Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (54 page)

After a very few minutes he was desperately
half-running again, each lift of a web throwing behind him a short
snow plume like the long ones that reached south from the peaks. He
kept no watch at all around him. He didn’t even look west again,
but only marked his steps with the short bleatings of his breath, and
turned all himself to the one business of getting north as fast as he
could.

So he was again surprised, this time by the sudden
fading of the light. He turned his body to look west, like a man
startled awake, and saw the sun more than half sunk in the city of
clouds. Great spokes of light and shadow went up from the domes and
towers and banners of the city, and reached high over him into the
east, and the domes and towers and banners themselves shone along
their upper edges as from a golden fire behind them. Everywhere over
the sea of mountains, snow fields that only an instant before, it
seemed to him, had been glowing, were now in blue shadow. Mountains
lay under the shadows of the mountains west of them, and only on the
highest peaks were there a few small, darkening remnants of the glow.
Those last peaks stood out clearly, like small islands far apart on
the darkened billows of the ranges. Even the ridge he was on had sunk
into the shadow, so that only his head and shoulders were in the
light. He looked the other way quickly, hunting for that place in the
northeast corner where the pass went out of Aspen Creek. He could see
over the lower range now, but everything out there in the northeast,
except one very distant, lighted rim, which could have been either
clouds or snowy mountains too far away to matter, was already shadowy
and indistinct. Queerly, since it had been tormenting him for hours,
he was most disturbed because the wind had fallen away with the
light. The quiet about him seemed as ominous as the awful distances
and the slowly rising darkness.

The careful planning of the cave came back to him a
last time. "Half a day north," he said aloud, and then
quickly, with something near a waking of his mind after the waking of
his body, "Half a day or no, , boy, you gotta get down offa here
while you can still see.”

He glanced at the nearest of the big peaks north of
him and not too far west, and believed it
was the
Pinto, but didn’t give it very much thought, for he had started
down already, and he saw now what must have been true for some time,
for hours perhaps, that there was no longer a jumble of unknown hills
below him, but a single, long, snow-floored valley between two
ridges. Despite fear and weariness, his hopes rose again.

"Not too far off at that, boy," he told
himself softly and quickly. "Not too far off, at that."

28

He went down as quickly as he could, but it wasn’t
easy going. The snow grew deeper all the way, so that even on the
webs he began to sink and flounder, and the downhill stepping made
his legs shake badly and give at the knees. When he came among the
bigger trees, where the wind had piled up steep, curving drifts, he
stumbled constantly, and fell a good many times. Each time he fell,
he was a little slower getting the webs back under him and rising out
of the foam-light snow, and each time he rose he swore to be more
careful, to go slowly and save himself this costly and exasperating
effort, but he c0uldn’t. It was much darker in the hollow than it
had been on the ridge, and his eyes, untrustworthy from hunger and
bad sleep and the long brilliance of the heights, often blended the
drifts into a smooth slope going down before him. Even worse, he
couldn’t seem to keep it in his mind for more than a minute or two
at a time that he would do better to go slowly. He couldn’t seem to
keep anything in his mind for more than a minute or two at a time,
except his fear of the closing darkness, and that was constantly
urging him to go faster and faster. His breath no longer labored and
bleated as it had when he was running on the ridge, but he began to
make small, uncontrollable moaning sounds, like the beginning of
helpless weeping, each time he fell and while he was struggling to
get up again.

It was almost dark when he finally came out of the
edge of timber onto the open meadow. The going was easier there, for
the wind had swept the length of the valley, smoothing it and packing
the snow a little, so that he didn’t sink into it so far or have so
much to lift on the webs. but now he was plagued by imaginary drifts,
which kept him testing the white glimmer before him, and also he was
delayed by the need to stop often and peer around him.

All day the black panther had remained far off and
scarcely more real than the creature of last night’s bad dream. For
half an hour at a time he’d forgotten it entirely. Now, with the
approach of night, it was back again. Several times he believed he
saw it moving silently and with disturbing ease and speed among the
black pyramids of trees the wind had cleared of snow. It was going
around the north end of the meadow, gliding from tree to tree and
keeping always opposite him or even a little ahead of him, despite
the much greater distance it had to go. He could never quite catch
sight of it when he looked directly at a place where it had moved,
but always saw it out of the corner of his eye and just as it was
completing its swift passage between trees, and merging with some
black fir or cedar.

"You’re seein’ things; you’re just seein’
things, like those damn bats," he told himself, but knew that he
couldn’t afford to believe what he said.

"Just keep your eyes peeled," he said
later. "It can’t get at you across all that snow, if you just
keep your eyes peeled."

Four times on the way across the meadow, he turned
when one of the shadowy flittings occurred, and raised the carbine to
cover the next open space the cat would have to cross. It never moved
out in front of the carbine though, and after the fourth attempt, a
movement several trees ahead of where he was aiming told him that the
cat had even made use of his halts to gain on him. It would be
waiting for him among the trees on the other side, where there was no
such guardian expanse of snow. He told himself that he hadn’t seen
the cat to be sure of, since the first day, when he’d missed it
twice across the ravine in the lower range, and that he hadn’t even
seen a sign of the cat since he’d found those few dark hairs in the
shallow cave on the ridge. When the fearful mentor spoke of the tiny
crawling against the wind across the white wall of the pass, he
replied aloud and scornfully, "Yeah, and I saw a million bats in
broad daylight too," but the retort was hollow. Too much of him
refused to be convinced. The mentor continued to insist that the cat,
or at least something he couldn’t afford to ignore, was already
around in the trees on the other side and waiting for him. lt was
waiting in that thick cluster, like a black patch on a black and
white pinto, a little way up the slope and just to the left of where
his course would take him if he held to it.

When he finally came among the trees, therefore, he
in creased his precautions. He took off his right mitten and stuffed
it into his pocket and held the carbine ready all the time, with his
foreinger touching the trigger. He watched intently each tree that he
approached, particularly any tree above him and to his left, and in
every space that was open enough he stopped and looked quickly around
him. He was having no trouble going slowly now. Darkness was as good
as on him already, and time and distance and even the night cold were
nothing compared to the necessity of never, in the least or for even
the fraction of a moment, relaxing his guard. One such lapse, however
brief, was all the cat was waiting for. It wouldn’t do to fall,
either. That airy snow would render him completely helpless. So he
made his way up among the trees, stopping every few steps to peer and
listen, and testing the treacherous snow before each step, though
never looking down at it, but only trying it with a bear-paw, feeling
his way around or up over one drift after another.

By the time he was half way up the ridge the stars
were out. Rocks and the spires of the fir trees broke the
constellations with small towers of darkness above him. It was
impossible to guess an irregularity or judge a distance up the
glimmering slope. Sometimes the snow stood like a wall before him,
and then all at once it would lie down and become a plain of infinite
extent.

The cat was in no hurry. It simply matched its pace
and watchfulness to his and went up stealthily, always just out of
sight and hearing and always to his left and a little above him. He
went more and more slowly, and spent longer and longer in each of his
watchful pauses, but he never saw anything but the last, illusive
flicker of a movement, and he never heard anything but his own
strained breathing. Before he finished the climb, nonetheless, he was
crouching every time he stopped, almost sitting on his heels, with
the carbine held ready across his knee, while he studied each tree to
the left of his course and stopped his breathing in order to be able
to hear any sound, however small and whispery, in the now perfectly
silent and motionless air. The most important single fact in the
world was again the fact that cats could see in the dark. He resented
bitterly the fact that cats could see in the dark. It seemed to him
that the malicious and chancy god of things had enabled cats to see
in the dark for the
sole purpose of rendering
this already unequal hunt even more unequal. Often, as he crouched,
he felt very sorry for himself, and wondered at the enormous
indifference of a universe which could permit a tragedy of these
proportions to be enacted before no audience but trees and stars.

When at last he came up into the open on the long,
firmer drifts of the ridge, almost solid under the webs, he came up
stooping, in order not to make a shadow in the patterns of the stars
himself, and crouched once more under the overhanging eave of a
summit ledge. He crouched there for a long time, watching the ridge
both ways, though mostly north, but couldn’t be sure that he saw
anything moving on it. He couldn’t be absolutely sure that he
didn’t, though. Half a dozen times he thought he detected a faint,
shadowy passage over the star glimmer, but always, as on the meadow
below, it began just in the extreme corner of his vision much farther
up the ridge than he’d expected, and each time he looked directly
at it, blinking his eyes quickly to cure them of the spooks that came
from staring, he could make out nothing certain.

There was no doubt about one thing, though. It was
bitterly cold now, a still, eating-in kind of cold that was two or
three months ahead of itself. The cold worked into him even through
the parka and the heavy underclothes. He was shaking all over and had
to clench his jaws to keep his teeth from chattering, and his
moustache was growing heavy and crusty as the steam of his breathing
froze in it. At the same time, the tightening of his muscles against
the cold gave him a new, false strength and cleared his mind a
little.

"Hell," he said finally, through this star
rift in his dark belief, "no painter’d hang around this long,
not even a black one."

A moment later he said, even more loudly, "Black,
hell. A few black hairs on his back, maybe."

He forced himself to stand upright. "You’re
seein’ things this time for sure," he remarked scornfully.
"And who the hell’s gonna hear me?" he asked that greater
part of him which was outraged by his loud voice in the open silence
of the ridge and by the foolishness of exposing himself, and wished
to crouch again immediately and resume the vigil.

"If I can spot a light now, I’m as good as
in," he declared.

He went around the sheltering drift and climbed up
and stood boldly against the stars on the very top of the ridge, and
looked down to the east. There were only the terraces of shadow trees
going down the snow out of sight. He was seized by a momentary fear
that he had got his directions mixed after all. He looked up into
what he believed to be the north. He was very little off. He had only
to search the sky a trifle to the left of where he first looked and
there he found the Dipper, wheeling slowly upon its invisible tether,
and out the line of its pointing lip, the tiny, reassuring pole star.

"It’s too close under the mountain still,"
he explained to himself, looking down again and north and south for
the light he eouldn’t find. Everything down there was as if no man
had
ever been in it; as if it had been covered
with snow and lit only by stars since the beginning of time.

"Geez, you’d think they’d have a signal out,
or somebody lookin’ for me, by this time," he complained.

It occurred to him that on the contrary it might have
been too long, that they might have given him up, and he was
embittered by the notion, as if help had been about to reach him and
then had been suddenly, perhaps even deliberately, withdrawn. For a
moment, as he had approached the crest, expecting to see the light
below him and not far to the north, he had been nearly home. Now he
felt as far away as he had been that morning, or farther. The
hollowness caused by his hunger was enlarged by a hollowness of
another kind, and despite the clenching of his jaws his teeth began
to chatter audibly.

"Well, there’s no use my freezin’ to death
while I think about it, even if they have given me up," he said.

The boastful ease of his words was not present in his
voice. Tears of self-pity stung his eyelids. Here he was, three days
out and alone and still lost, and all his family, and that little
Welshy in her yellow blouse too, fed and warm and careless in their
well-lighted room, were as indifferent to his plight as the god of
stars and snow and cats that could see in the dark. He wished to die
to avenge himself upon them.