved him from tumbling over the cliff. He checked himself so close to the edge of it that his left web broke off a block of snow, which vanished with startling suddenness, leaving a faint, shadowy break in the snow line, like the place where a tooth is missing. Perhaps it was only that break that warned him, for the sloping snow at the bottom of the ravine had appeared perfectly continuous with the slope he was coming down. Nothing had trustworthy shape or distance any longer, but only a scarcely distinguishable difference of pallor and shadow.
After the first moment of shock, however, he felt much better. He wasn’t going down into the valley after all. He was going down into a ravine, a pass, a cut of some sort through the range. He had been going south all the time, after all. The compass of his reasoning swung back to agree with the compass of his body, which had never stopped insisting that he was going south, and he felt wonderfully relieved. It was like being joined again, without a flaw, after having been cut in half.
The edge of the cliff seemed to slope downward to his left, to the east, that was, and he turned that way, climbing upslope a little first, to be safely above that too vague falling-off place, and followed it down. He felt the wind growing steadily stronger as he descended, but it seemed to him that it kept shifting also, coming at him straight from the north sometimes, and at other times from as far around as the southwest.
24
When a slow, step-by-step testing with the webs finally told him he was off the cliff, it was so nearly dark he could no longer guess at the mountain shapes around him. It seemed to him, from what the webs told him, and from the fury of the wind, that he must have come out into an open and almost level space beyond the mouth of the pass. He wanted to keep going east, down the slope of the big range, and take shelter as soon as the trees were tall enough and deeply enough sunk in the snow, but the wind whirled about him so continuously now, enclosing him with blinding spirals of snow, that he was mortally afraid to venture any farther into the open.
"Got to work back under the cliff," he muttered in the hood. "Can’t miss that. And find a cave or something; get out of this goddam wind."
He turned right once more and began to shuffle ahead. He kept expecting the wind to ease off, broken by the cliff rising beside him, or to connect more directly at him, funneled through from the west by the pass or the ravine, or whatever it was, but it didn’t. It continued to buffet him from every side, and to whirl the snow so that sometimes it struck him unexpectedly in the face, bringing him to a halt, and sometimes there would be a dark quiet before him, while the snow struck its hundreds of tiny blows against the back of the parka. He drew the hood nearly closed over his face, leaving only a little opening to peer through, and held it that way.
Gradually he began to believe that the wind was blowing more against his back than against his front, and again his inner compass fell into disagreement with the compass of his reason. It became an expensive effort of will to continue his advance with this argument going on, and after a time, he turned sleepy and inattentive as well as weary. Twice he almost blundered into one of the haunting trees, unable to see it until it loomed sudden and monstrous right before him.‘Each time the tree became, for an instant, a leaping black panther, but each time he forced the terrible fear down again, and told himself doggedly, "Right; go around it to the right" speaking aloud to make himself listen, and as a challenge to the tree. The third time, he actually struck against a springy, reaching branch. He was almost knocked over, and a little bleat of dread was squeezed out of him by the contraction of his belly. He was very near to weeping from exhaustion and bafflement, when at last the wind did begin to ease off, and the snow to fall more slowly and more evenly around him.
"About time," he said angrily. "Goddamit, it’s about time."
He could make out the trees a little sooner now, their goblin shadows against the glimmer of the fallen snow, and though he was stopped by them several times, believing he saw them move, even lifting the carbine against them, yet each start of fear was milder than the last, and each time, before he moved on, he remembered to warn himself, "Around to the right; keep going around to the right."
Gradually the trees became fewer and smaller and farther apart around him, until at last he seemed to have come into a region where there were no trees at all, but only the light, deep snow he shuffled through, and the thick, falling snow slanting across him. He had been worried before about losing his direction as he steered around the trees, and now, unreasonably, he was much more worried about circling in the pale emptiness.
He was about to risk making a complete right turn, to go straight at the north cliff, when the falling snow was twisted by the wind, and opened before him, and he saw the white wall looming up there, and the dark band of cliff under it, close ahead of him. In the moment he was allowed to stare at them, he was sure that he’d seen that shape of whiteness before, that, from far north, in the afternoon, he had seen that tiny dark movement across it and against the wind. The uneasy needles of his compasses spun wildly against each other, and he stood still, and the white slope that looked like a wall in the darkness was closed away from him again. He waited, feeling every least turn of the wind now, as something he must judge, and staring at the place where the wall had vanished. Finally there came another gust that was strong enough, and from the proper quarter, and he saw the white wall again, or enough of it to make him feel that its top might rise through the storm, and into the clear darkness and the light of stars.
Until then, he had most nearly believed himself to be going west, but now it became evident that he must already have got turned either north or south, unless he was in a box canyon, instead of a pass, and this was the end of it, and that didn’t seem likely so high in the mountains and with the storm sucking through the way it was. He brooded half-attentively upon the problem until his mind stirred resentfully against the waste of time.
You know damn well it’s no box canyon, and north cliff or south cliff, the thing now is to get to it and find a hole of some sort in it, before you fall asleep or fall over. He began to move forward again, more quickly than before, though he didn’t know it.
Now that he’d actually seen the white wall, seen something with a real direction to it, instead of just snow and trees, his inner compass steadied, but it insisted, perversely, that he was still going west and that couldn’t be right. The needle of his reason, because of the memory of the white wall he had se
en from afar, began to swing to a north behind him. He had gone to the right around each tree, but that didn’t matter, because it was most likely between trees, or on this empty canyon floor beyond them, that he’d started to circle. The way a man always turned was the way any animal would turn when it was blind lost, away from the wind. Well, he knew that the true direction of the wind, whatever the pass and the shapes of the mountains did to it, was from the northwest, but mostly north, didn’t he? And it had seemed to him that the wind was working around to come mostly from behind him, hadn’t it? So, if this was a pass he was in, it was most likely the south wall of the pass he was heading for.
The dark band of the cliff appeared before him again, and through the falling snow this time. It had been farther away than he’d thought when he’d seen it before, but now it was really close. It became a visible confirmation of his reasoning. His inner compass swung the quarter circle to put north behind him too, and for the first time since he’d entered the cut, the two needles lay exactly and steadily together.
This time the coincidence brought him no peace, however, for in the instant it assured him that this was the south wall looming above him, he remembered also that he’d seen the cat on the south wall, and going the same way along it that he’d been going along the floor of the pass. And surely it wouldn’t have gone all the way through the pass against a blizzard like this. It must have been caught by the snow, and holed up, pretty close to where he was now. And cats could see in the dark. His fear of the cat became for the first time as constant as his fear of the storm, and almost as strong. Even as the joining of the compasses made him one man, he was divided again by his fears.
The Track of the Cat Page 32