Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (45 page)

As he climbed, the darkness decreased swiftly. He had
worked up into the top and south edge of the shadowy advance guard,
and soon he could see the tall whirlwinds of snow dancing up the
slope ahead of him again. Finally the gray reach of the storm was
entirely behind him and below him, pouring on down to reinforce the
high cloud that was trapped in the valley. He was on a ridge still,
but lower than before. He could make out the near, ghostly spires of
evergreen timber in the edge of the valley cloud. The ground snow
kept racing across him as he hurried south, and then, after perhaps
an hour—it seemed a long time, anyhow—the first thin veils of the
new front came down over him, often broken by the gale, so that at
one moment he could see only faint, hardly distinguishable shapes,
and the next he could see clearly a long way down or ahead. He kept
telling himself then, only that he must get farther south and that if
the main storm caught him solidly before he found a familiar way out,
he could always turn straight down into the lower storm and find
shelter under a tree again.

At this lowest ebb of his confidence, however, when
he had nearly forgotten that he had started out to hunt, he was
suddenly encouraged by an accident of the storm. The mingled ground
snow and mist of the new storm, sweeping southeast across him, and
very high, was rent, like the parting of gigantic theater drapes, and
in the sharp perspective distance took on through that frame, he saw
a tiny movement, against the wind, and high on the white wall of a
mountain or pass ahead of him. He couldn’t tell whether it was the
wall of a mountain or of a pass, for there was only that one region
of it revealed, without a top, and without an end in either
direction. He didn’t try to guess which it was at that moment,
either. He just stood still, shocked out of his numbness, and watched
for that tiny movement against the wind to come again. He believed he
saw it again, too, but almost at once it vanished. That could be
because of snow blowing over it where it was, though, as it had been
blowing over him here. He kept peering, blinking frequently to rest
his eyes, and tilting his head back to look out narrowly from under
the lids, as Joe Sam had taught him to do when he had to look a long
distance and for a long time. He believed that he saw the movement
twice more, each time a little farther west upon the white wall.

The bastard’s still running, he thought. I’ve
really got him going; running hungry, and right into the storm. He’s
trying to get over on the other side, clear out of his territory.
He’s pretty near done, then. He must be pretty near done to be
tryin’ that.

He didn’t, however, feel altogether confident of
the truth of these silent and aggressive ords. He couldn’t be sure
that what he had seen was the cat, or even, to tell the truth, that
he had seen anything at all. Men often saw queer things at high
altitudes in snow. They made them up out of nothing, with their eyes.
He admitted these reasons for doubt, but the very fact that he
perceived them so clearly, that he was still measuring his chances
with such calm, was encouraging in itself. He didn’t really believe
he was just seeing things. He believed that what he had seen was the
cat, still retreating before him. The feeling that he was in
undirected flight himself, and with a personal and malignant doom
imminent,, abated within him. He was wonderfully restored, as if the
discovery that the cat was still retreating from him would in some
way enable him to master storm and distance too.

"Right on your tail still, you son-of-a-bitch,"
he said aloud, and thought, I can stretch the food another day even,
if I have to. And maybe I can even pick me off a rabbit or a buck, if
he goes down far enough on the other side. The thought of fresh meat
filled his mouth with saliva. It seemed to him that he could happily
eat the fresh meat raw; that it might even be better raw, still hot
and bloody and with the strong, salty, wild taste in it. He might
even eat
the cat, if it came to that.

He was already advancing again, and at the same time
keeping watch for that tiny movement into the wind on the high, white
wall.

"You’ll still get your blanket, you little
Welsh bitch," he said aloud, and gleefully. "And I’ll
charge you for it, too; don’t you ever think I won’t. My own
price, and no tricks."

Then the long chain dance of the wind snow came over
him again, and the white wall he had been watching was closed away.
He kept peering ahead for it, prepared to use the least instant of
its appearance to pick out the tiny movement again. Several times the
snow dancers broke their lines before him, or sank away, subsiding
along the lower slope in final, spreading curtsies, and he saw the
white wall again, the last time astonishingly closer, so that he
seemed to be approaching it with the speed and ease of a bird, but he
didn’t catch sight of anything moving on it again.

All at once, and quite surprisingly, so completely
had his attention been fixed ahead, he was enveloped again in the
darkening, blinding whirl of flakes that was not ground snow.
Everything else vanished. He was shut in entirely by himself in a
motion like a tremendous and infinitely various noise.

In an instant his optimism was gone, and not only
because of his present danger. He had been taken unawares again, and
not by any little, narrow advance column of the snow either, but by
the dark main body of the enemy, which he had been watching for hours
as it hung upon the ridge. It was a mile high, and God only knew how
deep, yet it had caught him napping, blind with a little, no-account
fancy of his own.

After this first panic, which he endured standing
still and bowed against the storm, he began to advance across the
blast again.
 
I’ve got to hole
up, he thought. That’s all that matters now; hole up and wait this
out.

"All the same," he muttered stubbornly,
inside the hood, "I saw something, and it wouldn’t be anything
else, up this high, in a blizzard like this. The damned cat wouldn’t
be up here, even, if I hadn’t chased him up. And if I have to dig
in, so does he. And I’ll know that wall he was on, the first good
look I get at it."

He was encouraged by the fact that he was still able
to argue in this way, but the argument itself was not convincing in
that whirling half-darkness. On the contrary he felt, profoundly and
unreasonably, and the storm and the panther were now in alliance
against him. Shortly, also, it began to grow darker around him in a
way he didn’t believe was caused by an increase of the snowing.
Once again time leapt ahead in him. He guessed, as soon as he noticed
the change, that he must already have overrun his mark badly, that he
must be way south of the ranch, as much as ten miles south, maybe.
With the growth of this first impression into a belief, all the
latter part of the ridge he had followed became increasingly strange
in his memory. He had never, until today, seen the white regions he’d
caught glimpses of through the curtains of storm, or the shallow pass
where the first skirmishers of the new snow had caught him.

Before the darkness had settled much more about him,
he was no longer certain, in the tangled whirling of the flakes, of
any direction except up and down. Then even that last safeguard was
weakened because he felt himself to be going down steeply. The webs
slipped a little sometimes, and the force of the wind was lessened,
and the whirling around him was slower. He must have got switched
around to the east without knowing it, and be going down between the
ranges. Well, there was nothing to do but go on down, and hole up as
soon as he could. Not only was he lost, but a new, fierce cold had
come down with the second army of the snow, and even in the heavy
parka, he was already shivering from it. He had to get cover, and get
it quick. Since he was already south of the ranch, it was all to the
good, so far as getting home was concerned. It was the end of the
last pretense of keeping up the hunt, though, and what was a lot
worse, it proved that his sense of direction, that infallible guide
that was just in him and to be obeyed, was no more to be trusted now
than his deliberate calculations of time and distance, if as much.

Gradually, with the barrier of the slope behind him,
it became possible to see a few yards into the dusk around him. He
had come among twisted, timberline trees once more, but much bigger
ones than those in the shallow pass, standing well up, blue and
ghostly, out of the deepening snow. He felt a more wakeful hope that
shelter was near, and began to increase his pace. He fell several
times, but struggled and floundered to his feet again each time, and
hardly gave the falls a thought.

It was only a last-moment glimpse, a something he
felt to be wrong, though he couldn’t have said what, that saved him
from tumbling over the cliff. He checked himself so close to the edge
of it that his left web broke off a block of snow, which vanished
with startling
suddenness, leaving a faint,
shadowy break in the snow line, like the place where a tooth is
missing. Perhaps it was only that break that warned him, for the
sloping snow at the bottom of the ravine had appeared perfectly
continuous with the slope he was coming down. Nothing had trustworthy
shape or distance any longer, but only a scarcely distinguishable
difference of pallor and shadow.

After the first moment of shock, however, he felt
much better. He wasn’t going down into the valley after all. He was
going down into a ravine, a pass, a cut of some sort through the
range. He had been going south all the time, after all. The compass
of his reasoning swung back to agree with the compass of his body,
which had never stopped insisting that he was going south, and he
felt wonderfully relieved. It was like being joined again, without a
flaw, after having been cut in half.

The edge of the cliff seemed to slope downward to his
left, to the east, that was, and he turned that way, climbing upslope
a little first, to be safely above that too vague falling-off place,
and followed it down. He felt the wind growing steadily stronger as
he descended, but it seemed to him that it kept shifting also, coming
at him straight from the north sometimes, and at other times from as
far around as the southwest.

24

When a slow, step-by-step testing with the webs
finally told him he was off the cliff, it was so nearly dark he could
no longer guess at the mountain shapes around him. It seemed to him,
from what the webs told him, and from the fury of the wind, that he
must have come out into an open and almost level space beyond the
mouth of the pass. He wanted to keep going east, down the slope of
the big range, and take shelter as soon as the trees were tall enough
and deeply enough sunk in the snow, but the wind whirled about him so
continuously now, enclosing him with blinding spirals of snow, that
he was mortally afraid to venture any farther into the open.

"Got to work back under the cliff," he
muttered in the hood. "Can’t miss that. And find a cave or
something; get out of this goddam wind."

He turned right once more and began to shuffle ahead.
He kept expecting the wind to ease off, broken by the cliff rising
beside him, or to connect more directly at him, funneled through from
the west by the pass or the ravine, or whatever it was, but it
didn’t. It continued to buffet him from every side, and to whirl
the snow so that sometimes it struck him unexpectedly in the face,
bringing him to a halt, and sometimes there would be a dark quiet
before him, while the snow struck its hundreds of tiny blows against
the back of the parka. He drew the hood nearly closed over his face,
leaving only a little opening to peer through, and held it that way.

Gradually he began to believe that the wind was
blowing more against his back than against his front, and again his
inner compass fell into disagreement with the compass of his reason.
It became an expensive effort of will to continue his advance with
this argument going on, and after a time, he turned sleepy and
inattentive as well as weary. Twice he almost blundered into one of
the haunting trees, unable to see it until it loomed sudden and
monstrous right before him.‘Each time the tree
became, for an instant, a leaping black panther, but each time he
forced the terrible fear down again, and told himself doggedly,
"Right; go around it to the right" speaking aloud to make
himself listen, and as a challenge to the tree. The third time, he
actually struck against a springy, reaching branch. He was almost
knocked over, and a little bleat of dread was squeezed out of him by
the contraction of his belly. He was very near to weeping from
exhaustion and bafflement, when at last the wind did begin to ease
off, and the snow to fall more slowly and more evenly around him.

"About time," he said angrily. "Goddamit,
it’s about time."

He could make out the trees a little sooner now,
their goblin shadows against the glimmer of the fallen snow, and
though he was stopped by them several times, believing he saw them
move, even lifting the carbine against them, yet each start of fear
was milder than the last, and each time, before he moved on, he
remembered to warn himself, "Around to the right; keep going
around to the right."

Gradually the trees became fewer and smaller and
farther apart around him, until at last he seemed to have come into a
region where there were no trees at all, but only the light, deep
snow he shuffled through, and the thick, falling snow slanting across
him. He had been worried before about losing his direction as he
steered around the trees, and now, unreasonably, he was much more
worried about circling in the pale emptiness.