The Track of the Cat

by Walter van Tilburg Clark

  The cat was in no hurry. It simply matched its pace and watchfulness to his and went up stealthily, always just out of sight and hearing and always to his left and a little above him. He went more and more slowly, and spent longer and longer in each of his watchful pauses, but he never saw anything but the last, illusive flicker of a movement, and he never heard anything but his own strained breathing. Before he finished the climb, nonetheless, he was crouching every time he stopped, almost sitting on his heels, with the carbine held ready across his knee, while he studied each tree to the left of his course and stopped his breathing in order to be able to hear any sound, however small and whispery, in the now perfectly silent and motionless air. The most important single fact in the world was again the fact that cats could see in the dark. He resented bitterly the fact that cats could see in the dark. It seemed to him that the malicious and chancy god of things had enabled cats to see in the dark for the sole purpose of rendering this already unequal hunt even more unequal. Often, as he crouched, he felt very sorry for himself, and wondered at the enormous indifference of a universe which could permit a tragedy of these proportions to be enacted before no audience but trees and stars.

  When at last he came up into the open on the long, firmer drifts of the ridge, almost solid under the webs, he came up stooping, in order not to make a shadow in the patterns of the stars himself, and crouched once more under the overhanging eave of a summit ledge. He crouched there for a long time, watching the ridge both ways, though mostly north, but couldn’t be sure that he saw anything moving on it. He couldn’t be absolutely sure that he didn’t, though. Half a dozen times he thought he detected a faint, shadowy passage over the star glimmer, but always, as on the meadow below, it began just in the extreme corner of his vision much farther up the ridge than he’d expected, and each time he looked directly at it, blinking his eyes quickly to cure them of the spooks that came from staring, he could make out nothing certain.

  There was no doubt about one thing, though. It was bitterly cold now, a still, eating-in kind of cold that was two or three months ahead of itself. The cold worked into him even through the parka and the heavy underclothes. He was shaking all over and had to clench his jaws to keep his teeth from chattering, and his moustache was growing heavy and crusty as the steam of his breathing froze in it. At the same time, the tightening of his muscles against the cold gave him a new, false strength and cleared his mind a little.

  "Hell," he said finally, through this star rift in his dark belief, "no painter’d hang around this long, not even a black one."

  A moment later he said, even more loudly, "Black, hell. A few black hairs on his back, maybe."

  He forced himself to stand upright. "You’re seein’ things this time for sure," he remarked scornfully. "And who the hell’s gonna hear me?" he asked that greater part of him which was outraged by his loud voice in the open silence of the ridge and by the foolishness of exposing himself, and wished to crouch again immediately and resume the vigil.

  "If I can spot a light now, I’m as good as in," he declared.

  He went around the sheltering drift and climbed up and stood boldly against the stars on the very top of the ridge, and looked down to the east. There were only the terraces of shadow trees going down the snow out of sight. He was seized by a momentary fear that he had got his directions mixed after all. He looked up into what he believed to be the north. He was very little off. He had only to search the sky a trifle to the left of where he first looked and there he found the Dipper, wheeling slowly upon its invisible tether, and out the line of its pointing lip, the tiny, reassuring pole star.

  "It’s too close under the mountain still," he explained to himself, looking down again and north and south for the light he eouldn’t find. Everything down there was as if no man had ever been in it; as if it had been covered with snow and lit only by stars since the beginning of time.

  "Geez, you’d think they’d have a signal out, or somebody lookin’ for me, by this time," he complained.

  It occurred to him that on the contrary it might have been too long, that they might have given him up, and he was embittered by the notion, as if help had been about to reach him and then had been suddenly, perhaps even deliberately, withdrawn. For a moment, as he had approached the crest, expecting to see the light below him and not far to the north, he had been nearly home. Now he felt as far away as he had been that morning, or farther. The hollowness caused by his hunger was enlarged by a hollowness of another kind, and despite the clenching of his jaws his teeth began to chatter audibly.

  "Well, there’s no use my freezin’ to death while I think about it, even if they have given me up," he said.

  The boastful ease of his words was not present in his voice. Tears of self-pity stung his eyelids. Here he was, three days out and alone and still lost, and all his family, and that little Welshy in her yellow blouse too, fed and warm and careless in their well-lighted room, were as indifferent to his plight as the god of stars and snow and cats that could see in the dark. He wished to die to avenge himself upon them.

  "Not even keepin’ a light," he said tearfully.

  He imagined himself found dead right where he was on the ridge. He saw himself lying half drifted over with blown snow which wouldn’t melt against his face or upon his long-closed eyes. He imagined in particular, so that the other members of the searching expedition became only her accompanying shadows, Gwen in her blue cloak with the red lining, being suddenly overcome with remorse because she had been so unkind to him while he was alive and casting herself upon him in the snow, weeping and calling his name over and over in a choked voice, like the heroines of the plays he had seen in Piper’s Opera House in San Francisco.

  In the midst of this satisfying vision, he was seized by a chill that shook his whole body. When it had passed he was once more possessed by the fear that had come with him up the mountain.

  “And don’t think you won’t be," he said, "if you just start dreamin’ now."

  His powers, so convincingly restored for a time as he held himself against the cold, were used up again by this little orgy of emotion after the long, attentive climb. The brief rift in his darkness was clouded over, and once he had moved north along the ridge a way and selected himself a downward course, the last guards of his will dozed off and the citadel of his mind was freely ransacked by the multitude of fears, doubts and credulities he had held so long at bay.

  He was well down among the trees, descending slowly, almost limply, and whimpering a little every now and then at the weakness in his knees, when suddenly he knew that the panther was traveling beside him again and closer to him than it had dared to come at any time before. He caught his breath in the midst of a whimper, shocked at the plaintive, tell-tale sound he was making. His brief drama of defiance and disappointment on the ridge came back to him now as if enacted by another, and that other a suicidal madman, beyond self-control and lacking the last vestige of a sense of reality. The cat had been up there watching him all the time, waiting only for a better chance to pick him off, and he had revealed to it every secret of his weakness. Now, contemptuous and confident, it was going down with him, taking its time, perhaps even enjoying the delay, since he had entered timber again and so afforded it an endless choice of opportunities. What’s more, it was on his right now. All this time, blindly, stupidly, weakly, he had been coming down under the impression that it was on his left, when it had been on his right. Only its desire to play him could explain the fact that it had not jumped him long since.

  For a time he managed to hold himself to descending the ridge as he had climbed it, a few steps at a time and then a long enough to search the darkness and the snow glimmer and to select the clearest avenue for his next retreat.

  "Take it easy," he advised himself. "There’s nothing’ll start a cat as quick as running."

  Gradually, however, he began to increase his pace and shorten the intervals of watching. Then the guarded retreat became to him a flight and he gav
e way increasingly to the blind desire to run. At last he actually broke into a lumbering, sliding trot, and almost at once he stumbled and pitched headlong down the slope into a loose drift. In the moment he swam there helpless, struggling to get the bear-paws under him, the last thin rind around the fears within him split open and he was flooded by panic. Diving forward, uttering a series of small, crying, animal sounds which he did not hear himself, he managed to break out of the drift on the lower side and gain enough balance to carry him, and went on down the slope plunging and stumbling.

  When he fell again, this time to the side and into the sharp, springy boughs of a fir tree, he distinctly saw the cat leap from its cover on the slope above. He wrenched over among the boughs and brought the carbine up and fired. The flash and the report stunned him and he realized, without caring in the least, that his boldest declaration on the ridge must after all have been little more than a murmur. The first echoes of the shot came from nearby and were short and close together and muffled by snow. They made a new thing, a near, attentive thing, out of the silence which came back almost at once behind them. The cat had vanished when the shadow of smoke allowed him to see the snow again. Then, from somewhere far below, like the booming of someone else’s shot, came a delayed echo, deep, softly thunderous and prolonged.

  The brilliance of the carbine’s flash, which for a tiny part of an instant had let him see quite clearly the bough above the muzzle and a little area of the snow beneath it, told him at once what he needed.

  Light, he thought. Jesus, if I only had a light. A fire; I gotta make me a fire.

  He worked himself free of the hampering fir and lay at the edge of its snow basin, holding the carbine ready and searching the forest around him with his eyes and ears. It didn’t occur to him until he had risen and climbed out of the basin and started cautiously down again that he had been lying there all that time with an unloaded gun.

  "Oh, Kee-rist, wake up, wake up," he whispered violently.

  He stood still with one foot braced against a drift, looking around him more than he worked, and sprung a new cartridge into the breech and replaced the used one in the chamber. Then he started down again. Twice more he believed he saw the great cat move among the trees quite near him, and raised the carbine at it, but then had no target. Before long he was plunging recklessly again. He fell several times and swam and scrambled back onto the webs and lurched. on down. He glanced back often, but moving as he was, and among the ever-closing trees, he couldn’t be sure of anything he saw. When he wasn’t looking back, however, his mind showed him the cat clearly, a huge, elongated beast with yellow eyes that burned and flickered, slipping down from tree to tree behind his right shoulder. It glided with that unnatural ease across the surface of the snow, scarcely sinking into it at all, and every motion of its effortless pursuit mocked his heavy, staggering descent and filled him with despair. The chase seemed to him to be going on forever and to be prolonged only because the panther didn’t choose to end it.

  When the trees opened about a small clearing below him, and he could see that the clearing continued far below and even grew wider, he made a decision at once, not by reason or by choice, but only because he could no longer bear to play mouse. He plowed as fast as he could into the clearing and across to the trees on the north side. From there he looked back, but there was nothing moving on the glimmer of the open snow, or in the lane above it from which he had just emerged, and he felt that he had achieved an important tactical success, a success which might even justify hopes of a final escape. His movements at once became more restrained and purposeful. Still holding the carbine across his arm, he drew the skinning knife out of the pocket of the parka and then out of its sheath, and slipped the sheath back into the pocket. After a last crafty survey of the dark row of trees on the other side of the clearing, he slowly stood the carbine into the snow and moved in against the nearest fir, pressing his way into the boughs until he could get hold of them where they joined the trunk. Still watching the clearing over his shoulder, he laid hold of one bough and began to hack at the base of it with the knife. After four cuts it came loose in his mittened hand and he tossed it out onto the snow beside the carbine and leaned in again and began to cut another.

  As the boughs piled up out on the snow, he cut in increasing fury and haste and kept his watch less carefully. His breath began to catch in his chest and break up into his throat in little sobs. By the time he had cut a dozen boughs, he was no longer watching the clearing at all. He felt a brief and particular triumph each time a bough came loose in the mittened hand and could be tossed out onto the growing pile. Stubborn boughs he abandoned in a rage that lasted no longer than the triumphs.

  It was when he turned to move on to the next tree that he caught a glimpse of the shadowy gliding again. It wasn’t on the south side of the clearing at all now, but on the upper edge and moving north. It had just crossed the snow lane by which he himself had entered the clearing. He was shocked because he had believed all this time that the cat was just waiting over on the other side, watching him curiously and giving him precious time because it hadn’t yet guessed what he was up to. Now he realized that once more, and, again nearly fatally, he had underestimated his enemy. He didn’t even toss out the last bough he had cut, but stood there, crouching a little, with the rough stem still clasped in his mitten and the knife in his numb, bare hand and stared up across the pale open until he was convinced that the sly motion along its edge was nearly continuous.

  Yessir, he thought, with foreboding and self-condemnation, it’s circling. It’s working around here to where I’m cutting ’em. Geez, he thought with an instant’s wildness, a minute more, just one minute more, and he’d of had me.

  "Take it easy, will you?" he said aloud.

  Watching the upper edge all the time, he crept out to the pile of boughs and dropped the last bough onto it and drew the carbine up out of the snow. He felt much better then. The margin of white clearing all around him, which a moment before had appeared so uselessly narrow, became a nearly adequate defense. He could no longer see the movement along the edge of the clearing either, and he understood that the cat had again settled down to watch him and to wait for another lapse, whether into dreaminess or into blind activity.

  "Not this time, you murderin’ black bastard," he said softly through his teeth. "No sleep-walkers this time, by God."

  He had been warmed by the furious cutting, and now he was encouraged by his defiance as well, and by the way his luck was holding up, even against such gross errors of inattention or bravado as some of his had been. He kept the watch for several minutes, but he really understood that the cat wouldn’t attack while he was waiting for it. There was to be no short and easy ending to this game, unless he himself was the victim.

  It knows, he thought. It knows, the ugly black bastard. Not a wiggle out of it when I got the gun.

  Finally he slowly eased the carbine, stock down, into the snow again, so that its disappearance from his hands was concealed against his body, and squatted and began to cut small twigs from the boughs onto the snow. Every few seconds he would hold the knife still and study the edge of the woods up there. When he had a little pyramid of twigs on the snow before him, he slowly got out the match container, and after the longest pause he had yet made, quickly drew the carbine up out of the snow, rested it across his trembling knees with the muzzle toward the upper end of the clearing, brushed the snow from the scarred butt-plate and scratched a match quickly down the curve of it. The little flame made an astounding, blinding light. It required all his courage and hope to keep him from shaking it out at once. He thrust it in under the twigs, and, with its light that much dimmed, peered anxiously across it at the edge of the clearing again.

  The flame didn’t catch in the twigs. It broke and sputtered among them, and crept back along the match itself, and winked out, letting back the safer darkness that gradually became the glimmer of the clearing under the frosty stars.

  In exactly the s
ame manner he lit and applied seven matches, though he was beginning to sweat with anxiety by the time he struck the seventh. None of them produced anything more than a brief sputtering and tiny flash-flames among the needles. He felt with a stiff finger in the tube of the container. There were not more than four or five matches left. It was then, while he was trying to think, despite his tremulous vexation, what to do to make the next match work, that he saw the shadow stir again. It was way around on the north side of the clearing now, nearly down to where he’d cut the boughs. He was terrified because it had got so far around without his once seeing it move. It was impossible to escape the conclusion that he no longer even knew when his attention was failing.

  He slowly laid the match container down against the pyramid of twigs and even more slowly raised the carbine to ready. There was no visible target, but he carefully led the tree into which the last movement had merged, and lowered his right knee onto the bear-paw so that his left knee came up to support his left elbow, and waited. Nothing moved. The clearing and the edge of the clearing were so motionless and silent that at last the twinkling of the stars became a distracting movement and a hint of sound. He lowered the carbine and let it rest across his lifted knee.

  After that, however, he worked hastily. Snatching off his left mitten, he turned up the long skirt of the parka and began to rip at the quilted lining with his knife. When he had slit it several times, he tore out the rags of the cloth and made a loose ball of them and poked the ball in under the pile of twigs. He lit another match on the butt-plate of the carbine and held it in carefully cupped hands down against the bits of red cloth. At first they took only minutely, like tiny sparks in the end of a dry wick, and he pressed the flame in more deeply under them. A threadlike crescent of sparks began to eat into one strip of the cloth. After a quick glance at the north edge of the clearing, he bent over and blew gently upon the smoldering crescent. A portion of it instantly winked out into blackness. The other side glowed intensely for a moment and then burst into a small and sooty flame.