Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (52 page)

He turned and started back along the soft furrow of
his own track. The pale sunlight then cast
his
own shadow faintly and downhill before him. He had gone only a few
steps when his eyes began to watch the shadow sliding along there,
and then suddenly his mind saw it too.

The sun’s behind me, he thought. It’s October,
and the sun’s way south already in October. So it’s south behind
me.

"Geez," he cried softly and wildly, "don’t
I know nothing no more?"

The needle of his mind settled and the needle of his
body turned and lay with it, and the two pointed north unquestionably
ahead of him.

He didn’t feel much better for their agreement,
though. There was no doubt now about the time he had to make up, and
his confidence, already so often tried and shaken, was nearly
extinguished when he remembered himself standing back there, arguing
so elaborately with the sun, while all the time it was shining right
in his face with the only answer he needed. The self-doubts crowded
upon him in great numbers, whispering all the time, and many of the
little fears mingled with them unrecognized. Before he had gone a
hundred steps, he was shuffling along at a half-run and breathing
quickly through his mouth. He had practically forgotten the panther,
so much closer were his other enemies pressing him, time and distance
and the entrancing snow.

27

The storm had thinned away everywhere over the
mountains into a final, passive settling out of flakes. Now the wind
began to move among them, making long, sweeping rents in many places,
through which the light reached the snowy trees below, and even, here
and there, the steep snow fields of the next range to the west. The
snow fields turned back the light with such an intolerable shining
that Curt couldn’t look at them except by squinting and peering
brieily through the shadowy flickering of his lashes. He didn’t try
to look very often. If there was anything to be learned from that
range, it wouldn’t be until he could see whole peaks and ridges at
once. His own plowed track in the snow was all he needed for now.
Just watching it, he was enough aware of the increasing light around
him to be encouraged too. If the storm had really given up, even time
and darkness might be outwitted. He was careful not to declare to
himself, even silently, that the storm had given up. It was always
"if" it had given up.

Gradually the wind drew together out of its first
faint gustiness, and blew against him all the time. It was a very
cold wind, and sometimes it stung his face inside the hood with
crystals of snow, but it felt good anyway. It seemed to give him more
air to breathe, and the stitch in his side, which had been growing
into a real pain, began to thin away again. He didn’t even notice
so much the alarming weakness in his knees, or the cramped emptiness
of his stomach. He began to feel that he might—the mentor would not
allow him to put it more boldly—that he might make up all the time
he had lost.

The last mists of the snow were breaking and thinning
out faster, too, as the wind increased. The brilliant light was
coming through everywhere. Finally it lay single and blinding upon
the slope of the ridge above him, and sprang at him in golden arrows
from every angle of the mountains, so that he had to squint just to
watch the trail ahead of him.

He slowed down occasionally to get his breath and
steady his knees, and then he would try to rest his eyes by looking
up into the deep blue of the sky that was showing through in many
places. Even that didn’t always help, though, for often rising
planes of light from the snow fields angled across between his eyes
and the blue, and sometimes the waving and folding of a snow veil in
the wind would make it glitter, high in the air there, almost as
painfully as the mountain slopes. Even so, the light remained
encouraging. The lengthening, widening vistas released his mind as
well as his eyes. He felt a little airy-headed, even really dizzy at
times, as if the light and the wind were making him drunk, but it was
a pleasing drunkenness, a kind of champagne elation.

Still the fear of time remained nagging faintly
within his growing hope. It was that small nagging which made him
keep looking west, as the world opened up, to see if he could locate
himself yet. He never could. Even when he was able, finally, to see
clear to the western skyline, over one wave beyond another of
dazzling, angular whiteness, it might as well have been the winter
roof of Asia he was looking across. The first whispering doubts, and
the little fears that had come out again to join them, had been
dispelled with the mists, but now there came moments when a single,
active, quickly moving fear ran out through him, escaped from the
small, dark core in his middle. The monitor set it off each time, by
suggesting that perhaps none of his calculations had been even close
to right, that perhaps the lapses into inattention had been much
longer than he believed, and that first eagerness and then fear had
made him travel much faster than he thought he was traveling.

Maybe, the monitor would keep suggesting, you’re
way to hell and gone west and south, in mountains you’ve never even
seen before.

Maybe, it would say, you might just as well be
looking across the winter roof of Asia, for all the good it’s ever
going to do you.

These spells of fear were short and well separated,
though. Most of the time he was hopeful. When he had the food packet
again, and was out the other end of the pass, and going north on the
east slope, he kept telling himself, he’d know where he was.

You’ll be able to see then, insisted the monitor’s
optimistic antagonist.

You’ll see something you know for sure from there,
it said again, almost gaily.

Even if it gets dark on you now, it added, a couple
of minutes later, there’ll be stars out. They can’t get you
tangled with stars out; you can keep right on going all night, if you
have to.

He continued to plow rapidly north, slowing to rest
now and then, but always resuming the hurried shuffle again as soon
as his knees and his lungs would permit, and always peering ahead, or
across at the gleaming sea of mountains in the west, through the
little, protective clouds of his lashes. Gradually the monitor began
to speak up, if at all, only to suggest his confidence was
approaching insolence again. He was getting so warm that, in spite of
the light, he pushed the hood back to let the wind work on his head.

He had to pull the hood forward a few minutes later,
though, and across his face from the left as much as he could and
still see. He had come around a sharply drifted buttress of the
mountain, and the wind was suddenly much stronger against him, and
much colder, and full of a twisting, glittering scud of ground-snow.
It blinded him, for the moment he was pulling the hood up, and he
stopped until it slacked off and he could see again. Then his growing
confidence received its first serious setback. The wide, crooked wake
of the bear-paws, which he’d been trusting all this time to the
point of not even giving it a thought, was barely visible and not as
a distinct, broken track at all, but only as a narrow, shallow
depression, as smooth as the slope on both sides of it.

"Goddam," he muttered violently.
"Everything, even the goddam wind."

The spur of time struck into him deeply again. He
hurried forward faster than ever along the faint depression, keeping
up the bent-kneed running without a break, until he was breathing all
the time in gasps through his mouth and the champagne dizziness was
constant and produced no elation whatever. Yet he didn’t go fast
enough. Before he was off the buttress of the range, the trace had
vanished completely. There was only the smooth, trackless snow, with
the glittering serpents of scud slithering up and across it at him.
He let his pace slack off a little. There was no use hurrying that
much any longer.

What the hell, he challenged the fear. It can’t be
far to the pass now. I’ve come back most of the way, that’s a
cinch. And nobody could miss a pass like that.

Actually he was not at all sure that nobody, himself
in particular, could miss a pass like that. He was watching the slope
and the skyline above him anxiously, peering ahead along them again
and again, and they were no more familiar anywhere than the shining
sea of mountains in the west. At the first break in the skyline, a
wide but shallow dip, with a shallow, drifted draw going up to it, he
paused and studied it uncertainly.

"Not deep enough," he declared finally.
"It’s no real pass. It ain’t it."

He really wasn’t that sure, though. The snow was
deep and light, and it drifted fast in a wind like this. Also, he
discovered that he wasn’t at all sure what the mouth of the pass
had looked like in the falling snow, let alone what it would look
like now. He went on after a minute, watching constantly ahead again,
scanning the ridge as far north as he could see it, each time the
clouds of windy crystals broke or subsided. It began to seem possible
to him that he had already gone by the mouth of the pass.

Twice more great dents in the snow wall halted him.
He didn’t believe he’d ever seen them before, but he knew now
that he hadn’t really seen anything around him that morning, only
the snow. He believed, trying to think back, that he hadn’t even
turned around, when he came out of the pass, to take a good look at
the mouth of it. It worried him that he had been capable of such
incredible carelessness.

The fourth of these troublesome depressions of the
ridge particularly disturbed him. It could quite justly be called a
pass. It was very high and not very deep but it went all the way
through, there wasn’t a doubt of that. He
finally decided against it, though. The mouth of the pass he’d come
through couldn’t be that high above him, even allowing for a lot of
heavy drifting, and maybe for his being a little farther down now.
The white domes of the timberline trees had been more numerous in the
mouth of it, too.

Nevertheless, he began to be troubled, as he went on,
by all four breaks he had passed. They pulled back upon something
within him, as if he were a spider simultaneously reeling out four
lines behind him. The farther he went, the more strongly the four
threads tugged at him, until at last he was forced to stop and turn
around and look back as far as he could. He couldn’t make out, for
sure, any of the notches he’d passed.

What he did make out, beyond any question, however,
was the fact that the sun had already gone far past the height of its
arc. He felt that it had taken a great, curving leap while his back
was turned, and that made it seem likely that he’d gone by the pass
long since, maybe even before he’d started to watch for it. If so,
however, there was nothing to do but give it up, and the food packet
with it. He was profoundly alarmed by that leaping sun. He turned
north again, and began to hurry on, the four threads dragging at him
as heavily as cables now. He even began to debate, as his belief grew
stronger and stronger that the pass was behind him, whether he hadn’t
better go up over the ridge any time now. He didn’t want to
overshoot the ranch to the north, and waste the increasingly precious
daylight on that end too.

He worked his way swiftly out around one more great
bastion of the range, and at the first look beyond it, the four
cables let go. There, not far ahead, was the mouth of the real pass,
the unquestionable pass. Now that he saw it, he was amazed that he’d
ever been troubled by those four shallow fakes. The end of the ridge
he was on sloped down northward toward the pass, and then broke off
steeply into it. The north wing of the V shone blindingly in the sun,
but its height and its slant were unmistakable.

He hailed it joyfully. "That’s you, you
son-of-a-bitch."

The joy, however, died quickly, squeezed out under
the terrible burden of the time that had already passed. The shadows
of the evergreen spires below him were now clearly pointing uphill as
well as north, and each of them pointed toward coming darkness. He
hurried on along the side of the ridge and up into the mouth of the
pass. The wind, blowing fiercely now, along the spine of the range,
was repeatedly hurling the snow in great clouds off the edge of the
north wall and out over the hollow. It sank in long shimmering
curtains into the cut and around him. A little way into the pass, he
salvaged another moment of certainty. There was the wake of his webs,
going right up the middle ahead of him. He followed it as fast as he
could among the watching trees, and through the shining, soundless
rain of crystals from
above.

The pass seemed much longer to him now than it had in
the morning. Twice he stopped and looked attentively along the dark
rock cliffs of the north side, thinking he must have gone as far as
the cave, even though he could see the half-erased track meandering
on ahead of him. And once he even stopped to study the south wall,
being assailed by a brief doubt as to which he had stayed in after
all. In this matter, as in the case of the pass, however, there was
no
mistaking the right cave when he saw it. The
break he’d made coming out and the buttress of hand-packed snow,
and the little section of uncovered wall in the upper, far corner,
tiny as they were in the base of the great wall, like the work of
some improbable survivor of cliff dwellers, did not for a moment
appear to be an accident of nature. He was dismayed to remember the
faith he had put in that flimsy and trivial shelter. He was
fascinated by it too, as if it were a long-deserted home in which
some family tragedy had taken place.