Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (55 page)

"Not even keepin’ a light," he said
tearfully.

He imagined himself found dead right where he was on
the ridge. He saw himself lying half drifted over with blown snow
which wouldn’t melt against his face or upon his long-closed eyes.
He imagined in particular, so that the other members of the searching
expedition became only her accompanying shadows, Gwen in her blue
cloak with the red lining, being suddenly overcome with remorse
because she had been so unkind to him while he was alive and casting
herself upon him in the snow, weeping and calling his name over and
over in a choked voice, like the heroines of the plays he had seen in
Piper’s Opera House in San Francisco.

In the midst of this satisfying vision, he was seized
by a chill that shook his whole body. When it had passed he was once
more possessed by the fear that had come with him up the mountain.

“
And don’t think you won’t be," he said,
"if you just start dreamin’ now."

His powers, so convincingly restored for a time as he
held himself against the cold, were used up again by this little orgy
of emotion after the long, attentive climb. The brief rift in his
darkness was clouded over, and once he had moved north along the
ridge a way and selected himself a downward course, the last guards
of his will dozed off and the citadel of his mind was freely
ransacked by the multitude of fears, doubts and credulities he had
held so long at bay.

He was well down among the trees, descending slowly,
almost limply, and whimpering a little every now and then at the
weakness in his knees, when suddenly he knew that the panther was
traveling beside him again and closer to him than it had dared to
come at any time before. He caught his breath in the midst of a
whimper, shocked at the plaintive, tell-tale sound he was making. His
brief drama of defiance and disappointment on the ridge came back to
him now as if enacted by another, and that other a suicidal madman,
beyond self-control and lacking the last vestige of a sense of
reality. The cat had been up there watching him all the time, waiting
only for a better chance to pick him off, and he had revealed to it
every secret of his weakness. Now, contemptuous and confident, it was
going down with him, taking its time, perhaps even enjoying the
delay, since he had entered timber again and so afforded it an
endless choice of opportunities. What’s more, it was on his right
now. All this time, blindly, stupidly, weakly, he had been coming
down under the impression that it was on his left, when it had been
on his right. Only its desire to play him could explain the fact that
it had not jumped him long since.

For a time he managed to hold himself to descending
the ridge as he had climbed it, a few steps at a time and then a long
enough to search the darkness and the snow glimmer and to select the
clearest avenue for his next retreat.

"Take it easy," he advised himself.
"There’s nothing’ll start a cat as quick as running."

Gradually, however, he began to increase his pace and
shorten the intervals of watching. Then the guarded retreat became to
him a flight and he gave way increasingly to the blind desire to run.
At last he actually broke into a lumbering, sliding trot, and almost
at once he stumbled and pitched headlong down the slope into a loose
drift. In the moment he swam there helpless, struggling to get the
bear-paws under him, the last thin rind around the fears within him
split open and he was flooded by panic. Diving forward, uttering a
series of small, crying, animal sounds which he did not hear himself,
he managed to break out of the drift on the lower side and gain
enough balance to carry him, and went on down the slope plunging and
stumbling.

When he fell again, this time to the side and into
the sharp, springy boughs of a fir tree, he distinctly saw the cat
leap from its cover on the slope above. He wrenched over among the
boughs and brought the carbine up and fired. The flash and the report
stunned him and he realized, without caring in the least, that his
boldest declaration on the ridge must after all have been little more
than a murmur. The first echoes of the shot came from nearby and were
short and close together and muffled by snow. They made a new thing,
a near, attentive thing, out of the silence which came back almost at
once behind them. The cat had vanished when the shadow of smoke
allowed him to see the snow again. Then, from somewhere far below,
like the booming of someone else’s shot, came a delayed echo, deep,
softly thunderous and prolonged.

The brilliance of the carbine’s flash, which for a
tiny part of an instant had let him see quite clearly the bough above
the muzzle and a little area of the snow beneath it, told him at once
what he needed.

Light, he thought. Jesus, if I only had a light. A
fire; I gotta make me a fire.

He worked himself free of the hampering fir and lay
at the edge of its snow basin, holding the carbine ready and
searching the forest around him with his eyes and ears. It didn’t
occur to him until he had risen and climbed out of the basin and
started cautiously down again that he had been lying there all that
time with an unloaded gun.

"Oh, Kee-rist, wake up, wake up," he
whispered violently.

He stood still with one foot braced against a drift,
looking around him more than he worked, and sprung a new cartridge
into the breech and replaced the used one in the chamber. Then he
started down again. Twice more he believed he saw the great cat move
among the trees quite near him, and raised the carbine at it, but
then had no target. Before long he was plunging recklessly again. He
fell several times and swam and scrambled back onto the webs and
lurched. on down. He glanced back often, but moving as he was, and
among the ever-closing trees, he couldn’t be sure of anything he
saw. When he wasn’t looking back, however, his mind showed him the
cat clearly, a huge, elongated beast with yellow eyes that burned and
flickered, slipping down from tree to tree behind his right shoulder.
It glided with that unnatural ease across the surface of the snow,
scarcely sinking into it at all, and every motion of its effortless
pursuit mocked his heavy, staggering descent and filled him with
despair. The chase seemed to him to be going on forever and to be
prolonged only because the panther didn’t choose to end it.

When the trees opened about a small clearing below
him, and he could see that the clearing continued far below and even
grew wider, he made a decision at once, not by reason or by choice,
but only because he could no longer bear to play mouse. He plowed as
fast as he could into the clearing and across to the trees on the
north side. From there he looked back, but there was nothing moving
on the glimmer of the open snow, or in the lane above it from which
he had just emerged, and he felt that he had achieved an important
tactical success, a success which might even justify hopes of a final
escape. His movements at once became more restrained and purposeful.
Still holding the carbine across his arm, he drew the skinning knife
out of the pocket of the parka and then out of its sheath, and
slipped the sheath back into the pocket. After a last crafty survey
of the dark row of trees on the other side of the clearing, he slowly
stood the carbine into the snow and moved in against the nearest fir,
pressing his way into the boughs until he could get hold of them
where they joined the trunk. Still watching the clearing over his
shoulder, he laid hold of one bough and began to hack at the base of
it with the knife. After four cuts it came loose in his mittened hand
and he tossed it out onto the snow beside the carbine and leaned in
again and began to cut another.

As the boughs piled up out on the snow, he cut in
increasing fury and haste and kept his watch less carefully. His
breath began to catch in his chest and break up into his throat in
little sobs. By the time he had cut a dozen boughs, he was no longer
watching the clearing at all. He felt a brief and particular triumph
each time a bough came loose in the mittened hand and could be tossed
out onto the growing pile. Stubborn boughs he abandoned in a rage
that lasted no longer than the triumphs.

It was when he turned to move on to the next tree
that he caught a glimpse of the shadowy gliding again. It wasn’t on
the south side of the clearing at all now, but on the upper edge and
moving north. It had just crossed the snow lane by which he himself
had entered the clearing. He was shocked because he had believed all
this time that the cat was just waiting over on the other side,
watching him curiously and giving him precious time because it hadn’t
yet guessed what he was up to. Now he realized that once more, and,
again nearly fatally, he had underestimated his enemy. He didn’t
even toss out the last bough he had cut, but stood there, crouching a
little, with the rough stem still clasped in his mitten and the knife
in his numb, bare hand and stared up across the pale open until he
was convinced that the sly motion along its edge was nearly
continuous.

Yessir, he thought, with foreboding and
self-condemnation, it’s circling. It’s working around here to
where I’m cutting ’em. Geez, he thought with an instant’s
wildness, a minute more, just one minute more, and he’d of had me.

"Take it easy, will you?" he said aloud.

Watching the upper edge all the time, he crept out to
the pile of boughs and dropped the last bough onto it and drew the
carbine up out of the snow. He felt much better then. The margin of
white clearing all around him, which a moment before had appeared so
uselessly narrow, became a nearly adequate defense. He could no
longer see the movement along the edge of the clearing either, and he
understood that the cat had again settled down to watch him and to
wait for another lapse, whether into dreaminess or into blind
activity.

"Not this time, you murderin’ black bastard,"
he said softly through his teeth. "No sleep-walkers this time,
by God."

He had been warmed by the furious cutting, and now he
was encouraged by his defiance as well, and by the way his luck was
holding up, even against such gross errors of inattention or bravado
as some of his had been. He kept the watch for several minutes, but
he really understood that the cat wouldn’t attack while he was
waiting for it. There was to be no short and easy ending to this
game, unless he himself was the victim.

It knows, he thought. It knows, the ugly black
bastard. Not a wiggle out of it when I got the gun.

Finally he slowly eased the carbine, stock down, into
the snow again, so that its disappearance from his hands was
concealed against his body, and squatted and began to cut small twigs
from the boughs onto the snow. Every few seconds he would hold the
knife still and study the edge of the woods up there. When he had a
little pyramid of twigs on the snow before him, he slowly got out the
match container, and after the longest pause he had yet made, quickly
drew the carbine up out of the snow, rested it across his trembling
knees with the muzzle toward the upper end of the clearing, brushed
the snow from the scarred butt-plate and scratched a match quickly
down the curve of it. The little flame made an astounding, blinding
light. It required all his courage and hope to keep him from shaking
it out at once. He thrust it in under the twigs, and, with its light
that much dimmed, peered anxiously across
it at
the edge of the clearing again.

The flame didn’t catch in the twigs. It broke and
sputtered among them, and crept back along the match itself, 
and winked out, letting back the safer darkness that gradually became
the glimmer of the clearing under the frosty stars.

In exactly the same manner he lit and applied seven
matches, though he was beginning to sweat with anxiety by the time he
struck the seventh. None of them produced anything more than a brief
sputtering and tiny flash-flames among the needles. He felt with a
stiff finger in the tube of the container. There were not more than
four or five matches left. It was then, while he was trying to think,
despite his tremulous vexation, what to do to make the next match
work, that he saw the shadow stir again. It was way around on the
north side of the clearing now, nearly down to where he’d cut the
boughs. He was terrified because it had got so far around without his
once seeing it move. It was impossible to escape the conclusion that
he no longer even knew when his attention was failing.

He slowly laid the match container down against the
pyramid of twigs and even more slowly raised the carbine to ready.
There was no visible target, but he carefully led the tree into which
the last movement had merged, and lowered his right knee onto the
bear-paw so that his left knee came up to support his left elbow, and
waited. Nothing moved. The clearing and the edge of the clearing were
so motionless and silent that at last the twinkling of the stars
became a distracting movement and a hint of sound. He lowered the
carbine and let it rest across his lifted knee.

After that, however, he worked hastily. Snatching off
his left mitten, he turned up the long skirt of the parka and began
to rip at the quilted lining with his knife. When he had slit it
several times, he tore out the rags of the cloth and made a loose
ball of them and poked the ball in under the pile of twigs. He lit
another match on the butt-plate of the carbine and held it in
carefully cupped hands down against the bits of red cloth. At first
they took only minutely, like tiny sparks in the end of a dry wick,
and he pressed the flame in more deeply under them. A threadlike
crescent of sparks began to eat into one strip of the cloth. After a
quick glance at the north edge of the clearing, he bent over and blew
gently upon the smoldering crescent. A portion of it instantly winked
out into blackness. The other side glowed intensely for a moment and
then burst into a small and sooty flame.