The Track of the Cat

by Walter van Tilburg Clark

  He didn’t pause even to taste this significant triumph, but, alternately working and watching, blew upon the little flame until it had come up whiter through several spaces in the ball of lining, and then busily rearranged the twigs to lie above the center of tire. This time the twigs took suddenly and brightly, and then arose a noisy fire as big as his hand. He drew a bough to him from the pile and hastily cut more twigs onto the fire. There was still snow on the bough and the new twigs sputtered and the flames sank as the snow melted and dripped into them. Frantically he stooped and blew into the fire. He continued to blow until he was so dizzy that the clearing was swinging in uneven circles. The fire saved itself. He straightened up, sighing with relief, and reached for another bough. He shook this one free of snow and when he judged the fire could stand it, laid it on whole. At last he stood up and began to lay more boughs on, first carefully shaking each bough free of snow. The blaze grew with a hostile crackling and spitting until its jumping light reached all the way across the clearing to the trees.

  "There, goddam you," Curt said to the trees.

  He was shaking from the long time he had squatted there denying his fear in order to nurse the fre, and from the cold which had worked back into him, but he was also triumphant. In his triumph he stood guard boldly erect beside the fire, with the carbine in the crook of his arm and gazed scornfully about the clearing. When the fre began to weaken, he fed it with the generosity of a victor. The new blaze rose higher than the frst and cast its light farther, even into the alleys of snow among the trees. He grinned at the trees along the north edge.

  "Black or not black," he told them, "you’re as scared of a fre as any of ’em, ain’t you, you murderin’ black bastard."

  He continued to stand with the carbine in the crook of his arm and the belittling grin upon his face, and to congratulate himself with silent bursts of satisfaction, for it was clear to him now that the fire was an ally who would see him through the night.

  "And once I got daylight to see by again . . ." he said, and grinned even more widely.

  It wasn’t until the fire began to shrink once more, and the shadows to advance slowly from the edge of the woods, that it came to him, like a blow in his middle, that there were only a few boughs left of the pile he had cut.

  "Geez," he whispered, dismayed anew that his fatuous relief should have made him overlook this first essential. He whirled and counted his reserve. "Four," he said desperately, "four measly little branches. For God’s sake, man,” he prodded himself, "wake up, will you? Wake up. And it’s sinkin’ into the snow too. The goddam snow’ll put it out if you don’t."

  He looked all around the clearing, but saw no movement that didn’t, after a second look, resolve itself into a trick of the fire. He crossed hastily to the trees along the south edge and stood the carbine up in the snow and began to hack at boughs once more. When he had a good armload, he got hold of the carbine and went back to the failing fire at a bent-kneed half run. He tossed the boughs onto the snow and fed half a dozen of them into the fire one at a time, and when they had taken well and the clearing was lighted to the trees and even up among them again, he stood the carbine up and knelt and cross-wove half a dozen boughs flat upon the snow and carefully, using two of the larger boughs for tongs, lifted the fire onto them and poked it back together again.

  "There," he said. "That’ll hold you for a while."

  He fed the bright ally as fully as he dared and returned to the south edge with the carbine and the knife. He kept up the cutting for a long while this time, resting only when his trembling hand and wrist refused the work entirely, and now and then to trudge hastily back to the fire and throw more fuel on it and dump all the extra boughs onto his new reserve pile on the downhill side. He carried the carbine back and forth with him on every trip.

  At last, when his hand was bleeding and his shoulder cramped and there wasn’t much to choose between the blade and the back of the knife except for the nicks, he carried his final armload out and threw it all onto the reserve pile. It made a very impressive pile then, low compared to its length and width, yet taller than he was, fir and cedar and spruce and pine, and the biggest boughs he could cut, so the real burning would go on a long time after the needles had dared off. He surveyed the magnificent pile from his bloodshot eyes and grinned. He wasn’t steady on the webs, even with the carbine as a prop, but there was in that grin the confidence of one who sees his way clear to the end of a difficu1t problem.

  "There, goddam you," he said softly, addressing the patient, invisible cat. "And I won’t move again till it’s daylight; so help me, I won’t."

  He counted boughs into the fire until it was taking steadily and sharply and casting its bright looks on every tree around the clearing, and then laid another iioor of boughs between it and the reserve pile. He leaned the carbine against the pile and squatted on the floor of boughs and unlaced the webs and stood them up together beside the carbine. He sat down and leaned back against the cushioning pile and stretched his feet to the blaze. Laying the carbine handy across his lap, he made and lit a cigarette and then let his head fall back into the boughs too, and smoked slowly. The smoke in his long freshened lungs and on his empty belly made him very dizzy at first, but it tasted good and it helped to ease his hunger. He was too tired, too cramped, dull, shaking tired to be very hungry any more anyway. After the third drag at his cigarette, he said once more, but very softly this time, "Not till it’s daylight, by God; not till it’s daylight, so help me."

  29

  He could not, at first, maintain a confidence which justified this little boast. He didn’t feel safe sitting down and in that open place with the firelight on him. The movements of the light in the edge of the woods alarmed him repeatedly and made him long to jump to his feet and raise the carbine against some shadowy threat. His long laboring muscles jerked independently when he relaxed and grew tense at each alarm. His sore and tired eyes moved with independent fearfulness in his head, trying to keep guard all around the edge of the clearing, but particularly along the north edge, opposite the fire. They went back to the north edge after each glance elsewhere. Without knowing it, he even shifted his position a little at a time until he was half facing the north edge. Occasionally his eyes more than doubled an alarm by detecting a fleeting, shadowy passage in the very place they were watching, a movement just beyond the reach of the light and out of rhythm with the flickering of the fire, so that he put both hands to the carbine and even began to lift it. He wished to smoke his cigarette slowly and deeply, but unless he kept his mind on doing so, he sucked on it quickly and blew out the smoke quickly too, and hard, so that it wouldn’t screen his vision. When an alarming shadow moved, he stopped smoking altogether and let the cigarette hang motionless from the corner of his mouth, smoking only by itself, at the tip.

  Gradually, however, the warmth and the light reassured him. The small, inclined world of the clearing, which was all he could see and all his weariness would allow him to consider, became more and more a sufficient margin of safety, a wide and blessed nakedness into which the enemy dared not venture so long as there was light. He gained faith in the power of the fire itself to hold the cat off.

  "Scared of a little fire, ain’t you, you black son-of-a-bitch," he murmured, and a little later, "I could go to sleep right here, and you still wouldn’t dare make a try."

  In his mind he commented, It’s all his game in the dark, the sneaky, black bastard, but while I got a fire and this—he patted the stock of the carbine with his mittened hand—it’s all mine.

  "I’ll wait you out, all right," he told the cat.

  He didn’t wholly believe in the truth of any of these daring remarks, but the monitor protested each of them a trifle less vehemently than the one before it, and he felt that he was gaining an internal victory, a success in home politics, as it were, that was a further guarantee of the ultimate triumph of his strategy. Several times he repeated, either aloud or silently in exactly the same words, "Not till da
ylight, by God," and with each repetition the promise became less a boast and more a simple reminder of the immediate tactics necessary to sustain the greater plan. The shadowy alarms came farther apart and with decreasing force until an occasional glance around or just at the critical salient on the north edge seemed enough to maintain his defenses.

  The heat of the fire was doubled where he sat by the pile of boughs behind him. The ice on his moustache melted and began to drip. He threw the wet butt of the cigarette into the flames and pressed the ice out of the bristles of the moustache with short, quick flips of his forefinger, and there was another minor irritation gone. He hadn’t noticed it at all, being busy with much bigger troubles, but now he was relieved by its absence. His body relaxed as the warmth worked into his garments, and then through them. The knot the branch-cutting had tied in his shoulder was loosened and the ache in his hand and wrist diminished. The unpredictable jerkings of his arms and legs became only twitchings and finally ceased, and much of his apprehension departed with them. Even the busy chewing of his stomach on itself eased off, and that was where every fear began. His feet suffered a period of excruciating tingling as the feeling came back into them, but he flexed them slowly and steadily inside the steaming pacs until he knew all their parts again and each toe could move by itself, and actually gained a small, perverse pleasure from the tingling. It gave him something to work the feet against, and afforded him a minor but certain triumph within the great triumph of fire and clearing and rest which he could not yet permit himself to celebrate without reservation.

  He took off his left mitten too, and with his warmed hands dug up snow from around the edge of the platform of boughs and pressed it slowly into ice-balls. When he had set four of the wet, gray balls in a row beside him, he reached back, congratulating himself on the arrangement which made all these tasks so easy, and pulled down five boughs, and leaned forward and laid them on the fire one by one, taking care that their solid stems should cross so they’d keep burning after the flare of the needles. Then he made another cigarette and lit it with a twig from the fire, and picked up an ice-ball and leaned back again. He meant just to suck slowly at the ice-ball but the first wet in his mouth made him so eager that he bit off chunks and chewed them to get the water faster. With the second ball, however, he took his time, alternately sucking it and drawing at the cigarette, and the third ball was an indulgence. He breathed out a thin plume of smoke insultingly, in the manner of one who is secure before a detested enemy, and turned his eyes slowly to look at the north edge of the clearing.

  "I hope you freeze out there, you bastard," he said. "I hope you’re drooling for a taste of me."

  He chuckled at the picture his mind made of the panther crouching in the shadow of a spruce tree and staring with great flickering eyes at the savory man at ease between his support of boughs and his sentry fire. He was amused by the indecision of its gaze, the torment it was enduring between fear of the fire and the urge to get at him. He made it slaver a little and then gulp its spittle, and chuckled again. He saw this against the fire, and without concern, as he might have looked at a colored illustration in a child’s book. Indeed he was beginning to find it difficult to look beyond the happily moving fire at all, and almost as soon as he had created it, the picture of the great cat lost the power to hold his full attention. It began to change shape and dilate and blur, so that the head of the cat became much too large and bright and, to his faint, departing amusement, assumed the iridescent halo of the fire as its own before it disappeared.

  "Thinks it’s a damned saint now," he murmured. "Damned cat thinks it’s a saint."

  He was standing on the paving blocks of the Embarcadero in San Francisco. It was the middle of the morning and the sunlight was warm and clear and full of the curving, arrowy flights and scattered settlings, like fruit blossoms falling, of hundreds of pigeons. He was dressed expensively in clothes that he must have put on for the evening before, and wore a gray derby and carried a cane. With his head back, like a man for whom there is neither hurry nor care, he was breathing out the smoke of a very large and costly cigar. In fact the cigar was so remarkably large as to amuse him. He was watching, with wakeful eyes under indolent lids, the passage of three hurrying women, all laughing alarms and sudden scurryings, across the wide plaza full of drays and carriages, clatter and calling, from the Ferry Building to the safety of a Market Street sidewalk. He had divined as they passed, in the quick, laughing glance of the woman nearest him, that it might be worth his while to follow them. Certainly the glance had been more than accidental, and its brightness not entirely the result of her adventure in the traffic. She had observed him quite completely for so short a look, and had ended by gazing directly, even with a kind of boldness, into his own eyes, before her companion in the center had drawn her by. Also there was something about the woman that was familiar, and he believed the familiarity to be promising in itself. He had seen her before somewhere, and their relationship, whatever it had been, gave her look a significance that could not be mistaken. The other two women wore long coats and great, flowered hats upon high-piled hair, but the half-remembered one was wearing a yellow suit with a pleasingly snug jacket, and no hat at all, but only the coppery wreath of her own braided hair. While he was watching them out into the center of the plaza’s confusion, she lifted the yellow skirt and folded it forward over her thigh while making a graceful, curving escape from the path of a huge, black dray horse with little plumes, like the plume of a band leader’s shako, on its harness, and large, yellow and peculiarly human eyes. Her escape was both more fearful and more revealing than the danger warranted, for although the horse was large, upon second thought unnaturally large, as arresting as a gigantic statue in the midst of the life-sized turmoil around it, it was advancing slowly and was not near enough to threaten her. He took the pleasant little exaggeration to himself.

  He was given a final encouragement when the three women were safely beyond the black horse by one more quick and laughing glance over the yellow shoulder. He promised himself, still watching, that he wouldn’t neglect the invitation, but also that he wouldn’t put himself at a disadvantage by acting with undue eagerness. Hurry of any sort and for any reason was against his natural inclination this morning anyway. He was full of lazy well-being, heavy and at ease and also, for some reason, he was finding the familiar uproar and motion and color of the Embarcadero unusually satisfying. Smoking and smiling, he watched from beneath his drooping lids the three women growing smaller among carts and horses, street cars and hurrying men, and was about to turn after them and commence his leisurely pursuit when they vanished, perhaps behind the great brewery wagon, piled high with barrels, which was just then slowly passing.

  The effect of their disappearance upon him was not that of anything so natural, however. He was astonished. His idleness and contentment were gone in an instant, and he became alarmed because his body was so unmanageably slow in answering his desire to hurry after the three women. It seemed to him now that the last glance of the woman in yellow had not been the signature of the invitation after all, but an urgent, a terrified warning. He became certain that her eyes had been staring at his in horror, because of some danger which threatened him. She hadn’t been laughing at all; she had been gasping, or even screaming; it was impossible in the complex uproar of the waterfront to tell which. Nor was there any question that the mock flight of the three women had at that very instant become an actual flight. He believed also that there had been, at the last moment, something familiar about the backs of the two women, with the woman in yellow, the tall, long-striding one in the center, and the short, quick one on the other side. Their likeness to women he knew disturbed him even more than that of the woman in yellow, but he hadn’t even glanced at them as they passed him, more than to make sure the woman in yellow was the one worth watching, and now there was no time to consult with his memory. He had first to discover what the danger was. He believed it to be almost upon him now, and he groaned at hi
s own unwieldiness, but managed at last to turn his head, and then knew at once that he had been expecting this attack from the moment he had seen the human, yellow eyes of the horse and the unnecessary little hurry of escape by the woman in yellow.

  The black horse was nearly upon him, looming twice his height above him, and over its head, between its ears, he beheld the driver, whom he hadn’t noticed before, a man unbelievably tall and narrow, with yellow, inhuman eyes full of a deadly delight. He had a long, dark beard, which flowed back upon the wind of his approach, and his left arm was lifted threateningly against the sky, which was suddenly gray and foggy and filled, as with streaming lower clouds, with the drifting smokes of the city. In his upraised fist, the bearded man was brandishing a great, black bullwhip.

  Curt cried out and raised an arm across his face to cover it from the expected cut of the lash, but astonishingly he was flicked only lightly and not across the face at all, but upon his right leg just above the knee. Then he realized that it hadn’t been such a light blow after all, for the pain increased until it stung almost unendurably. As he was telling himself that the whip must have cut him like a knife, it became very dark on the Embarcadero, much darker than fog alone could make it, so he knew he had been wrong about the time of day. It wasn’t morning at all, but the beginning of night. He became dreadfully confused, and the most confusing thing was that he knew now, the instant the pain had begun he had known, that the vengeful, bearded man was Arthur. The pain, however, became much more important than the impending threat of Arthur and the intelligent horse, which had now begun to shine like red gold and to develop an iridescent halo, as if it were coming through a flaming circus hoop.