Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (63 page)

One of us got him, he thought, while he raised the
carbine again, leading the bounding shadow to an opening in the
small, dancing leaves. It came there, black between the gold and
against the white, and he fired again, and again heard the sudden
scream through ghosts of the report.

Hit that time, by God, he thought exultantly. He
shuffled at a half-run, dragging and teetering down across the
snow-bank, treacherous with broken rock beneath, toward the little
yellow trees. He struggled to pump the carbine again as he went. The
echoes died, and there was no sound from the lower canyon. Harold
reached the creek, where he could cross, and saw Joe Sam coming down
very slowly on the other side, carrying the Sharps idly in his right
hand and looking intently into the aspens below him. The old man’s
sombrero was pushed half off his head and he was covered with light,
clinging snow.

"You all right?" Harold called, alarmed by
the old man’s slowness and the proof he had fallen.

Joe Sam looked up at him and grinned. "Good,"
he said, clearly enough, but with the effect, after Harold’s voice,
of advising quiet. Still grinning, he shook his head and made a quick
motion along his side to show how fast and how closely the cat had
passed him. Then he pointed down into the little dancing trees.

Harold realized the old man must have seen the whole
flight from his side.

"He’s down there?" he asked.

Joe Sam nodded, "Much shoot," he said,
grinning, Harold took his time then, and stood at the edge of the
creek and reloaded the carbine. Joe Sam waited across from him,
ankle-deep in the drift, and watched him, and once or twice looked
down into the aspens again.

"You loaded, Joe Sam?"

Joe Sam shook his head, grinning. "He wait,”
he said. "You shoot."

"I’ll have to go down this side, so he won’t
get across. You better load up."

Joe Sam made the little shrug, but took another
cartridge from his pocket and reloaded the old Sharps.

Harold was going to warn him not to be so sure it was
all over, but checked himself, thinking, he knows what he sees. He
played this game before I was ever thought of.

"Well, let’s finish the poor devil off‘,"
he said and started down his side.

It was all over though. The big cat lay tangled in
the first willows, his head and shoulder raised against the red
stems, his legs reaching and his back arched downward, in the
caricature of a leap, but loose and motionless. The great, yellow
eyes glared balefully up through the willows at the rock fort on top
of the south wall. The mouth was a little open, the tongue hanging
down from it behind the fangs. The blood was still dripping from the
tongue into the red stain it had already made in the snow. High
behind the shoulder, the black pelt was wet too, and one place
farther down, on the ribs. Standing there, looking at it, Harold felt
compassion for the long, wicked beauty rendered motionless, and even
a little shame that it should have passed so hard.

Like Arthur, he thought, smiling to himself in his
mind. A big price for a few stupid steers. But there was Arthur too,
he told the dead cat silently. You had it coming, several times over.

The wind turned high on the wall of the canyon, and
reached down in gently, setting the aspen leaves shimmering and
talking around the two of them standing there, and stirring the soft,
cream-colored belly fur of the cat.

"A big one, sure enough," Harold said.

"Big," Joe Sam agreed solemnly. "Devil."

"The black painter?" Harold asked, looking
at him.

Joe Sam’s good eye studied him, guarding against
ridicule. It found no smile, and the little jest danced behind it
again.

"Not black painter," the old man said,
shaking his head vigorously. "Black painter," and he made a
wide gesture with his arm, which might have meant it was in the
mountains above, or that it was everywhere and not confined to one
place, but certainly meant that it was not to be talked over dead and
empty in a willow thicket. But while it was still thus formless as
air in Harold’s mind, Joe Sam gave it body again by kicking the
dead cat’s belly gently with the rim of one snowshoe.

"Not black painter," he said.

"No, that’s white enough," Harold agreed.
He kept watching the old Indian. He missed something he’d expected
in him, some triumph, some little inflation of success. But the old
man was solemn again after the small half joke of kicking the pale
belly. He was waiting for something, that was it. He didn’t act as
if the thing was finished. And whatever he was thinking, he didn’t
want to be the one to speak about it first.

I don’t know what he wants, Harold thought. Some
ceremony? he wondered, remembering the wooden cats Arthur had made.

To make a lead, he said, "It was a killer,
though, pretty near as good as your black one," and then thought
of the steer he’d seen on the rock. There hadn’t been time to
notice it then, but now, remembering the red and white bulge beside
the great head of the cat, he knew that it hadn’t been an old kill.
There hadn’t been any snow over it.

“
Kill all time," Joe Sam agreed.

"It had another steer up on the rock there. Five
this time."

Joe Sam didn’t say anything for a moment, and then,
still looking down at the dead lion, he said, "Not steer,
maybe."

"I saw it," Harold said.

"Not steer," Joe Sam said stubbornly, but
now with a rising inflection that put both the steer and the cat out
of Harold’s mind. He waited, watching Joe Sam’s face. Joe Sam
still didn’t want to say it, or at least he wanted a direct
question to make it easier for him. Harold just waited though, and
the wait became too long.

"Coat, maybe," he said.

After a moment Harold asked, "Arthur’s coat,
you mean?"

"Curt wear," Joe Sam said. “Arthur have
red coat."

"Sure. I know," Harold said quickly.
"Wel1," he began, but then asked, "You sure?"

"See good," Joe Sam said. "Coat."
He wouldn’t look up from the dead lion.

Harold took a deep breath, and it wasn’t steady.
"Well," he said again, "we’d better go back and see,
I guess."

Joe Sam nodded, and turned away from the cat, but
still without looking at Harold.

Harold worked out of the willows up onto the higher
south bank, with Joe Sam behind him, and climbed slowly toward the
shadowed head of the canyon again. When he came onto the platform,
with the tall, black walls over him, he paused to get himself ready.
Then he went on in, seeing but not noticing the deep trail the cat
had left. Even before he was close to the huddle of red and white
hide, he knew that Joe Sam was right, because he could see the
twisted legs reaching from it toward the falls.

And dead for sure, he thought, the unnatural position
of the legs hurting him, and a little darkness of guilt stirring in
him because he hadn’t come here at once, and just let the cat go,
after the first shot. The first shot got him, anyway, he thought, and
excused himself, but I didn’t know that, or what this was.

He came beside the body and stopped and stood looking
down at it. The head, and the hood of the coat with it, was buried in
the snow, but the bare trigger hand was half showing, blue and
clutching into the snow, and the body was humped up, shaped over the
rocks it had fallen on like a sack only loosely filled and tossed
down.

Seeing the torn shoulder of the coat, and the raking
scars in the leather farther down, Harold thought, By God, it was
that black devil again, and the small, quick anger relieved him a
little of the dread he felt about moving Curt.

His memory, though like someone else quietly and
unconcernedly setting him right, reminded him of Arthur’s torn
shirt and wounded shoulder, and he saw that Curt’s shirt, where it
showed in the rip in the coat, wasn’t torn.

Joe Sam came beside him, and because he didn’t want
to hesitate in the old man’s presence, he gathered himself toward
what he had to do, and then it was his own mind thinking, No cat ever
did that to him. Not like that.

He knelt and took a deep breath, and pulled at Curt’s
shoulder to turn him over. At first the body wouldn’t move at all,
but stuck closely to the rocks under it. Then it broke loose
abruptly, with a little tearing of the hairs of the parka, but moved
all in one piece, the legs with the shoulder, and wouldn’t turn
over against its reaching arm. Harold let it back down on its face
and stood up. His stomach knotted in him, and a fine sweat broke out
on his face. After a moment, making it a single convulsive act, he
stepped astride of the body and lifted it whole and turned it over.
Then he quickly straightened again and closed his eyes against what
the rocks had done to the face and tried to close his mind against
what his hands had felt through the parka. When he believed he
wouldn’t vomit after all, he lifted his right snowshoe back over
the body, taking great care not to touch it, and stood beside it.

"Not painter,” Joe Sam said.

"No."

"Him fall there," Joe Sam said, and pointed
up. Harold looked where he was pointing, and saw the snow eave of the
cliff broken, and then, when Joe Sam pointed there too, saw where the
chunks of ice had sunk into the drift like little meteors, and the
rain holes of pebbles and sand among them.

He nodded.

"Well," he said finally, "we can’t
take him home like that."

"Bury," Joe Sam said.

Harold shook his head. "We have to take him
home."

"Make fire," Joe Sam suggested. "Get
warm, Fix."

Slowly Harold understood, and nodded. "Down
below, I guess," he said. "There’s some old dry stuff in
the willows."

He took off his snowshoes and lashed them side by
side, overlapping a little, and together they lifted the body onto
this poor sled. Harold straightened and stood there thinking, and
finally understood what was wrong, and looked around the platform,
and even went back and hunted closer under the cliff and at the head
of the creek. He found nothing, and there were no other breaks in the
snow at the back. He turned to where Joe Sam was waiting beside the
hooded body on the webs, that lay with the one arm raised still in a
grotesque gesture of greeting.

"I can’t find the gun," he said. "He
had the other carbine, the Winchester. And no snowshoes either."

Joe Sam pointed up at the cliff again.

"Must be, I guess," Harold said. “Wel1,
we’ll take him down and get the fire started, and then I’ll go
take a look."

"Night. Make fall," Joe Sam said.

Harold nodded. "However he got there," he
said.

Joe Sam was careful with his voice, making it flat,
with no feeling at all, but the tiny, malicious light was there
behind the good eye again. "Him know," he said.

Harold looked at him, asking the question silently.

Joe Sam pointed to his head, and then shook it, and
then tapped himself on the chest, on the wrinkles of the too big
coat.

“
Know here," he said. “Not lose plenty
times. Come back."

Slowly he drew a circle in the air in front of him,
parallel with the snow.

"Maybe," Harold said, and thought, Maybe
you have that kind of a compass under the ribs, old man, and then
wasn’t sure that was what Joe Sam had meant, and looked at him
again, and saw the little dancing malice in the good eye.

Celebrating it, you little heathen, he thought
angrily, but the anger shrank quickly in the mind closed by handling
Curt and seeing his face, and he thought wearily, Well, why wou1dn’t
you?

"Lost in the snow, you mean?" he asked.

"Not snow," Joe Sam said. He pointed at the
parka, and Harold remembered there had been no snow on it.

Since the snow stopped, he thought. Since yesterday
afternoon.

"Night," Joe Sam said. "Dark. Run
away."

"Run away?"

"Lose gun," Joe Sam said. "No shoe."

Harold thought about it. "What would he be
running away from?"

Joe Sam raised his shoulders that inch which
unburdened them. "Not know," he said. "Not see."

Harold thought, seeing the lively eye watching him
out of the impassive face, You think you know, though.

"Well,” he said, "1et’s get him down
there, and get that fire started."

Between them, tugging carefully, Harold struggling in
the deep snow without his webs, they drew the body on the joined
snowshoes across the platform and down the rock fall and past the
brindled heifer on the edge, and then the two red steers among the
aspens and then the stretched cat in the willows, and on down to
where the horses waited in the sun.

There they gathered the long, bow-shaped dead wood
from among the large willows, the breaking of the dry sticks bringing
faint, crackling echoes from the rim-rock above them. It took them
more than an hour to gather enough. They made two fire piles, and
lifting the body from the snowshoes, laid it between them, with the
head up canyon. Already the sun had softened the stiff hide of the
parka, and Harold drew the hood over the head, and closed it over the
face. Joe Sam brought dry dead leaves from under the pack of past
autumns in the thickets and made kindling wads of them under each
heap of gray willow sticks.