The cat struck, snarling continuously now, floundered for an instant in the drifts, and bounded away down canyon and toward the creek. The snow dragged heavily at it, but even so it had raced below the platform before he could sight on it again.
Jesus, right at Joe Sam, he thought, and yelled, “Look Out, Joe Sam," so that his voice and the last of the cat’s scream and the rocky thunder of the report fought all together for a moment in the shadowy air.
The turmoil had scarcely begun to diminish, when it was renewed. The Sharps boomed somewhere below the ledge, and the cat suddenly broke its snarl with half a scream, and at once the cliffs again multiplied and deepened the report and gave wings to the scream. Joe Sam yelled below, but excited, not wailing. Shuffling half-around to watch the lower slope, cursing, in his mind, the screen of aspens, Harold saw the cat going down, making the dark, serpent-curving leaps, but more slowly, he thought, staggering a little at each drop and fumbling the take-offs more than the snow explained.
One of us got him, he thought, while he raised the carbine again, leading the bounding shadow to an opening in the small, dancing leaves. It came there, black between the gold and against the white, and he fired again, and again heard the sudden scream through ghosts of the report.
Hit that time, by God, he thought exultantly. He shuffled at a half-run, dragging and teetering down across the snow-bank, treacherous with broken rock beneath, toward the little yellow trees. He struggled to pump the carbine again as he went. The echoes died, and there was no sound from the lower canyon. Harold reached the creek, where he could cross, and saw Joe Sam coming down very slowly on the other side, carrying the Sharps idly in his right hand and looking intently into the aspens below him. The old man’s sombrero was pushed half off his head and he was covered with light, clinging snow.
"You all right?" Harold called, alarmed by the old man’s slowness and the proof he had fallen.
Joe Sam looked up at him and grinned. "Good," he said, clearly enough, but with the effect, after Harold’s voice, of advising quiet. Still grinning, he shook his head and made a quick motion along his side to show how fast and how closely the cat had passed him. Then he pointed down into the little dancing trees.
Harold realized the old man must have seen the whole flight from his side.
"He’s down there?" he asked.
Joe Sam nodded, "Much shoot," he said, grinning, Harold took his time then, and stood at the edge of the creek and reloaded the carbine. Joe Sam waited across from him, ankle-deep in the drift, and watched him, and once or twice looked down into the aspens again.
"You loaded, Joe Sam?"
Joe Sam shook his head, grinning. "He wait,” he said. "You shoot."
"I’ll have to go down this side, so he won’t get across. You better load up."
Joe Sam made the little shrug, but took another cartridge from his pocket and reloaded the old Sharps.
Harold was going to warn him not to be so sure it was all over, but checked himself, thinking, he knows what he sees. He played this game before I was ever thought of.
"Well, let’s finish the poor devil off‘," he said and started down his side.
It was all over though. The big cat lay tangled in the first willows, his head and shoulder raised against the red stems, his legs reaching and his back arched downward, in the caricature of a leap, but loose and motionless. The great, yellow eyes glared balefully up through the willows at the rock fort on top of the south wall. The mouth was a little open, the tongue hanging down from it behind the fangs. The blood was still dripping from the tongue into the red stain it had already made in the snow. High behind the shoulder, the black pelt was wet too, and one place farther down, on the ribs. Standing there, looking at it, Harold felt compassion for the long, wicked beauty rendered motionless, and even a little shame that it should have passed so hard.
Like Arthur, he thought, smiling to himself in his mind. A big price for a few stupid steers. But there was Arthur too, he told the dead cat silently. You had it coming, several times over.
The wind turned high on the wall of the canyon, and reached down in gently, setting the aspen leaves shimmering and talking around the two of them standing there, and stirring the soft, cream-colored belly fur of the cat.
"A big one, sure enough," Harold said.
"Big," Joe Sam agreed solemnly. "Devil."
"The black painter?" Harold asked, looking at him.
Joe Sam’s good eye studied him, guarding against ridicule. It found no smile, and the little jest danced behind it again.
"Not black painter," the old man said, shaking his head vigorously. "Black painter," and he made a wide gesture with his arm, which might have meant it was in the mountains above, or that it was everywhere and not confined to one place, but certainly meant that it was not to be talked over dead and empty in a willow thicket. But while it was still thus formless as air in Harold’s mind, Joe Sam gave it body again by kicking the dead cat’s belly gently with the rim of one snowshoe.
"Not black painter," he said.
"No, that’s white enough," Harold agreed. He kept watching the old Indian. He missed something he’d expected in him, some triumph, some little inflation of success. But the old man was solemn again after the small half joke of kicking the pale belly. He was waiting for something, that was it. He didn’t act as if the thing was finished. And whatever he was thinking, he didn’t want to be the one to speak about it first.
I don’t know what he wants, Harold thought. Some ceremony? he wondered, remembering the wooden cats Arthur had made.
To make a lead, he said, "It was a killer, though, pretty near as good as your black one," and then thought of the steer he’d seen on the rock. There hadn’t been time to notice it then, but now, remembering the red and white bulge beside the great head of the cat, he knew that it hadn’t been an old kill. There hadn’t been any snow over it.
“Kill all time," Joe Sam agreed.
"It had another steer up on the rock there. Five this time."
Joe Sam didn’t say anything for a moment, and then, still looking down at the dead lion, he said, "Not steer, maybe."
"I saw it," Harold said.
"Not steer," Joe Sam said stubbornly, but now with a rising inflection that put both the steer and the cat out of Harold’s mind. He waited, watching Joe Sam’s face. Joe Sam still didn’t want to say it, or at least he wanted a direct question to make it easier for him. Harold just waited though, and the wait became too long.
"Coat, maybe," he said.
After a moment Harold asked, "Arthur’s coat, you mean?"
"Curt wear," Joe Sam said. “Arthur have red coat."
"Sure. I know," Harold said quickly. "Wel1," he began, but then asked, "You sure?"
"See good," Joe Sam said. "Coat." He wouldn’t look up from the dead lion.
Harold took a deep breath, and it wasn’t steady. "Well," he said again, "we’d better go back and see, I guess."
Joe Sam nodded, and turned away from the cat, but still without looking at Harold.
Harold worked out of the willows up onto the higher south bank, with Joe Sam behind him, and climbed slowly toward the shadowed head of the canyon again. When he came onto the platform, with the tall, black walls over him, he paused to get himself ready. Then he went on in, seeing but not noticing the deep trail the cat had left. Even before he was close to the huddle of red and white hide, he knew that Joe Sam was right, because he could see the twisted legs reaching from it toward the falls.
And dead for sure, he thought, the unnatural position of the legs hurting him, and a little darkness of guilt stirring in him because he hadn’t come here at once, and just let the cat go, after the first shot. The first shot got him, anyway, he thought, and excused himself, but I didn’t know that, or what this was.
He came beside the body and stopped and stood looking down at it. The head, and the hood of the coat with it, was buried in the snow, but the bare trigger hand was half showing, blue and clutching
into the snow, and the body was humped up, shaped over the rocks it had fallen on like a sack only loosely filled and tossed down.
Seeing the torn shoulder of the coat, and the raking scars in the leather farther down, Harold thought, By God, it was that black devil again, and the small, quick anger relieved him a little of the dread he felt about moving Curt.
His memory, though like someone else quietly and unconcernedly setting him right, reminded him of Arthur’s torn shirt and wounded shoulder, and he saw that Curt’s shirt, where it showed in the rip in the coat, wasn’t torn.
Joe Sam came beside him, and because he didn’t want to hesitate in the old man’s presence, he gathered himself toward what he had to do, and then it was his own mind thinking, No cat ever did that to him. Not like that.
He knelt and took a deep breath, and pulled at Curt’s shoulder to turn him over. At first the body wouldn’t move at all, but stuck closely to the rocks under it. Then it broke loose abruptly, with a little tearing of the hairs of the parka, but moved all in one piece, the legs with the shoulder, and wouldn’t turn over against its reaching arm. Harold let it back down on its face and stood up. His stomach knotted in him, and a fine sweat broke out on his face. After a moment, making it a single convulsive act, he stepped astride of the body and lifted it whole and turned it over. Then he quickly straightened again and closed his eyes against what the rocks had done to the face and tried to close his mind against what his hands had felt through the parka. When he believed he wouldn’t vomit after all, he lifted his right snowshoe back over the body, taking great care not to touch it, and stood beside it.
"Not painter,” Joe Sam said.
"No."
"Him fall there," Joe Sam said, and pointed up. Harold looked where he was pointing, and saw the snow eave of the cliff broken, and then, when Joe Sam pointed there too, saw where the chunks of ice had sunk into the drift like little meteors, and the rain holes of pebbles and sand among them.
He nodded.
"Well," he said finally, "we can’t take him home like that."
"Bury," Joe Sam said.
Harold shook his head. "We have to take him home."
"Make fire," Joe Sam suggested. "Get warm, Fix."
Slowly Harold understood, and nodded. "Down below, I guess," he said. "There’s some old dry stuff in the willows."
He took off his snowshoes and lashed them side by side, overlapping a little, and together they lifted the body onto this poor sled. Harold straightened and stood there thinking, and finally understood what was wrong, and looked around the platform, and even went back and hunted closer under the cliff and at the head of the creek. He found nothing, and there were no other breaks in the snow at the back. He turned to where Joe Sam was waiting beside the hooded body on the webs, that lay with the one arm raised still in a grotesque gesture of greeting.
"I can’t find the gun," he said. "He had the other carbine, the Winchester. And no snowshoes either."
Joe Sam pointed up at the cliff again.
"Must be, I guess," Harold said. “Wel1, we’ll take him down and get the fire started, and then I’ll go take a look."
"Night. Make fall," Joe Sam said.
Harold nodded. "However he got there," he said.
Joe Sam was careful with his voice, making it flat, with no feeling at all, but the tiny, malicious light was there behind the good eye again. "Him know," he said.
Harold looked at him, asking the question silently.
Joe Sam pointed to his head, and then shook it, and then tapped himself on the chest, on the wrinkles of the too big coat.
“Know here," he said. “Not lose plenty times. Come back."
Slowly he drew a circle in the air in front of him, parallel with the snow.
"Maybe," Harold said, and thought, Maybe you have that kind of a compass under the ribs, old man, and then wasn’t sure that was what Joe Sam had meant, and looked at him again, and saw the little dancing malice in the good eye.
Celebrating it, you little heathen, he thought angrily, but the anger shrank quickly in the mind closed by handling Curt and seeing his face, and he thought wearily, Well, why wou1dn’t you?
"Lost in the snow, you mean?" he asked.
"Not snow," Joe Sam said. He pointed at the parka, and Harold remembered there had been no snow on it.
Since the snow stopped, he thought. Since yesterday afternoon.
"Night," Joe Sam said. "Dark. Run away."
"Run away?"
"Lose gun," Joe Sam said. "No shoe."
Harold thought about it. "What would he be running away from?"
Joe Sam raised his shoulders that inch which unburdened them. "Not know," he said. "Not see."
Harold thought, seeing the lively eye watching him out of the impassive face, You think you know, though.
"Well,” he said, "1et’s get him down there, and get that fire started."
Between them, tugging carefully, Harold struggling in the deep snow without his webs, they drew the body on the joined snowshoes across the platform and down the rock fall and past the brindled heifer on the edge, and then the two red steers among the aspens and then the stretched cat in the willows, and on down to where the horses waited in the sun.
There they gathered the long, bow-shaped dead wood from among the large willows, the breaking of the dry sticks bringing faint, crackling echoes from the rim-rock above them. It took them more than an hour to gather enough. They made two fire piles, and lifting the body from the snowshoes, laid it between them, with the head up canyon. Already the sun had softened the stiff hide of the parka, and Harold drew the hood over the head, and closed it over the face. Joe Sam brought dry dead leaves from under the pack of past autumns in the thickets and made kindling wads of them under each heap of gray willow sticks.
"He had matches himself," Harold said. He felt in the pockets of the parka, and found the match container, and the knife too.
He put the knife in his pocket. Then he took one of the four matches from the container, and ran it quickly along his thigh, and set the flame to one and then another of the wads of dry leaves, and then to one on the other side too before he had to drop the match in. The leaves made a slow, heavy smoke, and then with soft explosions, one at a time, the three wads burst into flame. After a little, the dried willow began to crackle sharply. The wind, sucking down canyon, drew the flames east and strengthened them. The two men stood silently, one at each side watching the flames gain and rise, and to see they didn’t burn too close.
"Sun help," Joe Sam said.
Harold nodded.
The heat was making a watery dancing in the air over the body, and they had to move back from the fires.
"Skin painter," Joe Sam said. "Get skin."
Harold nodded. "Go ahead. You want his knife?" he asked, reaching into his pocket.
Joe Sam shook his head. "Got good knife," he said, grinning a little, and turned and went back up the canyon, carrying the old Sharps.
Harold squatted where he was, watching the fires, and the still figure between them, until there were only red shimmering coals left, hissing as they sank into the snow. Then he dared try the body, and it answered to his hands enough for what he had to do. He lifted it onto the snowshoe sled again, setting his jaw when he felt the broken bones grate under the parka and the flesh. He drew the arms down the sides, and straightened the legs as well as he could. He pulled the hood back and washed the broken face with snow and covered it with a blue bandana from his hip pocket, and closed the hood over it again. Finally he took the rope from Joe Sam’s saddle and bound the body securely to the webs, and it lay ready in the golden sunlight, between the two heaps of red embers.
Feeling almost impersonal about it then, the worst being over, he stood for a minute or two looking down at the body. He wished to make a prayer, or at least some ceremonial gesture of the spirit which would move him as a prayer should, but nothing stirred any deeper than the word-making surface of his mind except a weak, nagging worry ab
out how he should tell the mother, and even, since it was Curt, the father, and how he could manage the burial without letting them see what the rocks had done.
Finally he thought, Well, we got the painter for you, anyway, fellow, and at once was swept by a terrible loneliness. It was more for Arthur than for Curt, but Curt was in it too, a sense of real loss that his powerful body and angry will would never move anything at the ranch again.
The surge of loneliness drained slowly out of him and left only an autumnal sadness in the sunlight around him and on the bound and straightened body, and he let that do.
He went down into the willows, untied Kit, swung into the saddle and turned him down into the trail they had made coming up. When the slope was easy enough, he put the buckskin across through the unbroken snow toward the south wing, and then, by switchbacks, up onto the ridge. There he let him stand till his breathing was steadier, when he reined him toward the mountain and pressed him up once more, keeping on the spine of the ridge, where the wind had blown the snow shallower, so that sometimes brush or rock stood up out of it. Before they came to the first scattered pines, he could see Joe Sam, a tiny figure squatting in the red willows below. The sun had reached into the rock platform at the head now, and the busy knife made quick, blinding flashes in the light. Once Joe Sam looked up and raised an arm to show he saw him. Harold answered the same way, and the knife began to flash again.
When the drifts grew too deep among the conical trees where the ridge joined the mountain, Harold dismounted and tied Kit, and worked his way on up on foot, leaning and floundering, and stopping often to rest and breathe. When he stopped he always looked at the figure lying way down toward the mouth of the canyon, between the two black patches on the snow, and the wispy columns of smoke that still rose from them or flawed suddenly in the canyon wind. He looked down at Joe Sam each time too. He could always find Joe Sam in the shadow screen of the willows, because sooner or later the knife would take the right angle and flash.
The Track of the Cat Page 45