Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (15 page)

"By God, the little broomtail," he said
aloud.

A score of quick tales of doom went unfinished across
his mind. There were familiar phantoms in some of them that sprang up
out of recesses where he’d buried them, as Indians were sometimes
buried, with stones piled on the graves, partly to keep the coyotes
out, but partly to hold the dead down too. He turned on the ghosts.

"For Christ’s sake," he said aloud, "the
damn fool’s gone to sleep again. Whittling again while his horse
runs home."

He thought of riding down and catching the mare and
looking her over to see if there were marks on her that would tell
him anything. But the spoken contempt had not wholly cured his fear.
The ghosts kept stirring, though small and one at a time now. He felt
hurried. The mare could wait. He’d find the tracks, and follow them
out and they’d tell him what he had to know. He lifted Kentuck’s
hoof again, dragging his head down by the bridle and twisting the
lines around the raised leg, and slashed off the ball of snow flush
with the hoof and began to dig with the point of the knife again.
Kentuck blew for the mare twice more while he worked, but he only
cursed him softly and put his weight more heavily against the leg. At
the fifth careful try, the pack in the frog stirred in one piece. He
pried deeper and slowly and it sprang out, making a little thud on
the ground snow. Dropping the knife into his pocket as it was,he
freed the reins, spun Kentuck half way round, and mounted. When
Kentuck turned, even against his pull, rearing a little, and crying
once more at the mare, he put him down hard, cursing, reined him hard
around to the north, and drummed and lashed him up into a run.
Looking back as they swung onto the reach, he saw the mare trip on
her dragging reins and stand, looking after them. Turning again, as
they topped the crest, he saw her moving away toward the ranch, very
small at that distance, and carrying her head to the side to drag the
reins free.

He turned back and looked down into the creek canyon
as Kentuck started the descent. At first he saw only the thin column
of willows filing down onto the meadows, but then, distinct from that
height, once he saw what it was, the big arrow Arthur had made to
point at the crossing.

"Not asleep up to here, anyway," he said
aloud, and for a moment the fears were many and quick in him again.
He pulled Kentuck off the sloping track they had made at daybreak,
and put him straight down at the arrow, so that often his haunches
buckled under him and he slid.
Thinking the cat
might be in the canyon again, Curt raged that he hadn’t brought a
second rifle. When he imagined accidentally flushing the lion in the
willows with nothing but the knife for a weapon, it seemed no better
than being empty-handed. He followed the muddled arrow across the
strip of meadow, and put the black slowly down and through the creek,
splashing and rattling. Coming up out of the water, he searched the
north wing of the canyon and found where the mare had gone out on the
long slant, and pressed Kentuck straight up the slope and turned him
into her track. At the crest, he drew rein and looked along the trail
on the north side as far as he could see it, and then quickly over
the wide hollow, among the pines. He saw nothing moving anywhere, and
started Kentuck down. The trail was distinct, even far up and across
among the shadows of the trees, because Arthur’s mare had tossed
red needles and black mould up onto the snow. The phantoms quickened
again when the cat’s track came in, making a V with the hoof marks
and then running with them.

"Still not asleep, old medicine man," he
said.

The two tracks running together made him feel that
whatever had happened must have happened close ahead. He watched
about him constantly among the trees and then among the first
boulders, and twice he reached into his pocket to make sure the knife
was haft up and easy to get hold of. He felt more than ever
empty-handed without a rifle, but he was cold about it now. He didn’t
blame Arthur, either. It was his own fault. He should have made
Arthur bring a rifle when they first came out, even knowing he
wouldn’t use it. Not having done that, he should have thought of
bringing another with him this trip, instead of making whoring lies
in his head about Gwen, and then working on her as if they were the
truth. No use thinking about that either, now.

"Don’t think at all; it makes you blind. Just
keep your eyes open."

Where the double track turned straight up beside the
little north creek and then became a triple track, the deep incisions
of Arthur’s boot heels showing clearest of all, he was forced to
dismount too, and lead Kentuck. He climbed easily in the soft, flat
pacs, going up step by step in the mare’s prints, and the drag of
the laboring stallion irritated him, but he kept a close watch just
the same. He would be an easy prey on foot. There was no doubt in his
mind by now, that the lion, besides being a giant, was crazy, a
killer without reason. He thought of Arthur standing beside the dead
steer in the box canyon, looking at him solemnly and curiously, and
speaking of how bold the cat was. The warning had a power now that it
had lacked then. Each time it made him remember Arthur’s quiet
reluctance in the bunk-room while they were getting dressed, and then
many different times back through eighteen years, when they had joked
about the black panther, but Arthur always with the little serious
undertone, never really making fun of the notion as much as he did of
Curt. The chain of quick, small memories passing through his mind,
like black birds flying over him again and again in identical
formation, began to impress him in spite of his scornful denials.
After all, Arthur didn’t really believe in the black panther any
more than he did, certainly not in one as big as a horse and
transparent as a shadow, that started roaming the Sierra every year
just when the first snow came. Because each memory returned embodied,
and framed in familiar reality, himself speaking, Arthur speaking,
Joe Sam watching, Harold listening, at breakfast or supper in the
kitchen or out in the sun by the corral fence, it had the strength in
his mind of
something that had happened.

When the trail turned south across the mountain and
passed under a thicket of manzanita with a heap of rounded,
half-joined boulders standing up out of it, Curt thought, Going back
already, sure as hell. Going in from the top, and for a moment felt
what was as bad as fear, that Arthur, for all his dreamy hanging
back, had made the better guess about what the cat would do.

"Just what the old monk thought," he said
aloud.

He was up in the edge of the waiting clouds now. The
air about him was full of a fine suspended snow, like fog, with a
pale shining beginning to spread in it. Objects near him were clear
enough, but the ravine ahead of him showed only as a great milky blue
shadow, except when a cold breath from the mountain above whirled the
snow into long serpents that swam in the chasm, and let the rocks and
pines and clumps of brush on the far wall show through dark and clear
for a minute or two. He went very carefully in this mist, pausing
often to be sure what made some shadow he thought for an instant had
moved.

He came to where the cat had rested at the turn on
the edge of the ravine, and stood there to read the record. Watching
its own back-trail, he thought. Already got half a mind to do the
hunting itself. It took its time, too. Had a long lead. It just sat
here and watched him coming up. He was shaken even more than before,
so that even his breathing changed a little, by the belief that
whatever had happened couldn’t have happened far from there. He
could feel how the cat had hated the retreat, growing nettled,
wanting to stop it.

When he went around the castle of boulders to climb
beside the ravine, Kentuck dragging at the end of the reins behind
him again, the wind swung down at him strongly for a moment, so he
had to stop and turn away from the snow in it. He wanted to duck his
head and shield his face with a raised arm too, but held himself
against the wish, and only narrowed his eyes. The wind roared in the
pines above, and then below him, and made a soft, hollow singing in
the boulders beside him, and fell away again, bearing the curtain of
snow aside with it. The Cathedral Rock stood up big and clear above
him, and he scanned it carefully, especially the half-dome rock that
stood over the trail. There was nothing moving except here and there
the brush that jerked as if alive in the brief after-gusts. He tugged
at the reins to start Kentuck again and went on up. The mist settled
slowly around him once more, with the first sunlight spreading in it.
It made an unreal place of the mountainside, a region that hung in
space and unworldly silence, and Curt set his teeth against the
sudden, loud sounds the stallion made
scrambling
up behind him as they came off the sand onto the granite shelves
below the rocks.

Another gust halted them, and then, as it sighed away
down the ravine, he saw, and all at once, as if it had just that
instant fallen there, the spread form, like a dark, irregular star,
lying on the incline under the half-dome rock. The white patches of
the parka looked like snow, but even so, the ghosts gathered in him
at once, making a single, big fear that filled him and shut off his
breath. The flight of dark birds started over him again, but he
stopped it, and looked warily all around over the rocks and brush
with attentive eyes and an empty mind. After a moment he scrambled on
up, jerking and cursing at Kentuck without knowing it. Then the
stallion nickered softly and swung back, almost
upsetting him, and wouldn’t go up any farther for anything he could
do.

But you won’t run out on me, damn you, Curt
thought, and took the rope from the saddle and looped it around
Kentuck’s neck, high behind the ears, and knotted the other end
around a thick manzanita stem. While he worked at the rope, he
glanced up often at the spread figure on the trail and quickly about
among the brush and up at the pinnacles of the rock. Once or twice,
tricked by a movement of the snow veil in the wind, he believed that
the star-shaped figure stirred.

He yanked the knot tight against the manzanita and
tested it twice, and then went up the slope half running, telling
himself, the mare threw him; she spooked and threw him and he got
knocked out on the rock. But even while he hoped, he didn’t believe
it. The mare had been gone too long, for one thing, showing up way
out on the meadow there. When he was close enough to see Arthur’s
bare left hand clutching at the rock in the snow, he also saw the
carbine gleaming in the brush beyond. He didn’t even pause beside
Arthur then, but peering once more up at the half-veiled rock above,
stepped over him and worked into the brush and drew the carbine up
out of it, and examined it, first one side and then the other. It
wasn’t damaged to matter, a few sliding scratches, no more. He felt
much better with it in his hands. He came up to the edge of the track
again, trying the trigger, ejecting the empty shell, and feeling the
newly tightened trigger with pleasure.

At the same time he thought, He saw something,
though. He got one shot at something.

When he stood where his soft' boot could have touched
Arthur, he looked quickly up over the shadowy rocks once more, at the
ghostly edge of forest farther above, and then  knelt and
gripped the right shoulder in its stiff, cowhide sleeve, and drew at
it gently, as one might start to waken a sleeper. More than the
shoulder moved to his tug, but not even one linger of the bare, left
hand by itself. The out-stretched arm slipped suddenly across the
rock. He let the shoulder back down, and the arm slid out again. He
withdrew his hand and gripped his own knee with it. Squatting there,
using the carbine as a prop, he saw that the bare hand reaching onto
the rock was blue, and that a thin sifting of the little snow fflakes
lay unmelted on it, and on the hood and back of the cowhide coat. He
saw also what his hand had told him first, that there was a wide,
ragged tear in the shoulder of the parka. There were three parallel
marks below it, scraped through the red hair and into fine grooves in
the leather underneath. For a moment the panther in his mind,
possessed of purpose and malice and cunning like a man’s, was an
enormous black one in spite of him.

Then he stood up slowly to do what he should have
done first thing. There were many of the great flower prints in a
confused circle around the body. Then they went up from it along the
base of the half-dome rock, two sets of tracks, but both clearly made
by the same cat. He followed them up, constantly watching around and
over him as he went. Beyond the rock, where the open path turned back
slightly from the edge of the ravine, the two patterns changed. One
went on by single prints at regular intervals, an unhurried walk. The
other gathered suddenly into the clusters with wide spaces between
that meant running leaps. The two trails still lay together though,
and he followed them on up until, ten or fifteen yards
above
the rock, they separated. There he stopped and peered along the
leisurely track which continued upslope, but bending a little north
now, away from the ravine, and vanished nnally in the fog of snow at
the edge of timber. Then he turned and traced the leaping tracks.
They curved back into the upper side of the rock, and there took on
the slower pattern again, and showed only here and there, a print or
two at a time in the snow in the crevices. The scattered signs were
enough, though. They led back around to the down-slope face of the
big boulder that stood over the trail.