"Only it couldn’t of been," he complained. "By God, you ain’t seen nothing for sure," he wailed. The monitor promptly called his attention again to the bodily weakness which accompanied such despair, and spoke sternly against it.
"You gotta do something, and you gotta do it now," he declared. "You can’t just stand here and let time run out on you. You can’t last another night and have anything left to go on. Your damn knees are caving in now."
At the thought of a third night in the mountains, he thought also of the oilskin packet of food, and was invaded by another doubt which brought panic with it. He felt in his left pocket. It was empty. He hurriedly shifted the carbine to his left harm and pulled off his right mitten and felt in the right pocket. The knife was there, though without its sheath, which produced another but very minor shock, and the extra cartridges were there under it, and the match container, but there was no food packet. He remembered, then, quite distinctly, stuffing the food packet up into the niche he’d taken the Indian and the panther out of to burn them. To save him, he couldn’t remember having taken it down again. No, and he hadn’t eaten this morning either. That was part of what ailed him right now, of course, this fuzzy thinking and easy scaring. And the packet was still back there in that niche in the cave.
"Oh, Jesus," he cried, despairing as much because he’d forgotten the packet as because he didn’t have it. The fact that the food packet was still back there in the cave, however, made a decision possible despite the conflict of the compasses.
"Gotta have food," he declared. "Damn little chance I’ll make it home tonight, with all that time down the flume. I gotta have something to eat."
It occurred to him that he might even have to spend another night in the same cave. The idea was repulsive beyond all reason, yet the cave remained, dark, narrow and haunted though it was, "Like layin’ myself in my own coffin," he lamented, the only refuge his memory could produce out of the whole two days of white emptiness that alternately stretched and shrank like a concertina.
He turned and started back along the soft furrow of his own track. The pale sunlight then cast his own shadow faintly and downhill before him. He had gone only a few steps when his eyes began to watch the shadow sliding along there, and then suddenly his mind saw it too.
The sun’s behind me, he thought. It’s October, and the sun’s way south already in October. So it’s south behind me.
"Geez," he cried softly and wildly, "don’t I know nothing no more?"
The needle of his mind settled and the needle of his body turned and lay with it, and the two pointed north unquestionably ahead of him.
He didn’t feel much better for their agreement, though. There was no doubt now about the time he had to make up, and his confidence, already so often tried and shaken, was nearly extinguished when he remembered himself standing back there, arguing so elaborately with the sun, while all the time it was shining right in his face with the only answer he needed. The self-doubts crowded upon him in great numbers, whispering all the time, and many of the little fears mingled with them unrecognized. Before he had gone a hundred steps, he was shuffling along at a half-run and breathing quickly through his mouth. He had practically forgotten the panther, so much closer were his other enemies pressing him, time and distance and the entrancing snow.
27
The storm had thinned away everywhere over the mountains into a final, passive settling out of flakes. Now the wind began to move among them, making long, sweeping rents in many places, through which the light reached the snowy trees below, and even, here and there, the steep snow fields of the next range to the west. The snow fields turned back the light with such an intolerable shining that Curt couldn’t look at them except by squinting and peering brieily through the shadowy flickering of his lashes. He didn’t try to look very often. If there was anything to be learned from that range, it wouldn’t be until he could see whole peaks and ridges at once. His own plowed track in the snow was all he needed for now. Just watching it, he was enough aware of the increasing light around him to be encouraged too. If the storm had really given up, even time and darkness might be outwitted. He was careful not to declare to himself, even silently, that the storm had given up. It was always "if" it had given up.
Gradually the wind drew together out of its first faint gustiness, and blew against him all the time. It was a very cold wind, and sometimes it stung his face inside the hood with crystals of snow, but it felt good anyway. It seemed to give him more air to breathe, and the stitch in his side, which had been growing into a real pain, began to thin away again. He didn’t even notice so much the alarming weakness in his knees, or the cramped emptiness of his stomach. He began to feel that he might—the mentor would not allow him to put it more boldly—that he might make up all the time he had lost.
The last mists of the snow were breaking and thinning out faster, too, as the wind increased. The brilliant light was coming through everywhere. Finally it lay single and blinding upon the slope of the ridge above him, and sprang at him in golden arrows from every angle of the mountains, so that he had to squint just to watch the trail ahead of him.
He slowed down occasionally to get his breath and steady his knees, and then he would try to rest his eyes by looking up into the deep blue of the sky that was showing through in many places. Even that didn’t always help, though, for often rising planes of light from the snow fields angled across between his eyes and the blue, and sometimes the waving and folding of a snow veil in the wind would make it glitter, high in the air there, almost as painfully as the mountain slopes. Even so, the light remained encouraging. The lengthening, widening vistas released his mind as well as his eyes. He felt a little airy-headed, even really dizzy at times, as if the light and the wind were making him drunk, but it was a pleasing drunkenness, a kind of champagne elation.
Still the fear of time remained nagging faintly within his growing hope. It was that small nagging which made him keep looking west, as the world opened up, to see if he could locate himself yet. He never could. Even when he was able, finally, to see clear to the western skyline, over one wave beyond another of dazzling, angular whiteness, it might as well have been the winter roof of Asia he was looking across. The first whispering doubts, and the little fears that had come out again to join them, had been dispelled with the mists, but now there came moments when a single, active, quickly moving fear ran out through him, escaped from the small, dark core in his middle. The monitor set it off each time, by suggesting that perhaps none of his calculations had been even close to right, that perhaps the lapses into inattention had been much longer than he believed, and that first eagerness and then fear had made him travel much faster than he thought he was traveling.
Maybe, the monitor would keep suggesting, you’re way to hell and gone west and south, in mountains you’ve never even seen before.
Maybe, it would say, you might just as well be looking across the winter roof of Asia, for all the good it’s ever going to do you.
These spells of fear were short and well separated, though. Most of the time he was hopeful. When he had the food packet again, and was out the other end of the pass, and going north on the east slope, he kept telling himself, he’d know where he was.
You’ll be able to see then, insisted the monitor’s optimistic antagonist.
You’ll see something you know for sure from there, it said again, almost gaily.
Even if it gets dark on you now, it added, a couple of minutes later, there’ll be stars out. They can’t get you tangled with stars out; you can keep right on going all night, if you have to.
He continued to plow rapidly north, slowing to rest now and then, but always resuming the hurried shuffle again as soon as his knees and his lungs would permit, and always peering ahead, or across at the gleaming sea of mountains in the west, through the little, protective clouds of his lashes. Gradually the monitor began to speak up, if at all, only to suggest his confidence was approaching insolence again. He was getting
so warm that, in spite of the light, he pushed the hood back to let the wind work on his head.
He had to pull the hood forward a few minutes later, though, and across his face from the left as much as he could and still see. He had come around a sharply drifted buttress of the mountain, and the wind was suddenly much stronger against him, and much colder, and full of a twisting, glittering scud of ground-snow. It blinded him, for the moment he was pulling the hood up, and he stopped until it slacked off and he could see again. Then his growing confidence received its first serious setback. The wide, crooked wake of the bear-paws, which he’d been trusting all this time to the point of not even giving it a thought, was barely visible and not as a distinct, broken track at all, but only as a narrow, shallow depression, as smooth as the slope on both sides of it.
"Goddam," he muttered violently. "Everything, even the goddam wind."
The spur of time struck into him deeply again. He hurried forward faster than ever along the faint depression, keeping up the bent-kneed running without a break, until he was breathing all the time in gasps through his mouth and the champagne dizziness was constant and produced no elation whatever. Yet he didn’t go fast enough. Before he was off the buttress of the range, the trace had vanished completely. There was only the smooth, trackless snow, with the glittering serpents of scud slithering up and across it at him. He let his pace slack off a little. There was no use hurrying that much any longer.
What the hell, he challenged the fear. It can’t be far to the pass now. I’ve come back most of the way, that’s a cinch. And nobody could miss a pass like that.
Actually he was not at all sure that nobody, himself in particular, could miss a pass like that. He was watching the slope and the skyline above him anxiously, peering ahead along them again and again, and they were no more familiar anywhere than the shining sea of mountains in the west. At the first break in the skyline, a wide but shallow dip, with a shallow, drifted draw going up to it, he paused and studied it uncertainly.
"Not deep enough," he declared finally. "It’s no real pass. It ain’t it."
He really wasn’t that sure, though. The snow was deep and light, and it drifted fast in a wind like this. Also, he discovered that he wasn’t at all sure what the mouth of the pass had looked like in the falling snow, let alone what it would look like now. He went on after a minute, watching constantly ahead again, scanning the ridge as far north as he could see it, each time the clouds of windy crystals broke or subsided. It began to seem possible to him that he had already gone by the mouth of the pass.
Twice more great dents in the snow wall halted him. He didn’t believe he’d ever seen them before, but he knew now that he hadn’t really seen anything around him that morning, only the snow. He believed, trying to think back, that he hadn’t even turned around, when he came out of the pass, to take a good look at the mouth of it. It worried him that he had been capable of such incredible carelessness.
The fourth of these troublesome depressions of the ridge particularly disturbed him. It could quite justly be called a pass. It was very high and not very deep but it went all the way through, there wasn’t a doubt of that. He finally decided against it, though. The mouth of the pass he’d come through couldn’t be that high above him, even allowing for a lot of heavy drifting, and maybe for his being a little farther down now. The white domes of the timberline trees had been more numerous in the mouth of it, too.
Nevertheless, he began to be troubled, as he went on, by all four breaks he had passed. They pulled back upon something within him, as if he were a spider simultaneously reeling out four lines behind him. The farther he went, the more strongly the four threads tugged at him, until at last he was forced to stop and turn around and look back as far as he could. He couldn’t make out, for sure, any of the notches he’d passed.
What he did make out, beyond any question, however, was the fact that the sun had already gone far past the height of its arc. He felt that it had taken a great, curving leap while his back was turned, and that made it seem likely that he’d gone by the pass long since, maybe even before he’d started to watch for it. If so, however, there was nothing to do but give it up, and the food packet with it. He was profoundly alarmed by that leaping sun. He turned north again, and began to hurry on, the four threads dragging at him as heavily as cables now. He even began to debate, as his belief grew stronger and stronger that the pass was behind him, whether he hadn’t better go up over the ridge any time now. He didn’t want to overshoot the ranch to the north, and waste the increasingly precious daylight on that end too.
He worked his way swiftly out around one more great bastion of the range, and at the first look beyond it, the four cables let go. There, not far ahead, was the mouth of the real pass, the unquestionable pass. Now that he saw it, he was amazed that he’d ever been troubled by those four shallow fakes. The end of the ridge he was on sloped down northward toward the pass, and then broke off steeply into it. The north wing of the V shone blindingly in the sun, but its height and its slant were unmistakable.
He hailed it joyfully. "That’s you, you son-of-a-bitch."
The joy, however, died quickly, squeezed out under the terrible burden of the time that had already passed. The shadows of the evergreen spires below him were now clearly pointing uphill as well as north, and each of them pointed toward coming darkness. He hurried on along the side of the ridge and up into the mouth of the pass. The wind, blowing fiercely now, along the spine of the range, was repeatedly hurling the snow in great clouds off the edge of the north wall and out over the hollow. It sank in long shimmering curtains into the cut and around him. A little way into the pass, he salvaged another moment of certainty. There was the wake of his webs, going right up the middle ahead of him. He followed it as fast as he could among the watching trees, and through the shining, soundless rain of crystals from
above.
The pass seemed much longer to him now than it had in the morning. Twice he stopped and looked attentively along the dark rock cliffs of the north side, thinking he must have gone as far as the cave, even though he could see the half-erased track meandering on ahead of him. And once he even stopped to study the south wall, being assailed by a brief doubt as to which he had stayed in after all. In this matter, as in the case of the pass, however, there was no mistaking the right cave when he saw it. The break he’d made coming out and the buttress of hand-packed snow, and the little section of uncovered wall in the upper, far corner, tiny as they were in the base of the great wall, like the work of some improbable survivor of cliff dwellers, did not for a moment appear to be an accident of nature. He was dismayed to remember the faith he had put in that flimsy and trivial shelter. He was fascinated by it too, as if it were a long-deserted home in which some family tragedy had taken place.
When he came right under it, he stared up at it and said softly, "God, a blind cat with no nose could of picked it out. And knocked it in, too," he added, "knocked it in like nothing."
He went straight up toward it as far as he could, and then climbed sideways in what was left of the steps he had made that morning. When he reached the top of the tallest slope he went across at once to the corner of the wall that had no snow on it. There was no time to waste mooning over the strange hold the cave had on him. He would knock in a few slabs of the shale and reach out the oilskin packet without taking off the webs, and get going again as fast as he could. At the thought of having the packet, of opening it and finding the buttered bread and the salt jerky, his mouth filled with saliva so that he had to spit. He would eat it all, and go the rest of the way tonight, wherever he was when it got dark. That’s the way he would do it; no more dallying, no more silly notions.
He pushed, and the loose shale fell, clattering with short, thick echoes inside, and let in enough light so he could see the ledges he wanted to see. There was no sign of the yellow oilskin of the packet. He reached in as far as he could, and felt to the back of one ledge after another, but couldn’t End it. Every
thing else—time, distance, darkness, the now only half-believable cat—vanished from his mind. Nothing mattered except to get hold of that packet. His watering mouth and the growling hollow of his stomach demanded it fiercely.
He leaned the carbine against the cliff, and tore away the rest of the wall, throwing it down the slope behind him, shale and snow together. When the opening was large enough, he crawled up into the cave and searched in the crevices, at first carefully, but then, before he would be convinced, with his mittens of and frantically. There was nothing in any crevice.
After a moment of kneeling there, blank with despair, he unlaced the webs and let them fall outside, by the carbine, and then crawled along over the stones he’d pushed in, and searched the other end. He found the sheath of the knife, and slipped the knife into it, and dropped it back into his pocket, but the oilskin wasn’t there either, on the floor or in any of the crevices. He thought wildly, for an instant, that he must have taken it with him after all, and lost it somewhere along the side of the mountain in the snow.
He corrected the notion savagely. "No, by God," he declared, "I left it here. I didn’t eat this morning. I never touched it this morning. It’s gotta be here."
There was only once chance left. He began to hurl the slabs of shale from the floor out the opening onto the slope. He had thrown out only four or five of them when he saw the yellow patch between two stones on the bottom, and exulted. Furiously he tossed away the last slabs that kept it from him, and then, suddenly, with his hands out in the air, ready to grasp another slab, he knelt there motionless, staring down at it. The oilskin itself had been clumisly unrolled and then ripped, in places practically shredded, and there was not a single visible crumb of bread or scrap of jerky in it.
The Track of the Cat Page 37