Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (58 page)

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.

Then he knew what he should have known the moment
he saw the eyes. The cat wasn’t alone. Joe Sam was here, just the
way he’d been there at the cave. The cat was thinking about him
with the mind of Joe Sam, only he’d been slow to recognize the look
because it was in two eyes instead of just one. Joe Sam was on the
south side of the clearing, right in the edge of the woods. It was
impossible to look away from the eager and mocking gaze of the cat,
but he knew as certainly as if he could see through the back of his
head that Joe Sam was there, the same queerly young, smooth Joe Sam
in a breech-clout, with a stone knife held ready in his hand. Joe Sam
was there to block his retreat, to make sure the panther got a good
open chance at him.

The voice called from below again, though from
much nearer, and it wasn’t Arthur’s at all. It wasn’t even
alarmed. It called with thick, stupid cheerfulness, "Curtis,
where are you?” It
was the father, and
he was drunk. The father had got drunk and come up here to look for
him. He was walking right into the same playful trap Curt himself was
caught in.

At the sound of the voice, Joe Sam faded back
among the trees and waited there, just out of sight. The cat was
distracted by the new presence too. It looked away from Curt’s eyes
and past him, and held its tail still and fixed itself in exactly the
stage of preparation it had reached when the thick voice called. Its
monstrous intention seemed to weaken with the division of attention;
Curt could feel the concentration go out of the creature, as if it
were partially deflated.

His body became his own, and he leaped to his
feet, bringing up the carbine even as the cat, startled by his quick
motion, looked back at him and recoiled into a lower crouch. He fired
directly into the forehead interval of darkness between the two great
burning eyes.

The report was shocking beyond any report the carbine
had ever made before. A moment earlier he had been standing in front
of a big fire that lighted the clearing all the way out to the trees.
Now he was standing in blind darkness, with the carbine still at his
shoulder, and he could still hear the last, flat echoes of the shot
on the mountain above and a deep, thunderous echo rolling downhill
behind him. He could still smell the stinging powder. Yet he was as
astonished by the report as if someone else, the heavy-bodied man
who’d held him down, had fired the shot, and bewildered because the
shot had blown out the light in the clearing like that. The shot had
missed too. The cat had leapt aside from a shot right in its face; or
worse, the shot had gone right through its head and done it no harm.
It was crouching there again, just beyond the fire hollow and a
little to one side of where it had been before. It was still staring
at him with the great, lambent, knowing eyes, and the pleasure of
mockery which had restrained it before had almost completely given
way, because of the voice and the shot, to that murderous urge. At
any instant it would leap. And I shot right through it, he thought
wildly. I shot right through it.

The monitor abdicated with a long, internal wail, and
he dropped the useless carbine and turned to run. He fell into the
sharp, resilient wall of the boughs and crawled up over it on all
fours, yelling, "Dad, go back, go back," and fell into the
snow on the other side. He scrambled forward and up to his feet again
without a pause. Someone near him was making tremulous, unceasing
whimpers of terror and the sound made his hair crawl and weakened his
knees. He could think only to run as fast as he could down across the
star-shimering open. The snow was nearly to his hips and he plowed
down through it clumsily, falling when he stepped into hollows or
onto unexpected rises, but always swimming back up to his feet and
downhill, with that crazy whimpering going on around him. He expected
at any instant to feel the great, hurtling weight of the cat strike
him across the back, raking at the torn shoulder of the parka,
through which he was vulnerable, and the great curving teeth, with
the hot wetness between them, close upon his narrow neck.