Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (12 page)

Arthur opened his mouth to speak, and Curt said
quickly, with the hard grin, "And you’ll hold the trail till I
get back with my stuff."

That yellow blouse is strong magic, to take you off
the trail yourself, Arthur thought, studying Curt from the shadow of
the hood, and said, "Either way."

"No," Curt said sharply, "not either
way; that way," and fished the loose cartridges out of his
pocket and gave them to Arthur. He took the red’s bridle, and
handed Arthur the carbine, saying, "It’s loaded now," and
hoisted himself into the saddle. Staring down at Arthur, he said,
"And don’t get to mooning, for God’s sake. He won’t run
far, I tell you, and you’d better see him first."

Arthur smiled up at him, the smile widening slowly
until his teeth showed white in the dark beard, and nodded, but
didn’t say anything. Curt swung the red and put him to the lower
edge of the platform, heeled him over, and, below the rock fall,
lashed him into a scurrying run. For some time after he was out of
sight the running still went on in the cliffs, and then it blurred
and faded there too, and the aspens and the creek were the voice of
the canyon again, and overhead, for a moment, a soft, hollow beating
of wind.

6

For a minute Arthur continued to stand there gazing
down the canyon at the place where Curt and the red had disappeared.
Then he slowly turned the little mare so she could watch what he was
doing, and dropped the reins into the snow, saying, "You wait
here, Smudge. It’s all right now. There’s nothing can hurt you.
It’s all right," and crossed to the torn steer and bent over
it, leaning on the carbine.

The steer lay on its side, with its neck too far
extended, and twisted over so the lower jaw was half in the snow. A
little blood, clotted by the cold, lay in the black cup of the upper
nostril and the eye he could see stared up, open and already dry. A
few flakes of snow lay unmelted on the long, winter pelt. Arthur
looked at the great wound on the shoulder, and then at the neck.
There were deep tooth marks over the ridge of the neck, and long
parallel talon rips up the side of it. Yes, a very big cat, by the
spacing, and a heavy one, to make a killing attack from the ground
against a full-grown steer.

He drew off his left mitten and laid his bare hand on
the bulge of the steer’s belly. He smiled a little then,
remembering the dream of himself on the edge of the cliff, and mocked
softly, "So this is where I left it." Under the hair, the
steer was not hard or even quite cold yet. A dew of melted flakes
among the roots of the hair wet his hand.

He stood up again slowly, and slowly worked his
mitten down into the pocket of his parka, on top of the unfinished
carvings. His fingers touched the whittled edges, and he was faintly
pleased by the feel of the wood and the thought of the whittling that
remained to be done, and then troubled that he hadn’t finished the
cat for Joe Sam.

Finally he turned and walked across to the fallen
steer under the south cliff, and stood looking down at it. Its neck
was broken, too. The painful angle of the head, turning both horns
down into the rock, showed that. The neck wasn’t marked though.
There were no marks of claws or teeth anywhere on the steer.

Broke its own neck, he thought, running blind, and in
the dark, most likely.

He looked up and across the big body at the bull,
standing spread-legged in his shallow refuge. The bull hadn’t
moved, unless the wide head had drooped a little nearer to the snow.
It didn’t see him. Its stupid, round, innocent eyes were
half-lidded and dull. All its slackening consciousness was centered
on staying on its feet and keeping its horns turned out against the
danger that wasn’t there any longer. Walking carefully, his
boot-heels making him slip and stumble among the tumbled rocks masked
with snow, Arthur went around the steer and approached the bull. The
bull swung its head a little more toward him, very slowly and
without
lifting it at all, but otherwise didn’t move. When he was close
enough to have touched it with the carbine, Arthur stopped and stood
looking at it. He felt the creature’s weakness and dull fear as in
himself, and for a moment he couldn’t see it, his eyes glazing
over, turning their vision inward, as his mind shied from what he had
to do. Then he saw again.

"Well, friend?" he asked, hardly knowing he
spoke.

At the sound of his voice the bull shifted a little
in the rock, nearly falling. Then it braced itself again, and the
dripping of blood from its nostrils freshened for a moment into a
thin stream. The blood was thick and dark, almost purple on the snow.
The snow around it was flecked with a brighter blood also. Outside
the shelter of the niche, where the snow was trampled in a wide
semi-circle, the scarlet streaks were dimmed by new snow. The bull’s
thick shoulder was torn as if by three heavy-bladed knives that had
ripped together, and in one place four. Its throat was deeply torn
too, and the blood was still welling out there, running in a thin,
faintly shining trickle down over the bulging red shoulder and
spreading like arteries on the white brisket. There were even long,
open wounds, dug in deeply at the ends, like dagger thrusts, down the
slowly heaving barrel. The polished white of ribs showed in two of
them.

"A long fight, friend," Arthur said softly.
"I’m sorry. It’s only to make it quicker."

The first finger of his bare left hand tried the
trigger of the carbine gently. It held rigid against his touch, and
he felt, like an animal force, the charged powder waiting to be
sprung.

Hair trigger, he thought off the top of his mind. No
slack at all. The way Curt likes it, I guess. No chance not to, once
you’ve started.

He lifted the carbine until the muzzle, only a few
inches from the bull’s head, pointed just between the ear and the
eye. The barrel wavered for an instant then, but steadied, and he
drew, and the butt struck in his shoulder violently The report was a
deafening slam, at once deepened, enlarged and multiplied into a
confused booming between the high walls of the canyon. The gray
mustang started convulsively and wheeled and broke toward the edge of
the platform, but snubbed herself twice on the trailing reins and
wheeled back, swinging her rump about the pivot of her braced
forelegs. The echoes diminished, rolling faintly in the canyon below,
and she saw Arthur standing there still, and she stood also, though
trembling and staring.

The bull jerked as if stung, and then sank slowly
forward and a little to one side, its knees buckling, its muzzle
plowing out into the stained snow. Only small, unknowing panics of
life moved it a few moments longer, the short, thick-shouldered
forelegs stiffening and shaking, single tremors running swiftly here
and there in the great muscles of the body. Then the last breath
sighed out gustily, spraying the snow with blood, and the chattering
dance of the hoofs in the broken rock slowed and stopped. The huge
body sank away a little, relaxed, and lay still.

Arthur stood looking down at it, almost in the
attitude of a man praying, except for the carbine held across him and
still smoking faintly at the muzzle. A trickle of earth and pebbles
spilled suddenly down the cliff onto the bull’s shoulder. Arthur
started, as if the quick, small touches might waken the bull and
bring him lurching to his feet. He saw then that the dark horn that
curved into the air now was gummy with blood, with a scattering of
short pale hairs stuck in it. His closed mind made nothing of this,
however, only seeing and storing it.

He turned, smiling inside his cowl, but fixedly, like
a man asleep and dreaming strangely. Bearing the carbine across him
in both hands still, and with the empty shell left in the breach, he
worked his way out of the broken rock and moved slowly across the
platform to the waiting horse. She started at the first touch of his
hand but then turned her head to him and nudged his shoulder. He took
the reins in his mittened hand, carrying the carbine in the other,
and led her down to the creek and slowly through the shallow turmoil
of water among stones and ice, turned her down-canyon on the other
side, and mounted. He saw Curt’s wavering boot trail, and the
evener arc of widely spaced clusters on the slope, where the cat’s
speed had forced it up after the crossing. The clusters straightened
out below and went down beside the aspens. Sometimes there were
little jets of blood stretched between them, and less often, in snow
that had drifted deeper against a boulder or the brush, a long
serpent curve where the heavy tail had dragged. The mare went down
slowly along the marks of the cat, afraid for her footing. Arthur
didn’t press her, but just sat the saddle, not looking around, his
bare left hand braced against the horn, his right, in the mitten,
holding the carbine across his thighs.

The aspens drifted by, making their soft, nervous
fluttering, and the red willows began. Where the rim-rock ended
against the sky above and the canyon walls became rounded hills
sloping steeply into the valley, the tracks turned up. The blood
marks between them were heavier for a few jumps, and then faint
again, and finally as the tracks became single, there were none.
Going at a steep angle, only a little with the length of the hill,
they vanished north over the crest. The mare passed their turning and
went on down unchecked. She was almost out from between the wings of
the canyon before Arthur missed the tracks.

“
Dreaming again, Curt would say," he said
aloud, smiling a little. He reined the mare in, and, twisting clear
about in the saddle to see out of his hood, scanned the slope above
him. After a moment, in one place only, high up on the shoulder, he
saw the marks of the crossing.

"Dreams are all kinds, though, eh?" he said
to the mare or the quiet canyon. "Some we wouldn’t miss too
much," and gently urged her down once more.

When he judged the north slope easy enough for her,
he stopped her again, dismounted and, leaving her with the reins
hanging, shuffled down through the knee-deep snow to the willows and
then down-canyon along them to a place where they thinned at the edge
of a sandy ford so a horse might pass through them. Here he crossed
and went up on the other side onto the open meadow strip between the
south reach and the creek. He saw the tracks of steers there, moving
close together down toward the valley, and looking that way saw the
little bunch, already down on the edge of the meadow. He looked up at
the south slope, at the cut the horses had made coming into the
canyon. Then he dragged across the steer tracks, with the sides of
his boots, a wide, deep mark half the width of the strip of meadow,
and on the creek
end of it, scraping and
stamping, made an arrow head longer than a man. After that he went
back across the creek and up to the waiting mare, mounted, and turned
her up onto the slope.

On the other side of the spur, a wide draw opened
beneath them. The pines came clear down to the grassland in it,
though thinning their ranks a little toward the lower edge. The wind
had swept them clean, and they showed black against the snow. He
turned the mare in toward the mountain and downward only a little.
Where the spur became the mountain itself, and the slope of the draw
grew steeper, he came on the flower track again. He pulled up to let
the mare breath before the new climb, and looked along the cat’s
trail as far as he could see it. It went up northwest, weaving no
more than the trees made it, and the rosettes were still single and
closely spaced. There was one much larger, blurred impression in
sight, where the cat had sat down to rest, and perhaps to lick its
wound. The wound was doing all right, though, he thought, seeing no
blood now anywhere in the line of tracks.

After a minute he turned the mare onto the trail and
they climbed along it, slanting north and upward among the trees.
Once, well up in the quiet grove, a jay flashed suddenly over them,
screaming, its blue brilliant even in that gray light. It perched on
a high limb over the trail ahead of them, and kept scolding as they
came nearer.

Arthur looked up at it and grinned, thinking, It’s
no secret now that the master killer has come out. Everything on the
mountain will hole up and keep watch. They passed under the jay, and
it flew ahead and perched again. Four times it preceded them,
screaming as it flew, and scolding profanely from each perch. Then it
was satisfied, and from the last perch, dropped away down-slope,
still scolding.

The pitch of the mountain increased and even going
across it the mare was forced to stand and blow often, reaching with
her head to loosen the lines and breathe easier. Arthur didn’t
hurry her. His mind was still resting after what he’d done in the
canyon. Notions moved in him idly, by their own small power, all
frail and a little unhappy. They made passive overtures to what was
around him, the pines, the gray boulders where the mountain itself
began to show through the snow, the delicate writing of small tracks
on the white slope, the sentinel jay, a chipmunk making its pebbly
chittering somewhere out of sight, even the storm filling again, far
up among the peaks. He couldn’t complete this slow penance,
however, for the full knowledge of his act was still trapped within
him, as in a fist, so that he felt it, but couldn’t see it. With
that fist closed in him he remained apart from the life of the
mountain.

Where another creek, smaller than the Aspen, and the
willows thinner along it, went down to the northeast, the cat’s
track turned straight up the mountain. As Arthur on the mare came to
the turn, there was a sudden crashing in the willows below them.
Arthur swung the carbine over to put his left forefinger to the
trigger, but then he saw the two young deer, last spring’s fawns,
he thought, going up in long bounds on the steep slope beyond the
willows, the head of one against the haunch of the other. He reined
in the mare and watched them until the two came against the sky
between dark pines, and vaulted airily, almost in one curve, two
bodies long, over a manzanita thicket on the ridge, and vanished.