The Track of the Cat

by Walter van Tilburg Clark

  Gwen stood up from the table when he came in, but he said, "I better go wake Joe Sam up first. I’m taking him along, if he’s fit to move, and he’ll want some breakfast too."

  "A11 right," Gwen said. "I’ll get something on for both of you. Will your mother eat anything yet?"

  He shook his head. "You could take her a cup of coffee pretty quick. Then maybe you could try her again, after we get started."

  He could tell by the way Gwen looked at him that she wanted to ask something more, but then she just nodded and sat down again.

  "If we don’t pick up something to go on by noon, we’ll start back," he told her, hoping that was what she wanted him to say.

  She started to nod again, as if that was all right, but didn’t matter, but then her eyes filled with tears, and she looked down at her plate to hide them, and kept nodding too quickly. He pressed her shoulder with his hand, and she reached up quickly and put her hand over his, hard, and then laid it back on the edge of the table again.

  Harold saw that Grace was watching them. He wasn’t sure at first that she really saw them, but then knew she did, because she glanced up at his eyes, and then down again, and brought her hands up out of her lap and looked at something she was holding in them. He saw that it was the same carving of Arthur’s, the old sheepherder with a long, thin beard and a partly bald head with long hair at the sides, carrying a lamb over the back of his neck, holding two of its legs in each hand. The wood was dark and smooth with long handling. Grace felt of it with her thumb, and then stood it out on the table and picked up her mug of coffee and began to sip at it. She kept looking at the stocky old sheepherder and the shadow the lamp gave him, over the rim of her mug, and her eyes were quiet, and really seeing him.

  Harold took his hand from Gwen’s shoulder, and brushed the knuckles of it gently along her cheek. Then he went around to the pegs and took down his coat. He stood for a moment looking at the father, and went out. When he had the door closed, he could see the first faint light in the east, giving the mountains shape. He put on his coat and went around the comer of the house, through the failing reach of the signal fire. Up ahead, over the mountain behind the bunk—house, the stars were still as bright as they had been at midnight. From down behind the sheds, though, thin, but clear and prolonged and wakeful, sounded the shrill crowing of the little bantam cock.

  32

  The sun was up clear of the eastern hills when Harold came onto the crest of the reach that hid the Aspen Creek. He drew rein to let the buckskin blow and steady its legs, saying, “Easy, Kit; easy boy," and patting the sweating shoulder twice under the stock of the carbine he held against the horn. He turned and squinted back across the glare of the snow to watch Joe Sam coming up behind him on Smudge. The little mare was making hard work of it, even in the wake Kit had left. Joe Sam sat huddled down in his saddle, moving only as the mare moved, as if his body were still asleep, but the old Sharps buffalo rifle lay straight across his thighs.

  Harold looked out over the valley. It shone blindingly, with the sun coming across it, and it was only here and there that the eye could rest in the blue shadows of drifts. Out beyond the brush-line of the creek, even the familiar, dark map of the marshes had vanished, frozen over and then covered with snow. Their shapes could only be guessed at by the curves and mounds of shadow, and little patches of black hairlines where the tules stood out of the snow. A light, broken wind had come up with the sun, and snow ghosts ran on brief, aimless excursions over the level, rising from nowhere and vanishing into nothing. One of the ghosts came glittering down about him from the ridge, and then swung away behind him and back onto the slope.

  Joe Sam came up, and drew out into the unmarked snow beside him. The horses nosed at each other, mouthing their bits with a gentle clinking and blowing the steam of their breathing into one cloud, and making the girths creak. Harold looked at the old man’s face, turned up to him. It was very tired, aged by the short sleep with the vision gone out of him, but the good eye was seeing things as they were, all right, and he was resting even while he sat in the saddle. He was slack as a cat in the sun.

  "Hard going for the horses," Harold said.

  "Much snow," the old man agreed. He looked down, and moved his leg to make Harold see the snow on it where it had dragged through the drifts. Harold grinned, because that lively, private joke was in Joe Sam’s eye again, something he was keeping to himself, something quite sane and malicious, and then nodded and looked up the spine of the ridge above them.

  "Should we take a look first?" he asked, motioning up with his mittened hand.

  Joe Sam lifted his shoulders a very little, to show he wou1dn’t make a choice. "Much time go," he said, and motioned to the east and up to show how long the sun had been up.

  Harold studied his face. "You think that painter’s in there, don’t you?"

  "Snow not come now," Joe Sam said. "Maybe come back. Sleep all snow. Hungry now." The good eye was twinkling, the joke growing in it.

  He means more than that, Harold thought, but knew better than to ask what.

  "He could be, at that," he admitted. "It would be something to get him anyhow," he said grirnly. "We’ll go up by the creek then," and he pressed Kit to start down. They came around into the canyon mouth with the glare at their backs and the shadow of the big cut ahead of them, and could look with open eyes. The snow deepened rapidly as they climbed and the sides of the ravine drew in. The horses warned them before Harold had any other sign, by beginning to snort and try to turn against the reins, first to one side and then to the other. Harold read the snow before them quickly, and then looked along the willows on their right for anything moving, but saw nothing, and looked at Joe Sam. The old man, letting Smudge wheel a little to ease her, but never as much as half way, pointed up to the north wall, above the dazzle of the sloping shoulder, at a deep line where something had come down, heading up canyon and floundering. He nodded.

  "We’ll leave the horses here," he said. "Too much snow, and they’re spooky already."

  He swung off, and Joe Sam let himself down more slowly. They led the horses into the willows and tied them by ropes around the bases of two clumps, and took their snow-shoes off the saddles and laced them on, Joe Sam the small home-made bear-paws, and Harold the longer, narrow webs.

  "I go that side, hwh?" Joe Sam asked, pointing across the creek.

  Harold nodded. "Keep where I can see you."

  Joe Sam worked along the willows, until they thinned at a shallows, and went through and across.the creek and up on the other side until Harold could see his head and shoulders against the snow. Then they went up canyon slowly, keeping abreast of each other and alternately scanning the snow close before them and looking up ahead into the heavy shadow between the cliffs that were too steep to hold snow except in their scars.

  It was Joe Sam, perhaps instructed by the tracks that came down on his side, who pointed across toward the south wall, and held his hand there, pointing, until Harold saw the dark, anonymous bulk under a shelving drift, with the rim of the drift partly fallen over it. Then he could pick out the broken trail that led from it down to the willows too. He nodded, and they moved up again. Harold didn’t stop at the track, but only read it with a tightening of the chest at what it promised. The great pad marks, like broken flowers, were in the furrow on top of the sharper, split hearts of the hoofs, and only thinly covered with snow the wind had blown in. He took off? the mitten from his trigger hand, and watched scrupulously from the willows to the south wall ahead of him, and more often up into the shadow.

  When he saw the next tracks way ahead, but going up along the willows, so they showed plainly, he guessed, and looked almost as soon as Joe Sam pointed across, and saw where the cat had gone up diagonally toward the new trail from its kill under the south wall.

  Curt was right, he thought. Not even for fresh meat. A killer for fun, and pumped the first cartridge into the barrel, slowly, to be as quiet as he could.

  And not only of co
ws, he thought grimly. Just let me get one crack at you, just one good crack, that’s all I ask, he practically prayed, even moving his lips a little, but then warned himself off, feeling the excitement hurry his thoughts and tighten his body.

  He came into the deep rut he’d seen ahead, and found it made by three steers, two lumbering so close together they’d jostled each other, and one running alone, ahead of them. Where the two trails came together, just above the first aspens, the flurry of marks was too wild to read quickly, but following the heavier marks, he saw the two red hulks down among the aspens, and then went on up, the blue canyon shadow coming over him coldly, because the flower prints went up too, and sometimes blurred the last hoof prints.

  He found the fourth one, a young brindled heifer, above the next bend, where the canyon on his side began to rise steeply from the creek, so the aspens were gold bushes below him, only their tops standing out of the snow caught against the slope. The heifer had started down there, and lost her footing in the drift at the edge, and the cat had caught up with her. Her head was stretched into the snow and half covered by it. The hide had been ripped away raggedly from her shoulder, and the flesh chewed out deeply and widely, so the white joint showed, and the first ribs behind it. The blood was still liquid and bright in small pools in the wound, and short comets of it still flecked the snow red in many directions out from where the heifer lay, like the pattern of a little, scarlet bomb-burst.

  The panther’s tracks still went up beyond this last kill, along the ledge above the creek, where the wind had kept the snow shallower, and then Harold thought, peering, not quite certain in the blue gloom under the high walls, zig-zag up the high fall of boulders, smoothed almost into the canyon slope by the snow, and out of sight onto the shelf at the head.

  Right into the trap, he thought. And not minutes ago, not minutes, he added silently, glancing again at the blood in the great wound in the heifer’s shoulder.

  Once more he checked the dangerous excitement. If Joe Sam hasn’t found where he came out, he thought. He looked down across the creek, and after a moment found Joe Sam’s brown face, much lower than he’d expected, looking up at him through the yellow leaves and the pale snakes of branches. The old man saw him, all right, but he only waited there, makin no sign.

  So it's in there still, he thought, and felt himself tighten again in spite of all he could do.

  He nodded largely to Joe Sam, and made a fierce woodpecker signal in the air toward the head of the canyon to warn him. When he started up again, the motion easing him a little, he rebuked himself for his officious gesture.

  Don’t waste your time worrying about him, he thought. His one old eye’s better than your two young ones. And there’s something else works in him, he thought, remembering the halt on the south ridge. He was sure of this before he saw a track.

  Thinking that, he remembered what Curt had said about the steers and the bull that had been killed up there on the platform ahead. Back to the scene of the old crime? he wondered, smiling a little, tightly, in his mind, but his eyes searching carefully before him, all along the curving fort of the platform.

  At the foot of the rock slide, where the cat had begun to make the switch-backs going up, he paused and hunted with his eyes down among the aspen tops for Joe Sam again, and this time found him farther in than he was himself, and higher than he expected, already above the level of the aspens and working up the slanting base of the north wall still farther to see onto the platform before he exposed himself. The old man wasn’t looking over at him at all now. He wasn’t looking where he was going either, but feeling his way up and watching the edge of the platform all the time. He was carrying the old Sharps ready across his body.

  You’ll worry yourself to death yet, my friend, Harold told himself, and made the thin smile in his mind at this joke too, wondering a little that he should be making any jokes right then, and above all, jokes of that kind, but pleased that he did.

  He turned toward the south wall, where the tilt of the canyon floor rose into the platform more gradually. That was where the tracks said the cat had gone up also. He paused after each two shuffling steps to look all along the rim of the platform and to listen, he didn’t know what for, just anything that shouldn’t be heard there. But there was only the wind once in a while, beating hollowly over the canyon head, and always the subdued conversation of the creek in the snow and ice.

  In the corner where the platform of rock joined the cliff, he squatted on his heels to stay hidden, and prepared the last step of the attack. The carbine was ready, and he was holding it ready, and he was far enough back from the platform to swing it where he had to. He must raise himself slowly, with his head against the dark cliff, and he must make the first shot count; the first shot must be at least seriously crippling. If a panther like this one ever reached him, if it ever got inside the muzzle of the carbine with even one second of life left in it, it would take him apart like tearing paper; it would break his neck like snapping a dry splinter. There were two considerations which worried him. The panther might be so close to him when he saw it that he couldn’t get even the one precious shot, and the snowshoes, when he thought of such a sudden attack, seemed dangerously clumsy. He could discover no remedy for either trouble, though. There was no way to know where the cat was except to look, and in these drifts, he’d be even more helpless without snowshoes than with them.

  He experienced a brief loathing for close quarters, blind spots, and the airiness of new snow, which surpassed any natural loathing he’d ever known before. Then it occurred to him that if he waited too long, it might be Joe Sam that the panther would be tearing like paper, and snapping like a dry splinter. He was compelled to act promptly, and there were only two things he could afford to think of; he must see the panther first glance, and if possible, before it saw him, and he must keep himself perfectly steady in order that the all-important first shot should be neither too hasty to do its work nor too slow to do that work in time.

  This tactical conference was actually more a matter of feeling than of thought, and was concluded in a few seconds. As he began to inch up against the cliff, however, his mind, quite by itself, and without distracting his attention at all, made another unexpectedly humorous comment.

  Darned if I think there’s any cat there at all, it declared. Darned if I don’t think it’s Joe Sam’s cat after all, and there’ll be nothing to see in there except snow and three dead steers. The critter’s killed seven in all, now, and never been seen. Why on earth, then, should you expect it to show itself in broad daylight, and in the one place it couldn’t get out of? It won’t, of course; it simply won’t be there, and you’re making a fool of yourself with all this caution.

  The panther was there, though, and in spite of trying to ready himself for anything, Harold was surprised. In part he was expecting to find it way over by Joe Sam’s edge with its back turned; and in part not to find it at all, but only empty snow and the grinning black cliffs. Actually, as his eyes and the muzzle of the carbine came above the snow, he saw the panther only at third glance, and then farther away than he had thought of, back under the cliff and over near the falls. And in spite of his care, it had taken warning in some way. It was looking right at him. Also, he’d forgotten about the snow. He was prepared to see the whole huge, clever, dark cat at once. Actually only its head and shoulders showed and the curling tip of its tail above them.

  Arranged that way, dark upon a platter of snow, the head appeared black and impossibly large, and for a moment Joe Sam was the one wise man among many fools and the carbine became a useless toy against the cold panther will that was measuring him out of the yellow eyes.

  Yet even then, his independent mind repeated its first joke. Beside the cat he saw, without looking away from the fascinating eyes, a red and white bulge of steer’s hide, and he thought, Yes sir, back to the scene of the crime.

  That small humor of disbelief freed him to raise the carbine, but at the same instant the watchful trance
was also broken by some sound or movement Joe Sam made on the other side. The cat turned its head and saw the old Indian on the north slope raising the Sharps as he came up into sight. The two threats so far apart made up its mind for it, and it moved at once. Baring its great fangs in a snarl of fear, it swung away toward the back corner upon its right, but saw at once that it couldn’t climb out there, and swung clear around again toward the other corner, where the cliff sloped a little in the narrow creek chimney bearded with ice and snow. It cleared the drifts on the platform in two great bounds, crashed through the ice that covered the basin, screaming wildly at this sudden failure of its footing, and leapt into the chimney. It clawed its way up unbelievably on the ice and stone to three times its own length above the basin. While its scream still beat back and forth between the cliffs above him, like enraged eagles, putting his teeth on edge and raising his back hair, Harold forced the muzzle of the carbine up after the climbing cat. Its scrambling stiffened and slowed, the talons of the forepaws scraping desperately, and failing. It glared down over its right shoulder, the long snarl rattling in its throat, and braced its left hind foot high to drive it out over the pool when it fell. It hung there for an instant, motionless, clinging dark and spread-armed against the mottled crevice of rock and ice. In that instant, Harold fixed the blade of the front sight in the notch of the rear, and just under the straining shoulder, and jerked the trigger home. Dimly through the jet and the drift of the smoke, while the blast still closed his ears, he saw the panther launch out and drop away, like a great bat, toward the narrow snow under the north cliff. Its second scream pierced the deep echoes of the report that rolled among themselves around him, yet he saw that the fall was not helpless, but had the tense line of purpose, and thought, even as he quickly lowered the carbine and sprung the lever again, God Almighty, missed, and felt a fleet return through his body of his loathing for the snowshoes and encumbering drifts.