The Track of the Cat

by Walter van Tilburg Clark

  At first it seemed to him that the mountain itself must have developed a malignant spirit, an evil, trivial, crumb-eating thing that delighted in tormenting him. Then it crossed his mind that the cougar might have entered the cave after he was gone. A moment more, however, during which his disappointment and revived despair brought tears to his eyes, and he knew that it must have been the work of some of the little rock mice or chipmunks of the heights. They must live in there under those back ledges, farther than he had been able to see or feel. This guess did nothing but embody the malice he had imputed in general to the mountain. He continued to kneel there for some time, staring blindly down at the empty, shredded oilskin.

  At last, slowly, almost as dazed as when he had left that morning, he crawled out onto the edge again, and laced on the bear-paws and drew on his mittens. He lifted the carbine into the crook of his right arm, where it felt now like part of himself restored, and stepped slowly, both feet upon each step, down the slope of snow into the bottom of the pass again.

  "Even the mice now," he muttered. "Even the darned, stinking, little tiny bits of mice now. Everything. Every goddam thing in the wor1d."

  It was a dispirited summary, however. He didn’t feel very strongly about anything, even the mice. Half asleep he went on through the pass to its east end, and out of it to the north, and up onto the high ledges in the sun. There the cold wind struck him fiercely once more, full of the dancing, glittering particles of snow, like faults of his vision, and the dagger of time struck into him again, and woke him a little. He began to hurry but he felt his weakness all the time now, and knew it for what it was.

  "That’s done it," he muttered. "Oh, the goddam, stinking, little bits of mice, danmed if they haven’t done it." He kept on trying to hurry, just the same. The fact that he was already up to his knees in the shadow of the ridge made him feel that he had to hurry. It was a constant reminder, almost as if he were wading in icy water. Also, in spite of the fact that it would take a long time, two or three hours anyway, to change what he could see from up there enough to help him, he kept glancing anxiously into the northwest, and even more often downslope to his right. There were four big mountains up there in the northwest, with snow plumes streaming straight off their peaks. One of them had to be Pinto Peak, but he couldn’t tell from here which one. The ridge swelled and wandered ahead of him so that he couldn’t guess yet which peak it was leading to, and none of them, seen from this angle, and in their heavy new snow, had a shape he could be sure of.

  It was even worse below him, a jumble of snow-covered ridges and ravines he didn’t know at all, and then, over beyond them, on the east, what looked from this side like a broken range of separate mountains, miles across, and some of them nearly as high as the ridge he was on. There was nothing to do but keep going north as fast as he could, get far enough north before dark to be among mountains he knew, or to see over into the northeast. What he wanted to see more than anything else was the pass that went out of the Aspen Creek to the northeast, the opening through the low hills, with the dark, desert mountain across the far end of it like a wall. That, at least, was something he couldn’t possibly make a mistake about. But so far, all he could see in the northeast was the long, flat line of clouds, with sunlight on it, that was the rear guard of the departing storm. It would be bad if he didn’t find something he knew before dark. The stars would do to tell north by, but they wouldn’t help much with anything smaller, and mountains became even stranger in darkness than under snow. He didn’t have enough left in him to trust to just big directions, North and East, with their indifference to a few miles of error.

  So he kept on hurrying, even though the weakness stayed in his knees all the time now, and the wind was so strong against him he could practically lean on it, and getting colder fast. Even half running, as he was, and with the hood of the parka pulled around from the left to shield his face from the little blizzards of ground-snow, he was no longer warm. His right hand, holding the carbine in the crook of his arm, was growing numb inside its heavy mitten, and his feet in the pacs were beginning to feel dead and lumpy too. It hurt his throat and chest to suck the cold wind in through his mouth, but he had to, or slow down.

  Just after the shadow of the ridge had reached the skirt of the parka, he failed to see before him a knife-edge drift of snow curving down from a ledge above him. The drift was packed hard by the wind, and his right snow-shoe swung straight into it. His knees gave way at once, as if only the habitual rhythm of their movement and the lack of any obstacle had kept them working, and he fell across the drift, pushed over onto his right shoulder by the wind. The carbine leapt out of his arm, slid across the sharp crest of the drift, and vanished down the other side. For several seconds he lay still where he’d fallen, unable even to muster up any anger about the accident. He felt only weak and ready to weep. It didn’t seem to him, while he lay there, that there was the slightest chance left for a man who was so far gone he could be knocked down by a snowdrift.

  Then suddenly his body granted him the saving anger. "Goddam snow," he yelled. "Nothing but goddam snow, snow, snow," and he struck fiercely into the drift with his left fist, as if it were a human being who had played a practical joke on him. He struck the drift three times, to match the "snow, snow, snow," he was yelling. At the third blow, his fist slid upward and broke the blade-shaped crest of the drift. The loosened snow, torn off by the wind, struck him full in the face, blinding him, and blew down inside the hood in big clots. At once his anger was transformed into caution. He became greatly alarmed that he should be lying there, still miles of deep snow from home, and with daylight nearly gone, pounding a snowdrift as if it had tripped him on purpose. Part of his alarm, indeed, arose from the fact that the drift had struck back so promptly and effectively. The sudden caution was that of a man who has unexpectedly encountered a superior foe.

  "Geez, boy," he admonished himself, "use your head. You got nothing to spare for that kind of nonsense."

  With difficulty, he got himself upright on the webs again, and then he had to stand there, leaning against the wind with his head bowed and his eyes closed, because he was so dizzy. His knees were jumping too. After a moment the dizziness passed, but his knees kept right on trembling. His whole legs were trembling. He opened his eyes. The mountains to the northeast, where he was looking, swayed and flowed together, and tiny black spots, like the swarming flakes, only there were no flakes swarming, circled rapidly and flew back and forth across one another at a great distance. The mountains soon drew apart and became firm again, but the swarming slowed down and thinned out very slowly.

  Like damn bats, he thought, like damn bats hunting. He closed his eyes again, and waited until the bats stopped flying on the whiteness inside his lids, after becoming, during the last instant, white bats upon black snow fields. Then he opened his eyes again, and there were only the fixed black points of timber in the distant snow.

  "Take it easy, boy," he advised himself. "Slow and steady is what gets there."

  His mind went on by itself, Left out of the pass, half a day north, right, and go till you see it; left out of the pass, half a day north . . .

  At that point he managed to stop its jabbering.

  He worked his way carefully up over the drift, and started north again, saying, "Slow and steady," and carefully refusing to let the advice become another chant. He had shuffled perhaps twenty steps before he understood that he felt queer because there was nothing in his right arm, which was nonetheless crooked as if the carbine still lay across it. He was badly frightened by this lapse. For the first time since he’d left the pass that morning, the real flight of the small dark birds swept over him.

  "Jesus," he yelled at himself, "wake up," and then promptly, because he felt how his strength was drained by the anger, he whispered, "Take it easy."

  And don’t cuss, the monitor said. Now, of all times, don’t take the name of the Lord in vain.

  He returned almost to the drift, and then saw where t
he carbine was lying, the groove of its descent, and the well it had made a few yards below. He went down and picked it up, and dusted the snow off it with his mittens, and climbed back up until he could start north again in his own tracks. He went slowly now, lifting each foot as little as possible, sliding it around and forward through the loose top-snow. He took the steps slowly too, trying to stay within the bounds demanded by his failing energy and to lessen the light-headedness, which wouldn’t leave him, and prevent its maturing into another swarm of bats.

  This careful husbanding of his remaining powers did not last long. He couldn’t keep his thoughts or his will upon maintaining it, and the dark, internal traitor of time gained power over him steadily as the shadow of the ridge came higher. Gradually he began to increase his pace again, and at the end of half an hour, he was once more shuffling along as fast as he could, bent forward into the wind, and making little bleating noises when he breathed.

  Caught in a sudden and unusually vindictive spray of snow, he faltered, and stepped with one web onto the other, and fell again, half burying himself. No rage came to his rescue this time. He lay there for a minute or two, weeping a little, but easily, not even with desperation. It was finally only the slow return and growth of fear which drove him to undertake the labor of struggling to his feet, and picking up the carbine, and moving on.

  He had gone only a short way, when he realized that he was entirely in the shadow of the ridge now, and the wind, although it seemed to be slacking off a little, was very much colder. He had to get into the light again. He didn’t reason about it. It was simply that the shadow and the cold in the shadow were intolerable. Slowly, on a gradual slant, he climbed to the crest of the ridge and into full sunlight again. It wasn’t much help, though. It was only light now, a deepening, end-of-the-day kind of light, without any warmth in it whatever, and the wind up there was even worse. The sun stood far down on the west, gilding a low and infinitely distant horizon of clouds into a city of domes and enormous banners that extended as far as he could see into the north and into the south. Everywhere the light of that low sun struck, it frightened him with the sense of lateness. There were many more shadows than lights on the sea of mountains, and where high, angled snow fields took the light it was no longer dazzling, but only softly glowing.

  After a very few minutes he was desperately half-running again, each lift of a web throwing behind him a short snow plume like the long ones that reached south from the peaks. He kept no watch at all around him. He didn’t even look west again, but only marked his steps with the short bleatings of his breath, and turned all himself to the one business of getting north as fast as he could.

  So he was again surprised, this time by the sudden fading of the light. He turned his body to look west, like a man startled awake, and saw the sun more than half sunk in the city of clouds. Great spokes of light and shadow went up from the domes and towers and banners of the city, and reached high over him into the east, and the domes and towers and banners themselves shone along their upper edges as from a golden fire behind them. Everywhere over the sea of mountains, snow fields that only an instant before, it seemed to him, had been glowing, were now in blue shadow. Mountains lay under the shadows of the mountains west of them, and only on the highest peaks were there a few small, darkening remnants of the glow. Those last peaks stood out clearly, like small islands far apart on the darkened billows of the ranges. Even the ridge he was on had sunk into the shadow, so that only his head and shoulders were in the light. He looked the other way quickly, hunting for that place in the northeast corner where the pass went out of Aspen Creek. He could see over the lower range now, but everything out there in the northeast, except one very distant, lighted rim, which could have been either clouds or snowy mountains too far away to matter, was already shadowy and indistinct. Queerly, since it had been tormenting him for hours, he was most disturbed because the wind had fallen away with the light. The quiet about him seemed as ominous as the awful distances and the slowly rising darkness.

  The careful planning of the cave came back to him a last time. "Half a day north," he said aloud, and then quickly, with something near a waking of his mind after the waking of his body, "Half a day or no, , boy, you gotta get down offa here while you can still see.”

  He glanced at the nearest of the big peaks north of him and not too far west, and believed it was the Pinto, but didn’t give it very much thought, for he had started down already, and he saw now what must have been true for some time, for hours perhaps, that there was no longer a jumble of unknown hills below him, but a single, long, snow-floored valley between two ridges. Despite fear and weariness, his hopes rose again.

  "Not too far off at that, boy," he told himself softly and quickly. "Not too far off, at that."

  28

  He went down as quickly as he could, but it wasn’t easy going. The snow grew deeper all the way, so that even on the webs he began to sink and flounder, and the downhill stepping made his legs shake badly and give at the knees. When he came among the bigger trees, where the wind had piled up steep, curving drifts, he stumbled constantly, and fell a good many times. Each time he fell, he was a little slower getting the webs back under him and rising out of the foam-light snow, and each time he rose he swore to be more careful, to go slowly and save himself this costly and exasperating effort, but he c0uldn’t. It was much darker in the hollow than it had been on the ridge, and his eyes, untrustworthy from hunger and bad sleep and the long brilliance of the heights, often blended the drifts into a smooth slope going down before him. Even worse, he couldn’t seem to keep it in his mind for more than a minute or two at a time that he would do better to go slowly. He couldn’t seem to keep anything in his mind for more than a minute or two at a time, except his fear of the closing darkness, and that was constantly urging him to go faster and faster. His breath no longer labored and bleated as it had when he was running on the ridge, but he began to make small, uncontrollable moaning sounds, like the beginning of helpless weeping, each time he fell and while he was struggling to get up again.

  It was almost dark when he finally came out of the edge of timber onto the open meadow. The going was easier there, for the wind had swept the length of the valley, smoothing it and packing the snow a little, so that he didn’t sink into it so far or have so much to lift on the webs. but now he was plagued by imaginary drifts, which kept him testing the white glimmer before him, and also he was delayed by the need to stop often and peer around him.

  All day the black panther had remained far off and scarcely more real than the creature of last night’s bad dream. For half an hour at a time he’d forgotten it entirely. Now, with the approach of night, it was back again. Several times he believed he saw it moving silently and with disturbing ease and speed among the black pyramids of trees the wind had cleared of snow. It was going around the north end of the meadow, gliding from tree to tree and keeping always opposite him or even a little ahead of him, despite the much greater distance it had to go. He could never quite catch sight of it when he looked directly at a place where it had moved, but always saw it out of the corner of his eye and just as it was completing its swift passage between trees, and merging with some black fir or cedar.

  "You’re seein’ things; you’re just seein’ things, like those damn bats," he told himself, but knew that he couldn’t afford to believe what he said.

  "Just keep your eyes peeled," he said later. "It can’t get at you across all that snow, if you just keep your eyes peeled."

  Four times on the way across the meadow, he turned when one of the shadowy flittings occurred, and raised the carbine to cover the next open space the cat would have to cross. It never moved out in front of the carbine though, and after the fourth attempt, a movement several trees ahead of where he was aiming told him that the cat had even made use of his halts to gain on him. It would be waiting for him among the trees on the other side, where there was no such guardian expanse of snow. He told himself that he hadn’t seen t
he cat to be sure of, since the first day, when he’d missed it twice across the ravine in the lower range, and that he hadn’t even seen a sign of the cat since he’d found those few dark hairs in the shallow cave on the ridge. When the fearful mentor spoke of the tiny crawling against the wind across the white wall of the pass, he replied aloud and scornfully, "Yeah, and I saw a million bats in broad daylight too," but the retort was hollow. Too much of him refused to be convinced. The mentor continued to insist that the cat, or at least something he couldn’t afford to ignore, was already around in the trees on the other side and waiting for him. lt was waiting in that thick cluster, like a black patch on a black and white pinto, a little way up the slope and just to the left of where his course would take him if he held to it.

  When he finally came among the trees, therefore, he in creased his precautions. He took off his right mitten and stuffed it into his pocket and held the carbine ready all the time, with his foreinger touching the trigger. He watched intently each tree that he approached, particularly any tree above him and to his left, and in every space that was open enough he stopped and looked quickly around him. He was having no trouble going slowly now. Darkness was as good as on him already, and time and distance and even the night cold were nothing compared to the necessity of never, in the least or for even the fraction of a moment, relaxing his guard. One such lapse, however brief, was all the cat was waiting for. It wouldn’t do to fall, either. That airy snow would render him completely helpless. So he made his way up among the trees, stopping every few steps to peer and listen, and testing the treacherous snow before each step, though never looking down at it, but only trying it with a bear-paw, feeling his way around or up over one drift after another.

  By the time he was half way up the ridge the stars were out. Rocks and the spires of the fir trees broke the constellations with small towers of darkness above him. It was impossible to guess an irregularity or judge a distance up the glimmering slope. Sometimes the snow stood like a wall before him, and then all at once it would lie down and become a plain of infinite extent.