Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (51 page)

Say I can see seventy-five yards, he thought. I’d
guess it’s more than that, but say seventy-five to stay on the safe
side. It would take, say, five seconds for him to cover that much in
this snow. It takes me, say, he thought, counting the steps he took
and judging their rate, five seconds to take five steps. I’m giving
myself margin on both those counts too.

"Take a look around you every five steps,"
he concluded aloud, "and he can’t catch you napping."

The counting will keep you awake, too, he thought. He
began to count the slow, outswinging shuffles of the bear-paws, and
to look upslope and behind him after every fifth step. He had only
done this four times, however, when it occurred to him that each time
he looked around that way, he left a blind spot behind the other
shoulder. He began trying to look each way each time, and found that
it broke his gait badly, practically stopped him, in fact. It was a
process more tiring and more irritating than he could afford. His
body warned him that it must work smoothly and steadily if it were to
finish this job at all. He settled for looking over his left shoulder
after the first five steps of every ten he counted, and over his
right shoulder after the second five. It wasn’t much help, he had
to turn so far to see out of the hood. He tried it with the hood back
a couple of times, but the snow on his uncovered face blinded him
more than the easier turning helped. Finally it occurred to him that
there was practically no
chance of an attack from
below anyway, because the snow was too deep under the ledges and the
slope so steep he didn’t think the cat would try it. After that he
looked only over his left shoulder, and only every ten steps, and
just once in a guessed-at while, about every hundred yards, he
thought, stopped and looked carefully all around.

The step counting gradually became as dreamy as the
repeated directions had been.  Sometimes he counted to fifteen
or twenty before he realized that he hadn’t looked over his
shoulder. Twice he forced himself back into the pattern of
count-and-look and kept it up for a while, but each time it finally
got away from him again. When he brought himself back the third time,
it came to his mind that with no sun, and nothing but a guess to go
on as to what time he’d left the canyon, the only way he could
estimate his half day north was by steps too.

"Two feet to a step," he said aloud, and
stopped and looked back at his tracks. "Less," he said. He
moved forward again.

"Say three thousand steps to the mile, and say
fifteen miles before I turn down. That’s forty-five thousand steps.
Make it forty thousand from now, for an even figure. I’ve done
anyway a mile already."

He began to count his steps. He had counted, with a
happy sense of progress, to three thousand and nineteen, before he
was touched by panic because he had forgotten to look around at all.

"Geez," he said sharply, "wake up,"
and stopped, and turned completely around once, peering attentively
into the falling snow. There was still nothing else moving, and he
relaxed again. Then he believed that he’d been able to see farther
than when he’d last looked around. He peered part way around again,
and became sure of the improvement. Yessir, he thought exultantly,
yessir, it’s thinning out. He began his rhythmical advance again,
privately enjoying, down out of hearing of the jealous god, his
certainty that the snow was thinning out. He had been moving for some
time before he remembered that he should have been counting. Then he
discovered that he couldn’t remember where he had dropped the
count. He was flooded by angry despair.

"Oh, God damn this snow," he cried aloud.

The monitor pointed out at once that this burst of
temper was extremely foolish.
 
It
could’ve heard you a mile, it declared severely, and then added
that the emotion had also cost him good strength. He could feel how
it had cost him strength. His knees were even jumping a little.

"Take it easy, boy," he said aloud, but
quietly, and shook his head at himself.

He moved forward again, saying, "Call it another
mile; that’s close enough," and resumed his counting. From
then on, he looked around only when the monitor spoke. His progress
became almost entirely the rhythmical shuffle and count. Yet, for
some reason, an independent
uneasiness began to
develop in him. It increased until he had to pay attention to it, and
had trouble keeping his mind on the count. Still he couldn’t
discover the cause of the uneasiness, and finally he tried to dismiss
it.

"Now you’ve started fussing about nothing at
all," he said loudly and scornfully. "Take it easy, will
you?"

The uneasiness, however, refused to be dismissed by
any such casual wave of the mind. It continued to nag at him
increasingly as he shuffled and counted his way along.

The moment came, some ten thousand steps later, when
the uneasiness gained his complete attention, and in a manner against
which he could mount no defense. It came to his eyes first, and then
quickly to his mind, that there was a faint color in the light upon
the fallen snow ahead of him. At first he thought exultantly, right
in with his count, Breaking up sure, but in almost the same moment he
understood that there was something wrong about the light, and the
uneasiness rose swiftly from the dark animal region in which he had
imprisoned it, and moved about swiftly in his middle and in his mind.
He dropped his counting and came to a halt on the webs.

The trouble was that the light was coming down from
the ridge.

He looked up, and could see the sun up there on his
left. It was only a small, silver disc, with a wide, confused aura of
pale light about it. The high fogs of the snow blew half-formed
across it, and the closer flakes swarmed blackly before it, but it
was nevertheless, and beyond any question, the sun. Even then he
didn’t at once perceive what was wrong, but only knew that for some
reason or other, the sight of the sun up there above the ridge was
terrifying. It required what seemed like a long time of just standing
there staring at the pale, emerging sun, for his mind to gather its
forces and construct an explanation.

It turned out to be very simple, really. The sun just
shouldn’t be up there, that was all; the sun just shouldn’t be up
there on his left. There were only two possible explanations for a
sun up there on his left. Either he had slept all morning in the
cave, and it was afternoon now, and time running out on him fast, or
he wasn’t going north at all; he was going south.

The whole of the orderly schedule by which he had
steadied himself fell apart. He was unable to move in any direction
because of the terrible doubts which arose to confront him whichever
way he turned in his mind. He stared about him through the thinning
snowfall. He could see much farther now. He could see that it was
timber below him, all right; in fact he could see far down the slope
of brightening, motionless spires. And he could make out distinctly
the skyline of the ridge above him. This didn’t help, though; the
place was entirely strange, and it might have been on either side of
the ridge, all depending on which way he was facing, and whether it
was morning or afternoon now. He was disastrously weakened by his
inability to answer either of these large, simple questions,
questions which just didn’t come up for a man, any more than he’d
have to stop and think which hand was his right hand. Is it morning
or afternoon? Am I facing north or south? Who’d ever think of
arguing such things? He wished to burst into tears where he stood. He
endured the first movement of that
helplessness
which at last leads men in a blizzard to lie down and go to sleep
where they are, rather than to keep struggling on, perhaps in
circles, and perhaps in exactly the wrong  direction.

He protested against this desire to surrender. "Use
your head, boy; use your head," he said aloud.

His voice was hasty and worried, but, even so, the
sound of it in that pale, silent wildemess helped. The despair
receded a little. It occurred to him that he really had only one
answer to find; the answer to either of those big, simple questions
would be the answer to both. Then he saw that he couldn’t guess
which side of the ridge he was on, or which way he was headed, unless
he knew whether that was a morning or an afternoon sun. That was the
question then: What time is it?

The sun was nearly above the ridge. Say, roughly,
then, very roughly, he thought, with another seizure of panic, about
the same length of time one side or the other of noon.  Say ten
or eleven in the morning, or one or two in the afternoon.

"Two or three hours difference," he said
aloud. "Not more than four, anyway."

He remembered how he had lain so carefully silent for
so long in the little cave, waiting to be sure he saw daylight in the
cracks of the wall before he broke out. It must have been early,
then. His calculations of times and distances, his little, repeated
plan of retreat, were no longer worth considering. There was not,
there never had been, he felt now, a trustworthy figure or direction
in the lot. There had been too many lapses and too many blind spots,
and at least one enormous, tragic error which was enough all by
itself to render the rest of his laborious thinking useless. But
loosely, in a big general way that he could depend on even now, it
had been early when he broke out of the cave. Even with the darkness
of snow, it couldn’t have been much after six o’clock at the
latest. And little as he could now trust all that counting of steps,
even allowing for the fact that he hadn’t begun to count until he
was out of the pass, he couldn’t have been moving the seven hours
it would take to make it one o’clock. He’d have come at least
twenty or twenty-five miles in seven hours, and he certainly hadn’t
come that far.

"It’s morning," he declared, challenging
the sun. "It’s still morning. It’s gotta be morning, goddam
you."

The monitor at once added the awful corollary. You’ve
been heading south all morning, then. The morning’s nearly gone,
and you’ve got all that to make up. You’ve already used up your
half a day, and you’ll need another half just to get back to where
you started from.

The compass of his body was spinning wildly by now,
but the compass of his mind, as if locked where it was, still
insisted that north was ahead of him.

"How the hell could I be?" he asked aloud.

Once he dragged his attention from the whirling
needle, it became evident that there was only one possible answer to
that question too. He hadn’t got turned south, in the dark, among
the spook trees in the pass, he’d got turned north. He believed he
knew now just how it had happened too. He’d kept feeling he’d be
turned south by the wind, when he wanted to get under the north wall,
and he’d been stubbornly working against that happening all the
time. So the cave had been in the north wall after all, not in the
south, and that meant he’d come out of the west end of the pass,
not the east. So he’d been going south on the west side of the
range all this time. It was that simple. One mistake, and everything
he’d done for hours had been exactly wrong. Still he couldn’t
bring himself to believe it. He’d seen the cat moving, small as a
fly, across the south wall at a time when there wasn’t a chance
that he’d mixed his directions yet, and with all the power of the
night behind him, he remained convinced it had been the south wall
he’d seen looming before him when the snow drapes parted in the
dark.

"Only it couldn’t of been," he
complained. "By God, you ain’t seen nothing for sure," he
wailed. The monitor promptly called his attention again to the bodily
weakness which accompanied such despair, and spoke sternly against
it.

"You gotta do something, and you gotta do it
now," he declared. "You can’t just stand here and let
time run out on you. You can’t last another night and have anything
left to go on. Your damn knees are caving in now."

At the thought of a third night in the mountains, he
thought also of the oilskin packet of food, and was invaded by
another doubt which brought panic with it. He felt in his left
pocket. It was empty. He hurriedly shifted the carbine to his left
harm and pulled off his right mitten and felt in the right pocket.
The knife was there, though without its sheath, which produced
another but very minor shock, and the extra cartridges were there
under it, and the match container, but there was no food packet. He
remembered, then, quite distinctly, stuffing the food packet up into
the niche he’d taken the Indian and the panther out of to burn
them. To save him, he couldn’t remember having taken it down again.
No, and he hadn’t eaten this morning either. That was part of what
ailed him right now, of course, this fuzzy thinking and easy scaring.
And the packet was still back there in that niche in the cave.

"Oh, Jesus," he cried, despairing as much
because he’d forgotten the packet as because he didn’t have it.
The fact that the food packet was still back there in the cave,
however, made a decision possible despite the conflict of the
compasses.

"Gotta have food," he declared. "Damn
little chance I’ll make it home tonight, with all that time down
the flume. I gotta have something to eat."

It occurred to him that he might even have to spend
another night in the same cave. The idea was repulsive beyond all
reason, yet the cave remained, dark, narrow and haunted though it
was, "Like layin’ myself in my own coffin," he lamented,
the only refuge his memory could produce out of the whole two days of
white emptiness that alternately stretched and shrank like a
concertina.