Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (64 page)

"He had matches himself," Harold said. He
felt in the pockets of the parka, and found the match container, and
the knife too.

He put the knife in his pocket. Then he took one of
the four matches from the container, and ran it quickly along his
thigh, and set the flame to one and then another of the wads of dry
leaves, and then to one on the other side too before he had to drop
the match in. The leaves made a slow, heavy smoke, and then with soft
explosions, one at a time, the three wads burst into flame. After a
little, the dried willow began to crackle sharply. The wind, sucking
down canyon, drew the flames east and strengthened them. The two men
stood silently, one at each side watching the flames gain and rise,
and to see they didn’t burn too close.

"Sun help," Joe Sam said.

Harold nodded.

The heat was making a watery dancing in the air over
the body, and they had to move back from the fires.

"Skin painter," Joe Sam said. "Get
skin."

Harold nodded. "Go ahead. You want his knife?"
he asked, reaching into his pocket.

Joe Sam shook his head. "Got good knife,"
he said, grinning a little, and turned and went back up the canyon,
carrying the old Sharps.

Harold squatted where he was, watching the fires, and
the still figure between them, until there were only red shimmering
coals left, hissing as they sank into the snow. Then he dared try the
body, and it answered to his hands enough for what he had to do. He
lifted it onto the snowshoe sled again, setting his jaw when he felt
the broken bones grate under the parka and the flesh. He drew the
arms down the sides, and straightened the legs as well as he could.
He pulled the hood back and washed the broken face with snow and
covered it with a blue bandana from his hip pocket, and closed the
hood over it again. Finally he took the rope from Joe Sam’s saddle
and bound the body securely to the webs, and it lay ready in the
golden sunlight, between the two heaps of red embers.

Feeling almost impersonal about it then, the worst
being over, he stood for a minute or two looking down at the body. He
wished to make a prayer, or at least some ceremonial gesture of the
spirit which would move him as a prayer should, but nothing stirred
any deeper than the word-making surface of his mind except a weak,
nagging worry about how he should tell the mother, and even, since it
was Curt, the father, and how he could manage the burial without
letting them see what the rocks had done.

Finally he thought, Well, we got the painter for you,
anyway, fellow, and at once was swept by a terrible loneliness. It
was more for Arthur than for Curt, but Curt was in it too, a sense of
real loss that his powerful body and angry will would never move
anything at the ranch again.

The surge of loneliness drained slowly out of him and
left only an autumnal sadness in the
sunlight
around him and on the bound and straightened body, and he let that
do.

He went down into the willows, untied Kit, swung into
the saddle and turned him down into the trail they had made coming
up. When the slope was easy enough, he put the buckskin across
through the unbroken snow toward the south wing, and then, by
switchbacks, up onto the ridge. There he let him stand till his
breathing was steadier, when he reined him toward the mountain and
pressed him up once more, keeping on the spine of the ridge, where
the wind had blown the snow shallower, so that sometimes brush or
rock stood up out of it. Before they came to the first scattered
pines, he could see Joe Sam, a tiny figure squatting in the red
willows below. The sun had reached into the rock platform at the head
now, and the busy knife made quick, blinding flashes in the light.
Once Joe Sam looked up and raised an arm to show he saw him. Harold
answered the same way, and the knife began to flash again.

When the drifts grew too deep among the conical trees
where the ridge joined the mountain, Harold dismounted and tied Kit,
and worked his way on up on foot, leaning and floundering, and
stopping often to rest and breathe. When he stopped he always looked
at the figure lying way down toward the mouth of the canyon, between
the two black patches on the snow, and the wispy columns of smoke
that still rose from them or flawed suddenly in the canyon wind. He
looked down at Joe Sam each time too. He could always find Joe Sam in
the shadow screen of the willows, because sooner or later the knife
would take the right angle and flash.

At last he came onto the treeless strip of snow that
went up the mountain from the end of the canyon. He found the tracks
that led to the gap at the edge of the cliff, and worked up them,
guessing the wild running and the wallowing falls into the drifts,
till he came to a pile of cut boughs and the deep black hollow of a
burnt-out fire with a few woven-together boughs laid on the snow
between them and sagging from a weight that wasn’t on them now. The
Winchester lay on the corner of this platform of boughs, and along
its edge toward the fire hold, was a neat row of six cigarettes. The
missing bear-paws stood neatly together against the pile of boughs.
He picked up the carbine and tried the trigger. It gave limply, and
he pumped the lever, and holding the muzzle uphill at the open snow,
tried again. The carbine roared and leapt in his hands, and instantly
a little spurt of snow jumped in the clearing, and a deep, tumultuous
echo rolled in the canyon below. He shook his head, and laid the
Winchester down on the boughs again, and looked all around the
clearing.

Finally he sat down and laced on the bear-paws and
rose and worked slowly, very tired now, and sleepy from the dazzle of
sun on the snow, along the marks he could see. Still he found only
the flat, round prints of the bear-paws, in a single, dragging trail
down from the mountain, and in deep, unclear ruts from the black
remains of the fire to the slashed trees on both sides of the
clearing. It made a queer, lonely puzzle, a little foolish in the
bright sunlight on the snow, but a little terrifying too, when you
knew the end of it.

He stopped finally by the cut trees on the north
edge, and looked along the single trail that went up the mountain out
of sight into the timber. It went by itself as far as he could see
it, and he shook his head again, and came back to the pile of boughs.
He stood there looking down at the six cigarettes laid neatly side by
side upon the edge of the platform of boughs.

He had himself set for a long time, he thought
dreamily, and then, looking at the black fire hole again, And he was
here a good part of it.

Finally he looked around the clearing once more
seeing his own tracks going beside Curt’s now, and thought
drowsily, the whole pattern of what he had found becoming unreal, It
might as well have been your black painter at that, Joe Sam. He
picked up the Winchester and laid it with his own over his right
shoulder. He stood looking at the cigarettes again, but at last shook
his head a little and left them there just as they were. He went back
down to where Kit was waiting, and untied him and led him on down
below the last trees. There he took off the bear-paws and tied them
to the saddle and mounted. Laying the carbines together across his
thighs, he rode the rest of the way down slowly, going almost to the
end of the reach this time before he reined Kit over into the canyon.

When he got back to the body and the faintly smoking
funeral fires, he took Kit down and tied him beside Smudge in the
willows once more, and standing the rifles up against the brush, put
on the bear-paws, and climbed on up the canyon. He found Joe Sam
still squatted over his red work, but the great hide free to the
shoulders. Joe Sam stopped the knife where it was and looked up.
Harold saw it was Arthur’s knife he was using.

He shook his head. "He had a big fire up there,
but I couldn’t find any tracks except his."

"You shoot," Joe Sam said.

"Oh, I was only trying his gun. It was still
loaded. Something scared him, though. He was running when he fell
over the edge."

"No track?"

"Only his."

Joe Sam made one short sound, a kind of soft grunt,
and then suddenly, as if waking from some thought of his own he
wished not to show, looked down again and began to tug at the hide
and flick under the edge of it with the bloody point. That was answer
enough for him, Harold thought, A proof as good as seeing it.

He took off the bear-paws and knelt to help the old
man, drawing with both hands at the slippery hide, while the bright
knife flicked and flicked, severing the thin, clinging membranes.

The sun had gone out of the canyon to the southwest,
and the blue shadows and the wind were in the aspens again, when at
last Joe Sam rose with the freed hide in his hands, and held it up
for a moment to show its great length, and then laid it on clean snow
and rolled it, fur side in. The thin, marbled carcass, appearing much
smaller than when the pelt had covered it, lay naked in the bushes.
Joe Sam, grinning a little, held the roll of hide up, the tail flap
and one claw-weighted paw dangling, out of it.

"Good blanket for bed now," he said. "You
get marry, huh?"

Harold thought again, You can’t blame him, and
said, forcing a little grin himself, "Maybe. That’s up to
her."

Joe Sam shook his head, grinning widely now. "She
come," he said confidently. "You boss now. No trouble."

Harold looked at him, and finally said slowly, "I
guess I am at that," seeing for the first time the enormous
difference this could make.

"Well," he said quickly, "we’d
better get moving. It’ll be pretty near dark before we get back
now."

Joe Sam looked at him, with the joke in his eye, but
then only nodded and laid the rolled hide on the snow and knelt and
began to lace on his snowshoes. Only when Harold was knotting the
rawhide of his second web, the old man said, without looking up, "Not
black painter."

Harold finished the tie, and knelt there, looking at
the small old figure in the coat too big for it, and at the dark,
square old hands, splashed with the dried blood of the cat, working
awkwardly at the laces.

Going to sic it on me now? he wondered, but answered,
"No. I guess we’ll never get that one."

"Not get," Joe Sam agreed, and Harold
didn’t think he was joking now, but that he meant it for himself
too.

They went back to the horses, Harold ahead, with the
heavy Sharps rifle, and Joe Sam behind him with the rolled skin in
his arms. By the horses, Joe Sam bound the roll with the laces of his
webs, and after a long, patient trying, got Smudge to accept it, and
tied it on behind the saddle.

Harold turned the snowshoe sled so its prow was
headed down canyon, and then led Kit up out of the willows, and
hitched him to it by his lasso. Seeing Joe Sam already mounted and
waiting, he brought the two carbines up and mounted himself, and led
the way slowly down, looking back often to make sure the clumsy sled
with its hooded burden was following him safely. Each time he looked
back he saw Joe Sam coming down behind the sled, hunched stolidly in
the saddle, the Sharps straight across his legs, the black sombrero
set perfectly straight on his head, on top of the blue bandana around
his face.

A queer guard for your last ride, he thought once,
addressing the dead Curt between them.

They went clear out onto the flat of the meadow, into
the sunlight, before Harold turned south toward the ranch. The wind
was stronger out there, and sometimes they moved in shadowy file, the
leader, and the low, crude sled, and the guard, through a spinning,
glittering mist of blown snow they couldn’t see out of, the living
any better than the dead.

When the snow swept lower past them, though, or at a
shift of the wind tied away east in
three smoky
columns, Harold could see the ranch, still tiny with distance, and
already in the shadow of the mountain. Once in a while it showed
clearly, so he could see even the smoke lining out from the chimney
of the house, but more often it grew faint or even disappeared behind
the running snow.