The Track of the Cat

by Walter van Tilburg Clark

  He moved his hand quickly to brush away the pain. At once he was sitting, half-lying, really, in front of a small fire with nothing but empty snow around it. For a moment this transformation brought him tremendous relief, because he’d expected to have to dodge Arthur and the horse again, and now they weren’t there. Then he saw that what he’d brushed off his leg was a cigarette butt. It was lying on cedar boughs beside him, not on gray paving blocks, and the end of it, with the ash newly knocked off, was glowing brightly. He came back into the waking world completely. He looked quickly up across the clearing. Certainly he had done no more than partly close his eyes for an instant, yet the shadows had advanced dangerously toward him from every quarter. He could hardly make out the trees at the edge of the clearing. His mind cried, "Jump," but the best he could do was to bring his body lumberingly to its knees and get the carbine, with maddening slowness, turned toward the north edge. After a moment of scrutiny, he relaxed, still studying the vague woods, but letting himself back onto his heels and condemning himself aloud.

  "Geez," he said bitterly, "fallin’ asleep."

  When he felt that he could risk a look away from the edge of the woods, he glanced at the fire. It was burned down to less than half what it had been when he’d watched the panther with a halo staring out of it. Also it was falling into separate elements that would have left him no light at all in a very short time longer.

  "You gotta keep awake," he told himself urgently. "You gotta keep awake and keep that fire up. That’s all that bastard’s waitin’ for, you asleep and the fire down. Geez, boy,” he exploded in the first full comprehension of what a few minutes more of sleep would have meant.

  He got to his feet laboriously and, turning the carbine as he turned, peered all around the shadowy border of the clearing. When he had decided, moving his thoughts with almost as much difficulty as he had in moving his body, that he could afford another look away from the woods, he threw live more boughs from the pile onto the fire. At first slowly, and then with a rush, the flames came up through them and the clearing was once more defensible. He stood attentively at guard for some time, but then, since only the firelight and the shadows it made had moved, decided that he could risk some action against the threat of returning drowsiness. He vigorously rubbed the spot on his leg where the cigarette had burned him and then stretched himself, holding the carbine aloft and arching his back, urging every muscle of his body to return to usefulness. He relaxed with a sigh and began to walk about in small circles and figures of eight on the sinking couch of boughs, stretching his legs one at a time, straining his head down and shaking it. But even after that he felt dull. He made another examination of the outer line of his defenses and knelt, with the carbine across his thighs, and scrubbed his face fiercely with one handful of snow after another. After that it seemed to him that his mind was nearly to be trusted, although his body still refused to be completely aroused. Kneeling there with the snow-wet on his face, he considered the problem, moving each idea separately, as if it were a large and almost square stone. Suddenly he raised his head.

  "Smoke," he said with satisfaction. "Keep smokin’."

  He seated himself cross-legged upon the boughs, the carbine ready across his lap, and drew his papers and sack of tobacco out from under the parka and began to make cigarettes.

  "Last about ten minutes apiece," he decided. “Mostly longer, but say ten. Then ten minutes between cigarettes. That’s three an hour. There’ll be daylight enough to get going by six o’clock. It’s about. . ."

  He squinted up at the sky, trying to see the stars through the imprisoning aura of the fire. Only a few of them were visible, and they were such faint points and so far apart that he cou1dn’t recognize any constellation. He thought of getting up and going beyond the light for a look, but he wasn’t sure he could make a good guess even then. He’d never paid much attention to stars. Lethargy and the thought of standing out there in the darkness and staring up instead of keeping his gaze upon a useful worldly level decided him against the effort.

  "You can figure it close enough," he said, working at the cigarettes again. "Say it was dark about six. Not any earlier, anyway, and that’ll make it an even twelve hours. I must of been up in the valley about then."

  He began to estimate the time it had taken him to climb the lower ridge, play his ridiculous little drama on top of it and then get down into the clearing, and start the fire and cut the big pile of boughs. For the first time he realized how spasmodically he had moved, here waiting on guard for a long while, there advancing with the utmost caution, and finally descending in a series of blind, panic-stricken rushes. In review the whole journey since dark was a dream in which action is without sequence and there is no dependable sense of time or place. The clear, even-paced dream of the Embarcadero was daylit reality compared to it, except for the final, murderous rush of the man-eyed horse and the animal-eyed driver. Yet as he reviewed his progress and at the same time remembered the dream, it was the clear and amusing passage of the three women which receded and dwindled and became transparent, while curiosity and lingering fear allied the monstrous assault of the horse and the teamster with his actual retreat from the cat.

  "Holy God," he muttered, "didn’t I know what I was doin’ at all?" and resigned himself to calculating the time it would have taken him to get across the ridge in daylight at a steady pace, such as he might have maintained in the course of an ordinary hunt.

  "That’ll be close enough for this cigarette business," he assured the monitor, who had been weakened by sleep and made terribly uneasy by this last wrestling with the mingled experiences of the sleep world and the waking.

  "Three hours," he admitted finally. "It couldn’t have been less, that’s a cinch. Call it nine o’c1ock now then."

  At the conclusion the monitor promptly lost his self-control, and cried out wildly within. Only nine o’clock. I thought it was midnight anyway. Nine o’clock. That’s nine hours to wait. You can’t last nine hours, you fool. You can’t keep awake nine hours. You aren’t even really awake right now. Nine hours. Oh, my God.

  Curt experienced a frantic urge to get up and make a run for it right now, and at the same time he underwent a great rising, dilating, tremulous motion of the spirit, a wordless prayer in extremity. The "Oh, my God," of the monitor was not merely a profane exclamation, by any means. All of the three days’ need of help, of someone to talk to, of lapses into unaccustomed panic, and self—doubt, and dreaminess, came together in him, and the monitor cried it out in

  those three words.

  In his present heaviness, and in the security of the firelit clearing, however, even despair had only the power it might have in a borderline dream which part or him refused to believe, remaining aloof and critical.

  "Take it easy, will you?" he told the cringing monitor. "Nine hours? What the hell’s nine hours? You can take anything for nine hours."

  "What was it I figured?" he asked himself, and finally found it. "Three cigarettes an hour," he said. "That’s twenty-seven cigarettes."

  There were papers enough to make only fourteen cigarettes, however. When the last paper had been used, he counted the cigarettes, laid out in a row on the bough beside him, and there were only fourteen.

  "A1l right," he said quickly, before the monitor could wail again. "You’ll have to wait a little longer between smokes, that’s all. It’ll be. .."

  He labored slowly at the problem, helping himself with figures written into the snow with a twig, and making several errors, each of which caused a raging despair almost equal to that which had followed the attempt to review his retreat. After four tries, he arrived at the conclusion that there were five hundred and sixty minutes in nine hours. But then he brooded for some time, and finally bent his head down and pummeled the back of it with both lists, and cried softly, "Geez, can’t you think at all?" because he couldn’t make up his mind what calculation was required to discover the number of minutes between cigarettes. At last, however, he decided tha
t he should divide five hundred and sixty by fourteen. He got the answer to this on only the second try, and was encouraged because it was so probable that it seemed to justify his selection of division.

  "Forty minutes," he announced happily. "One cigarette every forty minutes."

  He was about to settle himself in the unthinking ease of one who has only to observe a completed table of answers in order to know what to do and when to do it, when it occurred to him that he hadn’t allowed for the time required to smoke the cigarettes.

  "Oh, dammit to hell," he groaned, and suddenly and furiously wiped out all the figures he had drawn in the snow.

  "No," he retorted, after a minute, "you gotta know. Ten minutes to a cigarette, I figured. Times fourteen, that’s . . ."

  He paused, and then declared happily, because he hadn’t even had to write it, "One hundred and forty minutes. Take that from five hundred and sixty, and you got. . ."

  He performed the subtraction in the snow.

  "Four hundred and twenty minutes left," he decided.

  "Then . . ." but discovered that once more he wasn’t sure what his problem was.

  After a long, unhappy time, he decided that it was division again. He performed the division in the snow also.

  "Thirty," he announced. He was much cheered because the answer had come out even. "Thirty minutes," he announced.

  At those words, he made another happy discovery. "That’s half an hour; an even half hour between smokes."

  He drew a deep breath and smiled upon the figures in the snow. He was enjoying fully the satisfaction of the scientist who has reduced disorderly nature to a quotable mathematical certainty.

  When his pleasure began to diminish of itself, he turned to applying his findings to the actual problem in hand, and the whole beautiful, painfully erected structure collapsed.

  "I light the first cigarette," he began, and at once saw that there were only thirteen intervals included by fourteen cigarettes, not fourteen, so that he was at least a full half hour off, and . . .

  "Oh, the hell with it," he said violently.

  It came to him then, like enlightenment from an entirely different realm of knowledge, that in getting things down to exact minutes, he was perhaps going to impractical lengths, since he had no way of keeping time. He felt reassured to be back in a practical realm, and a little ashamed of having gone to such academic lengths in order to get there.

  "Call it half an hour, roughly," he said.

  He made himself wait for the first of the fourteen cigarettes, thinking, it’ll be easier to wait now than later. He fed the fire again during the wait, and discovered in that act a final, useful, common-sense device.

  "Make it one cigarette every time you fix the fire," he said. "That’ll give you margin."

  He maintained this system of vigil through five cigarettes, rising to throw the boughs upon the tire each time, and then forcing his reluctant body to move about against its drowsiness. Only when the flames were high again, and he’d examined the edge of the clearing until he could see it with his eyes closed, every tree and every half-lighted avenue through the trees, would he sit down once more and light the next cigarette.

  30

  Even so, the sixth cigarette burned him again, and when he started awake he saw with horror that the fire had burned down to a dull pyramid of embers that gave scarcely enough light to reveal the carbine across his lap. The darkness had closed in to within a few feet of him, not one good leap for a cat like that, and the stars he hadn’t been able to find when he wanted them were brilliant overhead, their every pattern filled to the least member. He sprang up clumsily, and swung the carbine against the north edge of the woods.

  Only after a long, hard-breathing, peering attentiveness, during which the cold began to shake him again, did he dare turn to get another bough to put on the fire. Then he had to kneel and nurse the fire alive under it, and half a dozen times, as he knelt there, he became rigid, and brought the carbine to ready against a cat which wasn’t in the edge of the woods at all, but slinking along far out on the open snow.

  When at last the brightening light had driven these phantoms back toward the trees again, far enough so that he dared undertake a longer task, he experienced a great revulsion against darkness itself, and heaped new boughs on in a spendthrift frenzy. They caught with hissing bursts among the needles, and then, as the heat sucked them ever more strongly upward, the flames joined and rose, with a great roar and crackling, until the light showed him even the motionless and watchful trees way up the side of the mountain. The heat backed him into the pile of boughs as far as he could go, and then he had to turn his face aside from it, and shield it with his arm. When he turned aside, he really saw his reserve pile for the first time since he’d cut it. Immediately he was alarmed by the shrinkage of the pile and denounced himself for prodigal expenditure.

  Six hours to go, he thought, six hours anyway, and I’ve burnt up half the goddam stuff; more’n half.

  "I gotta get more," he insisted aloud. "I gotta get a lot more."

  He turned to start toward the south edge of the clearing, where he could see plainly now the ravages of his last cutting, but when he stepped off the woven cedar boughs, he sank into the snow above his knees, and nearly fell.

  "Geez, will you wake up?" he cried plaintively.

  The monitor was shocked by the cry. The monitor warned him tremulously but fiercely that he must not again, not once, so far forget himself as to utter such a sound of fear.

  They can hear it just as easy as they can smell it, the monitor insisted, with quiet, hissing violence.

  He crawled back onto the boughs, now hollowed and sunk by his weight, and slowly, for his fingers were as clumsy with sleep as they had been with cold, laced on the bear-paws.

  Better keep ’em on, too, he told himself silently.

  He struggled to his feet, and making sure that he had the knife, cradled the carbine in his arm, and dragged his way across the brightly dancing snow, behind the wavering shadow, to the trees.

  He made another great pile of boughs, right where he was working, this time, returning only once to build up the sentinel nre as big as before. It required six trips to bring the pile back and stack it beside the fre, and this time he felt no triumph. He was nearly weeping from exhaustion, and frightened by all the signs of error and improvidence in his conduct which had come back to him magnified while he worked.

  "What the hell you want to make a fire like that for?" he asked himself.

  "You tryin’ to warm the goddam cat up too?" he asked himself tearfully. "You tryin’ to light up the whole damn mountain or something?"

  He decided to stand up, as a guarantee against falling asleep again, but in a very few minutes he became unable to hold the position, and when he sat down, he took the bear-paws off again after all, because it was impossible to let his legs out flat with them on, and because he couldn’t get over feeling that if he had to move quickly they would be more a hindrance than a help.

  He lit another cigarette, and made himself smoke it slowly, and after a little he was cahner again. He reflected that it must be midnight by now, even if he hadn’t kept times very well, at least midnight, and probably a lot later. If he just didn’t get into another brainless hurry, there was fuel enough to last till daylight this time, and no mistake. His body, which had protested every move of the last fuel gathering with cramps and jerks and limp failures which he’d had to wait out, surrendered itself rapidly to the warmth and the return of his confidence.

  He had taken only a drag or two on the eighth cigarette, when it suddenly became evident that he had failed again in his watch, and this time once too often.

  He was warned by a man’s voice calling, "Curt, Curt, look out," and thought at first that it was Arthur calling, from somewhere down the slope behind him. Then he saw the eyes turned upon him from beyond the fire. At first he believed, seeing only the great black shape through the bright screen of fire, that it was the black horse from
the Embarcadero, because the eyes had that same partly human look. The eyes stared out of the great dark shape exactly the way the charging horse had looked down on him before. But then he saw how it was creeping, and he knew. It was the cat all right, only it was as big as that infernal black horse. It must have crept up on him in the full light, making use of his negligence, and now it wasn’t a leap away from him.

  It saw that he was awake and staring back at it, and it ceased crawling, and crouched on the snow, trembling with preparatory excitement, its enormous, glowing eyes fixed on his face, and its mouth a little open, so he could see the curving saber tusks and the lolling tip of its tongue. Silently and flexibly, scarcely changing the level of its back, it gathered the great springs of its hind legs under it. The tip of its tail was curling and uncurling in little twitches. He could see the curling tip first on one side of it and then on the other. He couldn’t look away from its eyes, and so long as his own eyes were fixed by them, he couldn’t move from where he sat either. He felt horribly exposed and helpless, and the carbine, which he couldn’t move to lay hold of, became a millstone weight upon his thighs. He struggled frantically to bring about the internal change, the escape from those eyes, that would allow him to put his body in motion, but it was as if he had lost any direct connection with the body, as if his terrified self were anchored there immovably by the weight of another man’s body, over which he had no control at all, a great, iron-heavy, feeble-nerved, settled body. He knew this paralysis was largely a result of the cat’s stare. It wasn’t the feelingless, gilded stare of a cat about to leap. There was that in it, all right, the barely controlled eagerness to kill him, but there was something else too, that didn’t belong in a cat’s eyes at all. The eyes were not only intent upon him; they were at the same time mocking his helplessness. The mind behind them knew perfectly well the cause of his fettered condition and was making a little joke of its own about this ignominious conclusion to the boastful pursuit and the laborious defense. It was the same look he’d seen in the black horse’s eyes that had made him think they were human.