The Track of the Cat

by Walter van Tilburg Clark

  "A regular blamed art ga1lery," he said. "Damned if I ain’t even got a regular blamed art gallery. I got everything; the luxuries with the comforts."

  His shelter had already warmed up again a good deal. He laid the last twigs on the fire, tucked the mittens back into his pocket, and began to pack the snow-balls together with his bare hands. At last he had four dark, dripping ice-balls.

  "Yessir," he said, "the luxuries with the comforts. Damned if I won’t have a smoke with my drink."

  He wiped his hands on his pants and got out his tobacco and pad of papers. This time, with the light to work by, he made a good cigarette. He returned the makings to his shirt pocket, and rolled over and lighted the cigarette from the fire. Then he lay back and inhaled deeply, and blew the smoke out slowly, and watched it spread and disappear under the low ceiling of rock. After the third draw, he blew the smoke in a long, narrow jet toward the un-sealed portion of the wall, and watched it eddy out at the top.

  “Snuff that, you black bastard," he said happily. "And that’s all the good it will do you, too."

  At once he felt that he had gone too far, that he had foolishly laid himself open to the malicious god.

  "Says you," he added quickly.

  After that he lay there, alternately drawing at the cigarette and sucking and chewing at the ice-balls. Twice he twisted over and gazed up at the three little carvings in their niches. He was pleased to have them there in his refuge. He felt a fondness for them that he had never felt for any of Arthur’s finished pieces.

  "Yessir," he said, after the second look, "like a regular damn millionaire or a duke or something. Private statue collection and everything."

  The cigarette lasted through two of the ice-balls, and then he dropped the butt into the fire and consumed the other two ice-balls slowly, even holding a portion of the last in his cupped hand until it melted completely, so that he was able to finish with a real sip of water.

  The warmth was making him drowsy again, and the memory of his bewilderment and fear down in the darkness of the canyon made his weariness pleasant. He lay there staring dreamily at the fire. It was almost down to embers by now, and he regretted this. It would have been nice to keep it going. It would have made his sleep a lot more restful.

  "By golly," he said suddenly and wakefully. He reached back over his head and took down the heavy, dark whittling that had only been started.

  "Lord only knows what you were meant to be," he told it, "but I know what you’re going to be now."

  He set it against the best burning side of the embers. It lay there darkly resistant, not even a wisp of smoke rising from under it.

  Curt took down the Indian, and used him as a scraper to heap the coals together under the dark piece. Still it wouldn’t take. He was profoundly disturbed. It became more important than anything else in the world to him that the stubborn mahogany should catch fire.

  "Stuff’s harder than coa1," he muttered. "Burn all night, if I could once get it started."

  He regarded the unfinished Indian in his hand. "Well," he said finally, "can’t be too finicky in a pinch," and laid the Indian beside the formless piece.

  After a little, the Indian began to smoke on the inside, but it wasn’t lighting fast enough to suit him. The embers beneath it were dying already.

  "Shoot the works," he said, and took down the panther and laid it beside the Indian, and leaning to the fire, blew cautiously between them into the embers. Smoke began to curl up around both sides of the cat. He squinted his eyes against the smoke, and continued to blow. At last a little flame leaped up between the cat and the Indian, and he transferred his blowing to the space between the Indian and the mahogany. Shortly the cat and the Indian were both wrapped in flame, but the dark piece still lay there, solid and impregnable.

  "Goddam stuff," he muttered, and thought about the problem for a moment.

  Then, saying, "I’11 get You this time, damn you," he took the knife out of his pocket and pushed the cat and the Indian closer together and then quickly lifted the dark piece and laid it upon them. He pushed the embers together under the three with the knife. The mahogany began to smoke.

  "Ah," he said. "Now you’re talking."

  He made another cigarette and lay smoking it and admiring his new fire. It made more light than the twig fire had, and gave off more heat. The low, closed cave became really warm, and his drowsiness returned upon him heavily. He dropped the second cigarette into the fire before it was even finished, rolled up the food packet and stuffed it into the crevice above his head where the panther and the Indian had stood, and pulled up the hood of the parka. Thus prepared, he lay propped on his elbow and considered his fire once more. Despite weariness and drowsiness, he was reluctant to go as completely off guard as sleep would put him. Also, he wished to savor every moment of the light and warmth.

  At last, however, he drew on the mittens and carefully pushed the fre together and back against the wall, and, when it was settled and burning steadily again, stretched out and pillowed his head on his left arm. He continued to watch the fire for a while, but each time he blinked, his eyes stayed closed a little longer. The fire was all right. The mahogany was urning now too, with tiny, insecure red flames along its sides and, in one place underneath, a glow beginning, like that of burning coal.

  "Dandy fire," Curt murmured. "Lucky I had ’em."

  At this expression of satisfaction, something within him again made a propitiatory gesture toward Arthur.

  "He’d of said so, himself," Curt protested. "In the same fix, he’d of burned them himself."

  Nevertheless, he opened his eyes wide again, and looked at the wall of brown shale, with the firelight moving on it, and listened to the breathing of the dark ravine into the cracks. After a moment, he felt behind him, to make sure the carbine was there, and then picked up the knife, drew it out of its sheath, and laid it handy between him and the wall. Then he closed his eyes, and began to recite softly.

  "Turn right out of the cave, left at the end of the pass, north half a day, right, and go till you see it," he murmured, and repeated the incantation five times, and sighed and began to breathe deeply and slowly.

  There were actually two winds blowing outside. One of them was very big, and made a continual, hollow roaring high above the pass. That wind belonged to the realm of immeasurable mountain chains and the whole advancing storm, and did not, at present, concern him. The other was the little, occasional wind that came sniffing and snuffling at the chinks in the wall beside his head, and his ears continued to listen to that one a long time after he was asleep.

  25

  He was sitting at the table in the warm, brightly lighted kitchen of the ranch house; at least the room appeared to be the ranch-house kitchen. The table, the stove and all the doors were where they should be. At the same time he was reminded of other rooms, though not entirely of any one he could remember. There were five big chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, chandeliers of the kind he had seen in the bars and hotels in Virginia City and San Francisco, made up of circular tiers of gas flames and reflectors, and all hung about with glittering crystal pendants. The walls increased the light. They were white, like the kitchen walls, and had a stairway up the north side, too, but they were made in panels instead of wide, rough-hewn boards, and they were painted with a shining lacquer instead of the powdery whitewash. The stairway was also different. It was carpeted in crimson with brass edges and had a turned mahogany rail. There was a crimson carpet with a big, leafy, black pattern on the floor, a thick carpet, that made the room quiet. In spite of these differences, however, he continued to feel that he was in the kitchen of the ranch house, and that the ranch house was standing under a timbered mountain in the south end of the Aspen Creek Valley. Part of his pleasure in being there came from the certainty that he was in the ranch-house kitchen.

  On the table in front of him was a thick, elliptical white platter, on which lay the bone and fat scraps remaining from a huge steak. He was still holding
in his right fist the very sharp knife which had made it as easy to cut the steak as to Cut butter. For that matter, the steak had been almost as tender as butter. He could still feel the way each piece had melted in his mouth, filling it with savory, hot, salty juice. There were also so many side dishes that they almost covered the table, and there was a big, silver coffee pot at his right hand, which was vaguely familiar, but had certainly never been in the ranch house before. The spout of the silver cofee pot was sending up a delicate tendril of steam.

  He wasn’t alone, either, and the attitude of his company encouraged him to believe that the enormous dinner wouldn’t be the last of his pleasures that evening. The door of the north bedroom was open. The room beyond it was dark, and Gwen Williams was leaning against the doorframe in a pose of deliberate and interested indolence, with one hip high and her hand upon it, and the other hand playing with a locket which hung down between her breasts. She was smiling at him, and watching him with an amused curiosity which had only a small remnant in it of her former guarded withdrawal. She was wearing a gown made of the same shiny, yellow stuff as the blouse she had worn before, but it was trimmed with black lace, and it didn’t cover her arms or her shoulders or the round bases of her breasts. He noticed this particularly, because her warm, brown skin, like a Mexican’s or an Indian’s, was amusingly wrong, rising out of that dress, so that he felt a comfortable sense of superiority in her presence, and at the same time believed that he would benefit from the freshness of her body and the wiry independence, even slight antagonism, of her spirit. There was no one else in the ranch house with them. The place was perfectly silent, and he could feel the emptiness of the other rooms. In such freedom, the idea of a slight hostility, of chase and resistance, intrigued him. He’d take his time about this game, make the most of the preliminaries too.

  Yet, in the midst of all this comfort and promise, he wasn’t wholly at ease. He felt that he had to play the part of being at ease, in order not to lose his useful superiority over Gwen, but at the same time he kept listening to the roaring wind outside, and for something else, perhaps inside after all, that the wind made it hard to hear, and that might shorten his time, and even rob him of this desirable conquest.

  He tilted back in his chair slowly, steadily returning Gwen’s look, fencing masterfully with it, and set down the glass of liqueur which had appeared in his hand instead of the steak knife, and drew long and deliberately upon the cigar which was between his thumb and fingers the instant he let go of the glass, and hooked the thumb of his left hand into the arm-hole of his brocaded vest, which was exactly like the father’s. He blew out a long, slow cloud of smoke at Gwen, and continued to stare at her through it, hoping to make her look down, or in some other way be the first to lower her guard.

  Gwen surprised him, however, by refusing to continue the contest. It appeared to him that behind the curtain of smoke she became a much larger woman, tall even in that doorway, which was much; higher than any in the ranch house. She had much heavier, rounder, arms and shoulders and breasts than Gwen had, too. She was still Gwen, however, with the same thick wreath of hair and brown skin and wide-apart, slanting eyes. In one way she was even more like Gwen than before. The withdrawn, appraising look was back full strength in her eyes, and her smile, increasing slightly behind the thinning smoke, became entirely a smile of amusement. He felt at once that in some way he had played into her hands, and his pprehensions concerning time and the sound he couldn’t hear became much stronger.

  Gwen turned and walked out of sight into the bedroom. He jumped to his feet, but then stood there, because the instant she disappeared, the bedroom became as brilliantly lighted as the kitchen. The bed, and the table and lamp by the window, were all he could see from where he stood, but they weren’t the bed and lamp and table that belonged in the north bedroom. The table was an ornate, gilded one, with a marble top, and the lamp on it had a big, glass shade, painted with roses and hung about the edge with tear-drop pendants of crystal. The bed was a vast, brass bed, as wide as it was long, and there were two big, yellow satin pillows, trimmed with black lace, propped up against the head of it. The only thing he recognized in the bedroom was the cover on the bed, and he liked that even less than the unfamiliar objects. He was afraid when he saw it. lt was the rough, blue bedspread the mother was so fond of, the one with all the twisting vines and tropical birds and fruits and beasts on it, and in the center, the horse with a horn on his forehead, the one Arthur had studied over so much when he was a kid. Well, he would go in there now, I and remove that bedspread first thing, and put it out of sight. The moment he decided to do that, he saw that it had already been done. There was a yellow spread like the pillow slips on the bed now. Yet he wasn’t relieved. Instead he became suspicious as well as apprehensive. Gwen, or the big woman who was so much like Gwen, wanted to lure him into that room, and not for what he wanted, either. He didn’t want to go into the bedroom at all now, yet he couldn’t stop himself from advancing toward it. The best he could do was to go cautiously, being careful that the floor didn’t creak under his feet, and listening all the time.

  He had his hand on the doorframe when the light in the bedroom went out as suddenly as it had gone on. In almost the same instant, he realized that the lights were out in the kitchen too, and. then he believed that the room was shrinking around him, that it meant to crush him. Also, he heard what he had been listening for under the loud wind all this time. It was a sound of heavy breathing, of sniffing. It was going on in the bedroom. The loud wind was still blowing over the roof of the house, but he could hear the breathing sound in the bedroom as if the place were perfectly quiet. Then he knew that it wasn’t Gwen waiting for him in the dark in there, or any other woman either. His fear became a paralyzing terror. He was standing in an open doorway, where he couldn’t see anything, and that heavy, snuffling breathing was coming closer and closer to him from the other side.

  He was lying perfectly still, on his side, facing the wall. He couldn’t see the wall in the absolute darkness which had closed in when the lights went out in the bedroom and the kitchen, but he knew it was there, so close he could have reached out and touched it. He didn’t, though. He had to lie perfectly still. Not only his ears, but his entire body, was concerned with detecting every least whisper of that breathing and snuffling in the cracks of the wall. He knew now that it was the panther out there, and that it had been out there for a long time already, that it had gained over him a considerable advantage of preparation while he’d sat in there letting Gwen make a fool of him. Even in his present predicament, he felt extremely bitter that Gwen had betrayed him to such a terrible extent as this. He couldn’t afford to think about that now, though. He had to know exactly what the cat was doing outside, and the sniffing was all he had to guess by.

  The cave was smaller than he remembered. He had to lie with his legs drawn up, like those of a child sleeping cold, because there wasn't room for him to stretch them out, and the shelving roof pressed down on his shoulder. When he imagined the cat breaking in through the loose stones in front of him, he was terrified anew because he was so tightly trapped. He felt that his position would be much improved if he could only get the carbine over in front of him, but that would be impossible without a good deal of contortion, and he didn’t dare try. If he made the least sound for those attentive ears out there to pick up, the delicate balance of doubt that was preserving him would be broken. That cat was cleverer than any man about all the signs of fear and helplessness, and it would know at once how he was fixed. He could only lie perfectly still and curse himself inwardly for having gone to sleep with the carbine behind him. He even had to control his fretfulness about that, for he knew that if he were to let himself go only a little, he would be swept by brainless panic, and that would be even worse than trying to reach the carbine. It would give him away at once. Even if he managed to hold himself absolutely quiet, not a single muscle moving, not the faintest whimper escaping him—and that whimpering could begin o
nly too easily—even then the cat would know. Those busy, intelligent black nostrils couldn’t possibly miss the scent of such an overwhelming fear, and the smell of fear would set it off even more promptly than the sound of struggle. No, there was nothing to do but lie perfectly still and concentrate upon keeping his fear imprisoned in that small, round cell in his middle where it was now huddled, waiting like a dangerous internal ally of the enemy outside.

  The worst of it was that he could think of no good end to this cornered-rabbit strategy. His fire had gone out some time since; just when, he didn’t know, and the cave was getting cold. He was almost as much afraid of jerking from the cold as of jerking because the fear broke out of his middle. And time meant nothing to the panther out there, warm in its thick, black coat, and free to move about, and fascinated by the man smell it breathed in at every crack of the loose stone wall. Time was as much in its favor as position was, and that was another thought which couldn’t be allowed to repeat itself too often or dig in too deeply. He couldn’t help imagining the panther, suddenly moved by some failure in secrecy inside, rearing against the loose stones beside his head, and pushing them in. He could see, as if it were happening, the huge, flat, whiskered head thrust into the breach, the mouth slightly open to pant, and the great yellow eyes shining at him as if there were a fire inside the cat that showed out through them. He could feel its hot breath on his face, and even smell the carnivorous reek of it.

  Then, all at once, he really was seeing the panther. This wasn't because the wall had been broken in, though. He was terribly alarmed for an instant, because he thought the wall had vanished, and the Cat could see him too. Then he realized, with great relief, that the wall was still there and that, although he had developed the ability to see through it, the cat had not. It was crouched just the other side of the wall, with its sniffing, snuffling nose down to the lowest cracks. It came to him only slowly, like the growth of a horror too vast to be comprehended all at once, that the beast, in order to loom up as far as it did out there, in order to stand on the top of the slope of snow and crouch down to snuff at that crack, must be enormous. All his previous notions, the lost dream of pleasure, everything, vanished frog; his mind at the overwhelming impression of the cat’s size and nearness. He held his breath, no longer able to trust the wall between them at all.