Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (22 page)

There was something else that troubled him too,
though it was only a kind of puzzle on the edge of his fear. They
were standing in the center of the clearing, but there weren’t any
tracks in the snow to show how they’d got there. Gradually, as they
kept on just standing there, and nothing happened, this puzzle of the
trackless snow distracted him. It was then, while his attention was
divided, that he recognized the ravine. It was the Aspen Creek
Canyon. He could look down along the serpent of leafless aspens and
willows and see its last turns, far out and narrow as a thread, and
then the black shapes of the tule marshes. Yet it wasn’t quite
right for the Aspen Creek Canyon either. Having discovered this, he
saw, almost at once, what the difference was. The sides of the canyon
were much higher than he remembered. The rim-rock was so far above
them that its top was lost in the gray sky. Also it was much farther
down out of this canyon than it was out of the Aspen Creek. The black
marshes out there in the snow fields looked no farther away than the
valley marshes, but when he glanced down along the gigantic cliffs,
he saw that this was because they were actually very big lakes lying
miles out on a plain too wide to see across. He still knew the
canyon
perfectly well, but now it was such a huge trap that it would take
hours to get out of it, and they didn’t have hours.

There was another difference too. He should have
noticed this difference at once, and it worried him than he hadn’t.
The sides of the gigantic canyon were thickly timbered clear up to
the base of the rim-rock. The real Aspen Creek Canyon had only a few
stunted pines standing up out of the sand. It was the trees, of
course, that made it so easy for the enemy to move around without
being seen. He knew where they were, and they didn’t know where he
was, and he could keep it that way if he wanted to. If they started
down the canyon, and that was the only way out now, he could trail
along beside them as far as he liked, and never be seen. Maybe that
was why he was waiting. Maybe he liked playing cat and mouse. Once he
had thought of it, it became a fact that the invisible enemy liked to
play cat and mouse.

He understood all this very quickly, and once he
did, the first paralysis of his will passed off. At once he touched
Gwen, and motioned to her to throw herself down into the snow. She
didn't look at him, but she understood when he touched her, and
obeyed him promptly. He threw himself down beside her. Even as they
dropped, as if their falling had started it, they head the voice
again. Because they were moving then, and not really listening, they
still didn't know who it was, but they were relieved about their own
situation anyway. Whoever was calling was much farther away this time
than when he’d first called. If he was calling to them at all, he
was certainly calling for help. It no longer seemed that the enemy
was a man, either. No one trying to get away from a man with a rifle
would keep yelling like that. He’d yell only if he thought it might
frighten the enemy off.

"It's the black painter," Harold cried.

Gwen didn't answer him, but he knew she thought so
too.

Then he was on his feet and running heavily,
laboring to run faster, toward the place farther into the canyon and
up the north side, from which he believed the voice had last cried
out. He became desperate because he was running so slowly. His legs
weighed like stone, yet he floated a little at each stride and could
never take the next step soon enough. The snow, which had appeared
dry and light on the clearing, turned out to be heavy and wet and
slippery, and that made it even worse trying to hurry. When he did
reach ground firmly, he always slipped back, and the harder he tried,
the more he slipped.

The next thing he knew, Gwen ran past him. He
couldn’t understand how she could run so fast and easily, and he
was frightened to see her rushing toward the danger ahead of him. He
tried to call to her to wait for him, but he had no voice. He wasn't
breathless or choked; he just didn't have any voice. He kept trying
to shout, but he couldn’t make a sound. Gwen got farther and
farther ahead of him up the slope. He could still see her plainly,
because they had come into a long climbing avenue through the trees.
It was free of growth of any sort, and perfectly straight, like a
road through a park. Far up this avenue she continued to move away
with amazing speed and ease, and he saw that she was leaving no
tracks behind her. Her cloak, flapping as she ran, made her look like
a small, fluttering bird, and then like a tiny insect on a white
wall, barely moving its wings, perhaps just cleaning them. At any
moment
she would arrive at the place where
the black painter was waiting, but he couldn’t do a thing about it.
He still couldn’t run any faster, or make a sound. He stopped
trying to call.

At once, when he stopped trying to call, he wasn’t
running either. He was just standing there staring up the long avenue
ahead of him. The black figure of the cat was creeping out of the
woods on the left side, and Gwen, as if she didn’t see it at all,
was rushing right toward it. Harold wanted to cover his eyes, but he
couldn’t; he had to watch. The sweat broke out on him again, as it
had during the first moment in the clearing. He heard a voice
mumbling in fear or in crazy monologue. Either it was his own voice,
or the cat up there was mumbling. Maybe the cat was purring. He
became sure that the cat was purring, and then he was much closer,
only a few yards behind Gwen, and could see that the crawling
creature wasn’t a cat at all, but a man. It was Curt, in the red
mackinaw with the black stripe around it. But there was something
terrible the matter with him. He was crawling on his hands and knees,
and mumbling continuously, without sense. Every few feet, he stopped
crawling and mumbling, and retched, and then vomited a great gush of
blood. It seemed impossible that he could still be alive after even
one such outpouring, yet every time he would begin to mumble again,
and then to crawl ahead. He wasn’t attacking Gwen, and he wasn’t
going to. He was only trying to get across the avenue and into the
woods on the other side before the enemy caught up with him again.

Suddenly another figure appeared at the very top
of the avenue. He was tiny up there, but Harold could see that he was
wearing the red and white parka, and that he was taking aim down the
avenue with a rifle. Probably he was aiming at Curt in his red coat.
It was impossible to be sure at that distance, and it didn’t matter
anyway. The tiny, mocking figure up there, taking such slow and
deliberate aim, meant to kill all three of them, and he’d have time
to do it, too.

All at once the whole situation became clear to
Harold. He found his voice and cried out a loud warning to the figure
in the red coat. It turned its face at him, and he was right. It was
Arthur’s face, bearded, and very thin, white grid quiet. The eyes
were closed too, and the big lids were blue.

Harold wasn’t standing in the avenue through the
trees at all; he was standing in the north bedroom. The lamp on the
table was making great shadows of the eagle that perched on the bed
and of the mother on the white wall. The mother was looking down at
the white, bearded face on the pillow, at the face with the closed,
blue-lidded eyes, and she was smiling grimly. Harold had his arm
around Gwen now, and they were both staring at the mother. He was
trying to draw Gwen away, because he believed that the mother was
crazy. But then he saw that the mother had on a handsome, new, black
overcoat with a velvet collar, and realized that he had been
mistaken. The gloating figure was the father, and his satisfaction
wasn’t nearly as evil, because he was so drunk he couldn’t really
know what he was looking at. He was the one who was making that sound
now. He was talking to himself. When Harold heard the sound, he
remembered, or perhaps saw through the wall at the head of the bed,
the tiny figure taking aim from the top of the white avenue through
the trees. He was still aiming at Arthur, too, although Arthur was
already quite dead. Harold was going to cry out, but before he could
make a sound there appeared, as silently as if it had come out from
inside, a neat,
dark, round hole, perhaps
large enough to put the end of a little finger into, right between
the eyebrows of Arthur's face on the pillow. The report came long
after the hole had appeared, but it was much too loud, stunningly
loud, as if the rifle had been fired inside the room. But it would be
impossible, if the rifle were fired inside the room, for the hole to
appear so long before the report was heard. The entire time and order
of events became terribly confused, and Gwen vanished. She wasn’t
in his arm, and he couldn’t see her anywhere. It was as if the shot
had carried her off too.

He was up on his elbow, staring and breathing hard.
He saw that he wasn’t in the north bedroom, and for a moment
everything was more mixed up than ever. Then he came slowly over to
the waking side and was greatly relieved. Everything in the dream
receded and became a little less than real, except the report of the
rifle. He remained convinced of the report.

He saw Joe Sam by the light that flickered through
the little window in the door of the stove, and faintly by the first
glimmer of daylight in the bunk-house window. The two lights made him
two colors where he showed, red up his back, and pale, almost blue in
front. He was standing close in front of the stove, but facing the
door. He was naked, and he was shaking both fists above his head in
fierce triumph. He was talking constantly in Piute too, a low,
excited chattering.

That’s the purring anyway, Harold thought. That’s
the noise Arthur was making, and then the old man in the bedroom.
This didn’t set the dream back farther, though. It made it more
real again instead. It made it seem as if the dream was alive in the
room again, and Joe Sam had
something to do
with it.

There was a strong smell of whisky in the room. There
was something in Joe Sam’s right fist that gleamed in the stove
light when he moved it just right, too.

That bottle again, Harold thought angrily. The old
fool must have got that bottle again in the night. However much he’s
got in him, he must have spilled a lot of it to make it stink so. He
must have been up all night, he thought. He’s kept the fire going.

“
Joe Sam," he said sharply.

At once the old Indian stopped chattering, and then
he slowly let his arms down. Finally he turned to face Harold’s
bunk, so he was standing with his side to the stove, and what he was
holding in his right hand showed clearly. It wasn’t the whole
whisky bottle, but just the neck, with long, jagged points of the
shoulders still on it. Joe Sam wasn’t threatening anything, though.
He just stood there by the stove, silent, and with all the excitement
gone out of him, and held the bottle neck loosely in his hand. He
looked very tired, and older than ever.

"What’s the matter, Joe Sam?" Harold
asked.

"Bottle break," Joe Sam said. He was very
sad. He was lamenting an accident.

I’ll bet it did, Harold thought. No bottle ever
broke that way by accident. You broke it, you old faker.

The wind came down heavily against the bunk-house,
making it creak and tremble, and then fell away again along the
mountain. The fire it had beaten down leapt up again roaring, and
Harold saw the glittering fragments of the bottle on the floor.

"Stand still, Joe Sam," he said, "or
you’ll cut your feet."

Joe Sam looked down slowly and curiously, as if just
remembering that he had feet, but stood where he was. Harold rolled
up onto the edge of his bunk, tried the floor lightly with his own
feet, to make sure none of the chips had come that far, and stood up.
He crossed to the shelves and lighted the lamp. The second bottle was
still there and still sealed. He took the old stub of broom from the
corner and swept the glass around Joe Sam’s feet into a little pile
in front of him.

"Better put that in too," he said, pointing
to the bottle neck.

Joe Sam looked down at it the way he had looked at
his feet. Then he leaned over and laid it gently on the pile of
broken glass. Harold brought the nail keg that was the bunk-house
waste basket from its corner by the front window, and swept the glass
into it. He swept the last dust of glass that wouldn’t go in, under
the stove, and put the broom and the keg back in the corner. When he
turned around, Joe Sam was still standing there in front of the
stove.

"All right, Joe Sam. It’s all gone."

The old Indian walked slowly over to his bunk and sat
down. He laid his hands one over the other between his legs, so they
covered his crotch, and sat staring at the worms and fluttering wings
of light the fire made on the floor.

Harold came back to his bunk and began to dress.

"Did you get any sleep, Joe Sam?" he asked.

After a long time, Joe Sam said drowsily, "No
sleep. All time snow. Much snow. Painter hunt."

Harold stood still the way he was, with his pants
only half pulled up, and looked at the old man. So that was it, he
thought finally. But he was plenty happy about it, that’s a cinch.
He was celebrating something.

"Did you get him?" he asked.