Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (42 page)

He climbed back onto the ridge, and turned south
where he met his own tracks. With the wind behind him, or quartering
down over his right shoulder, so he felt it finger in now and then
through the tear in the parka, he was warmer, and moved faster and
more easily, and saw more clearly. He pushed the hood back
impatiently, so he could see all around him, and traveled quickly
along the crest of the ridge, watching for any place among the ledges
where the cat might have crouched to hide or to wait for him, and
scanning the edge of the snow on both sides.

Twice he saw breaks in the stone where the cat might
have hidden, and held the carbine ready, and worked up to them
carefully. In the first there was a little slanting drift of snow the
wind had dropped over the edge, but no mark in it.

The second was sheltered by an overhang, and the
stone floor was bare. Standing above it, and looking south as far as
he could see, without finding any break in the snow below the ridge,
he thought, The bastard waited here till I went up the north end. It
has to be that. Then he could of got clear down there where it’s
snowing before I got back around.

He went down and around and into the flat, long,
shallow cave, and stooped and looked carefully at the thin scattering
of sand over the granite, and the lines of sand caught in the
crevices. There was nothing that was clearly a track, but in three
places there were breaks, the sand spread a little and across its
natural line, as wind couldn’t have moved it.

Couldn’t have been there long, either, he thought,
or the wind would of straightened them out again. He watched them for
a moment, and saw the grains stirring now, moving bit by bit, a few
here, a few there, back into their lines with the wind.

"It’s you, you damn spook," he said
aloud, eagerly, and straightened up quickly, and climbed back onto
the ridge again, and turned south. He went at a dog-trot now,
glancing along the edges quickly, and as far ahead as he could, and
looking up and beyond that now and then too, worried by the snow
cloud spreading along the ridge. Still there were no tracks.

As the first flakes of the snow began to move across
him, he said aloud, "So you made it, you lucky bastard. But it
won’t cover for you yet."

The snow thickened, though. He couldn’t see
anything distinctly in it, and had to go more slowly, peering to find
the white edges, sometimes waiting out the heavier flurries in order
to see at all. And again, as it became suddenly darker in the blown
snow, time jumped away from him, all the way to the edge of evening.

"Oh, you lucky devil," he said. "But
it’s not done yet, you son of a bitch," he vowed angrily.
"This goddamned ledge can’t go all the way to Mexico. You’ll
have to show some time."

Then, after all, in his anxiety, in the
ever-thickening pall of the snow, he almost missed what he was
looking for. It was only chance that he saw it. A gust of wind
uncovered it for a moment, and before his eyes lost it again, he
guessed what it must be. Standing there peering toward it, waiting
for another break in the whirling of flakes about him, which had
already whitened the parka, and now was beginning to hold on the
rocks too, he felt the little fear again, the cold, slight thrill of
being outwitted, as he realized that what he’d seen wasn’t at all
what he’d been watching for. He’d been watching right along the
edge for the flower prints and the groove of a tail drag. These marks
were far down from the edge and just holes in the snow. The wind
broke the snowing open for him again, and he saw them clearly, only
one
group, all hunched together, and twenty
feet or more below the bare granite ledge.

He went down to them, partly blinded by the snow
driving against his face. It was the cat, all right. In the bottom of
the little pits the legs had made, he could still see the broken
flowers of the pads. He couldn’t see out of the snowing in any
direction now. He worked on down slowly, and found another cluster of
marks, and then a third, and a fourth, each many feet farther down.
Then the incline lessened, and the tracks closed a little. He drew up
the hood to shelter his eyes, and followed the descending clusters,
forcing himself to go slowly and carefully in spite of his
impatience, and his fear of the storm and the coming darkness.

"You can’t go any farther than I can in this,"
he said aloud, but now less as a threat than to encourage himself.
Farther down the slope, where the wind-bent timber closed in again,
the
tracks became single and evenly spaced, and
now and then a short crescent of tail-drag showed. The cat was sure
of itself again, trusting the cover of the storm, and the bare ridge
and the long leaps behind it.

"Give me one look, just one," Curt said
softly, half exulting again, but continued to work his way carefully
down among the trees, pausing and peering, and sometimes flaring
angrily inside against the snow and all the hiding places which made
him go so slowly and kept him from seeing any distance around him. It
was quieter down there though. The wind passed high above him, and
the snow fell gently under it, making only occasional mild eddies.

Toward the bottom of the ridge, the snow grew rapidly
deeper. The cat had floundered several times, leaving long, deep
belly troughs, with dark holes in them where its legs had sunk.

Been snowing here all day, Curt thought. On and off,
anyway.

And a little later he thought, And all night too.

The cat marks floundered on, though, going as
straight down into the valley as they could among the trees. No
tricks now, he thought. Thinks it’s clean away. Just traveling.
It’ll hole up by dark, and lick its scratches. When the snow came
almost to his hips, and it was difficult just to push through it, he
stopped long enough to lace on the bear-paws. Then he went down
again, clumsily, with the little side-swing of each leg the bear-paws
made necessary, but even so, faster and more easily.

The trail led straight across the high valley between
the two ranges, first through a reaching peninsula of timber, and
then across a wide, open meadow, where the snow was blown into sharp,
curving drifts over the earth humps and along the turns of the creek
that meandered south through the middle of it. The creek was frozen
over and then covered with snow.

By the time Curt came among trees again, on the west
edge of the meadow, real darkness was spreading into the gray gloom
of the snowing. The snow was the deepest yet there, and light and
evenly spread. The cat had dragged badly in it, and floundered from
side to side, hunting for solid footing underneath. Even in the dusk
and among the trees, the big trail was still easy to follow, going up
through the terraced pines in long, irregular switchbacks. Curt was 
encouraged, thinking how he gained here, going nearly straight up
from point to point of the cat’s slow zigzags. He climbed as fast
as he could, but it was exhausting work. The webs sank in, and a
little burden of the snow had to be lifted and shaken off at each
step, and often he had to dig into the white slope to keep from
slipping. He was breathing quickly and loudly, and beginning to feel
shaky and a little lightheaded from the steep pitch and the height,
and painfully empty from his long fast.

Also, as the darkness increased, he began to mistrust
his eyes. The burdened trees loomed ominously all about him, and
sometimes seemed to be closing in. He couldn’t be sure of distances
among them. He was high enough now, too, for broken gusts of wind to
reach down to him sometimes, whirling the snow and moving the trees
jerkily, so that he stopped several
times, with
the carbine held ready against the shadowy jumping. The snow was
falling more heavily all the time, and he had to give up cutting
across the cat’s long detours for fear of losing the trail
altogether.

He’d hardly been thinking at all for a long time
now, only watching, when all at once, like a warning from outside, as
sharply as if somebody had called to him, he thought, Cats can see in
the dark.

The thought stopped him at once, right where he was.
Mountain lions can see in the dark, of course, he thought. They hunt
at night all the time.

He was almost as much alarmed because he had gone so
long without thinking of this obvious fact as he was by the fact
itself. His confidence was shaken again, as it had been shaken when
he came onto the first ridge, and couldn’t see the cat or any
tracks. Now it was getting to where he had to be almost within reach
of a tree to pick it out of the moving darkness of snow and nightfall
and wind together. But the cat could see him as well as ever, if it
was in the right place. The snow would blind it a little, perhaps,
but hardly more than in daylight. Again he quickly remembered stories
of the malice and cleverness of mountain lions, and also what the
tracks had told him at first hand about this one, doubling back and
waiting above the trail for Arthur, and then gaining all that time
using the granite ridge. In the darkness, his mind made very clear
pictures, too. He saw Arthur’s dead face, the way it had looked
when he first turned him over. Then he saw Arthur coming up the trail
under Cathedral Rock, alive, but not watching and not thinking about
what he was doing either, and the cat crouched on the ledge above
him, working its hind legs carefully, nervously under itself for the
leap, the tip of its long, serpent tail slowly curling and uncurling.
At once, after that, he imagined it preparing in the same way now for
him, on a ledge he couldn’t even see.

After a moment, though, he made himself go on up. He
had sworn to get that cat. He had repeatedly made a vow to a dead
brother for whom he had wept his first tears since he was a little
kid that he would get that cat if he had to follow it all the way to
the ocean. And he had said something to the little Welshy about a
lion skin too. It had been a foolish boast, but he’d made it, and
when he thought of going back without the hide now, the boast became
a vow more compelling than the one to Arthur, because others had
heard him make it. If he stopped here, and the snow kept falling, he
wouldn’t even be able to make a guess, by morning, where the cat
had gone. He knew this range. He knew exactly where he was on it now.
If he could just keep tracking until the cat holed up, or set a clear
course from the ridge, he could guess his way back onto the track in
the morning.

He had to stoop to see the trail now, and he climbed
more and more slowly and guardedly. He was nearing the real
timberline. The trees became smaller and smaller around him. He
couldn’t really see them, but he knew what they looked like, low
and flat and one-sided, with loose fibered, twisted trunks, like
sagebrush, the tough misshapen little dwarfs of height and cold and
wind and rocky footholds. The darkness seemed to be holding oil to be
giving him a little more time up in the open among them, but the wind
was constant and icy, and the snow it carried pelted him like fine
shot.

At last he came up onto the dark rock ledges of the
crest. The wind was so strong he had to stoop against it, and
sometimes hold onto the rock to steady himself. It blew the snow at
him like weapons, in long spear lines out of the dark northwest. He
couldn’t see the tracks at all now, but only make out the long,
blackish shape of the wind-swept rock m the snow. This was where he
had to quit. The long rock would have to do as a starting point in
the morning.

Standing still for a moment to think about that, he
felt the sweat in the hollows of his knees and running slowly from
his arm pits down along his ribs, although his face and his trigger
hand were numb. Also he realized for the first time how tightly he
was holding the carbine, and the tiny, glancing tricks of their own
his tired eyes were playing on him.

When his breath was evener, he moved slowly along the
edge of the dark rock, feeling with his bare hand for the tracks his
eyes kept making in the snow when they weren’t really there.
Sometimes he got down on his hands and knees and put his face close
to the snow because he couldn’t trust the numb hand either. He was
luckier on this rock, though. He’d started south along the edge,
because he couldn’t see at all going north, with the blizzard in
his face, and the cat must have made its choice the same way. He
found the tracks going off the south point of the rock. He made sure
of them, taking off his left mitten and trying them with the
fingertips of his warmer hand. There was no question about them.
Through the thin sifting of new snow, he could feel the little
pattern of hollows and ridges made by the pads.

You weren’t far ahead, you cocky bastard, he
thought, to leave them that fresh. And sure you’d done it, too,
just walking off, like taking a Sunday stroll

He stood up and put on his mittens, both of them now,
and leaning over, bracing his back against the wind, peered south
down the funnel of the streaming darkness. He could see nothing but
the ghostly, slanting spears of the snow.

"We’re not done yet, you murdering bastard,"
he said aloud, addressing the enviable panther his mind made, which
was curled up, its nose buried in its own warmth, in some sheltered
crevice not very far south.

He went slowly back down among the tough little
trees. He fell several times, because it was impossible to judge the
pitch and because of his trembling knees. When the trees were bigger
and closer together, and the wind was more a roaring overhead than a
power, he hunted, almost by touch, and with the dogged
overcarefulness of exhaustion, for just the kind of tree he wanted.
He hunted all in one direction, south, and he counted his steps. He
had taken forty-eight deep, dragging steps which he hoped would still
show in the morning, when he found the tree. It was a fir tree, tall
and thick for that altitude, and it stood flat sided against a low
cliff. The snow had drifted deeply below the rock, burying the tree
far up. It had drifted into a firm wall too, where the wind had
sucked down around the rock, a curved wall with the tree inside it.