Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (10 page)

Harold stood up. "I didn’t get the chores
finished anyway," he said. "I had to help Curt with the
horses."

"He never got the black panther then?" Gwen
asked.

"No," Harold said. "And he didn’t
shake his bad luck, either. He saw the cat once more that winter, and
right after that another of his kids died. It was pneumonia, I guess,
from what he told Arthur about it, but by that time he was blaming
everything on the black panther, and it wasn’t just an ordinary cat
any more. And the next winter one of his sons died, starvation,
probably; it was a tough winter. Long snow, as he says. But he’d
seen the cat’s tracks only a day or two before, and right close to
his camp."

"A cat’s," the father said.

"All right, a cat’s. Though Joe Sam would know
if he’d seen them before."

"I don’t believe it," the father said.
"By then it was as big as a horse." He laughed. The laugh
was too long and too loud for his joke. "So he gave up hunting
it, and moved out. What happened to the number-four papoose we don’t
know. He was all alone when he got here, and half starved to death.
But he’s kept the black painter, and it keeps getting bigger, too.
It would
probably be as big as an elephant by
now, if he’d ever seen an elephant. And no doubt it’s out this
morning."

"He told me it was." Harold said, taking
down his coat. While he put the coat on, he said to Gwen, "He
thinks it’s trying to clear everybody out of this country."

"Especially white men now," the father
said, and laughed.

"Especially white men now," Harold agreed.

He opened the outside door and stood in the doorway,
looking at the sky over the valley. "No stars," he said.

"We’re in for more snow at that, I guess,"
and went out, closing the door behind him.

Grace got herself another cup of coffee, and the
father poured his glass a third full of whisky again. The mother
remained in the big chair, bent forward over Matthew, following the
words with her finger and shaping them with her lips. The wind moved
only occasionally outside, and then with a soft and faraway
hollowness. In the room only the fire and the lamp and the slow clock
spoke.

Finally the father looked at Gwen again and cleared
his throat.

"So you’ve been in San Francisco recently,
young lady?"

Gwen made the little smile and nodded.

"We talked all about it before we got up this
morning," Grace said quickly, but it didn’t help.

"Ah," said the father, leaning back and
looking up at the small, bright circle of light in the middle of the
whitewashed ceiling, and drawing another cigar from his vest. "Ah,"
he said again, "there is a wonderful city."

He spoke briefly about the beauty of San Francisco on
its hills, and with the blue bay inside it, and the green, soft
mountains across the bay.

"However," he said, after a meditative
pause during which he stared at the ceiling, "it’s not the
place it used to be."

Grace sighed, gripped the handle of her mug tightly,
and sat staring down into the coffee. The father clipped the end off
the cigar, set it between his teeth, and lit it, slowly and
ceremoniously, allowing them to wait for the words to come.

"There is a spirit gone out of it," he
said, with round solemnity, when the air about the lamp was full of
slowly turning, blue smoke. "Something vital is missing now, a
hopefulness, an enterprise that was in its very atmosphere once, as
heady as champagne. You should have known San Francisco in the
sixties and seventies, my dear," he said, bringing his gaze down
out of the smoke clouds and looking at Gwen.

"It must have been exciting then," Gwen
said, making the little smile.

"Ah, yes," the father said slowly, and as
if turning the word over and over and considering its every
possibility. "It was that at times, to be sure. But it was also
more than that, much more. Excitement, after all, is a matter of
moments, and what the old city had then was no such brief and
periodic thing. It was going to be the Babylon of the world, the new
Jerusalem, the capital of the Pacific, the very shrine of wealth and
beauty and fashion. In short, it had a soul, for it had faith, and
what, after all, is a soul, save the product of such a faith. Why, I
can remember. . ."

He went on happily describing for Gwen the soul of
San Francisco in its good days. He spoke proudly and in detail, as
one who was himself, in part at least, responsible for the
magnificence and the activity and the promise. In one tale of
gigantic manipulation, he spoke of Ralston. The name reminded him of
his own meeting with Ralston. He had met him at a bar. He described
the bar, and the meeting, and spoke the words Ralston had spoken to
him about the stock of the Savage Mine in Virginia City as the words
of a prophet are repeated at a safe interval after'his death. The
quotation took him to Virginia City for a time, but the water problem
of Virginia City carried him back to San Francisco, where there had
been some most enlivening speculation in water also. The water
problem reminded him of a race horse of Ralston’s. The race horse
reminded him of a famous dancer. Because of some stocks on which the
famous dancer had profited abundantly, he was drawn back to Virginia
City and what President Grant had said about the heat in the lower
levels of the mines. He quoted resident Grant also with the care and
awe of a disciple. He continued to branch intricately and happily
into this near past until the twenty or thirty years since the events
he spoke of seemed live thousand.

Gwen looked at him when she had to, and smiled and
nodded and made little sounds of agreement. Grace sat there with
them, but after a little while she wasn’t listening. Gray daylight
appeared faintly and at a distance in the front window. It increased
until the lamplight on the table turned yellow. The mother sat back
in her chair then and read by the light from the window.

5

When daylight began to spread under the clouds, Curt
and Arthur were north almost to the foothill that hid the creek. The
snow covered its long whale shape smoothly, only the sagebrush, and
the few, small, lonely pines farther up, showing dark on it. A fine,
thinned-out snow was still falling. As the light increased, Curt
pressed his pony, a small, nervous red, and in his mind cursed Gwen
and then used her violently, with anger, not pleasure, making a whole
quick story of it, because he had wasted time waiting for her.

When he came onto the whaleback, he turned the red
out toward the nose of it, and only a little up, and heeled him to a
lope, meaning to circle wide and come into the canyon mouth. He
turned in his saddle and angrily signaled Arthur after him, sweeping
his right arm forward twice. Arthur pressed his gray mustang mare up
to the red’s pace, but shook his head and
pointed
up and west toward the high ridge of the whaleback where it joined
the mountain.

Curt said softly, fiercely, "Now what crazy
notion, priest?" but pulled in the red and turned him and
waited.

Arthur came alongside, so the horses stood tail to
nose, and said, "You could see pretty near the whole ravine from
up there. Get a good shot without starting him, if he’s still in
there. He’ll be jumpy, now it’s daylight. He’d hear us long
before we got up to him."

Curt stared at him, and smiled with one side of his
mouth and said, "You’d just as soon not meet him coming down,
eh, priest?" but looked up at the ridge and thought about it.
“If you’d ever shoot a gun," he said angrily, "if you’d
brought a gun too, we could cover both sides. Well, we’ll take a
look," he said, making it his decision, not Arthur’s.

He spun the red back again, forcing Arthur’s
mustang to shy off, and rode up on the whaleback at a slant out
toward the valley, weaving through the brush. Arthur waited to steady
the gray, stroking its shoulder, and saying softly, "Easy
Smudge, easy," and then turned up after him. The unshod hoofs of
the two ponies, slicked with soap to keep the snow from balling in
the frogs, made a soft, muffled counterpoint. Before they would show
over the taper of the whaleback, Curt reined the red sharply back and
climbed along the upper slope toward the mountain. The angle was
steeper, and the ponies began to labor. At the first dwarf pine, Curt
let the red down to a walk, signaling Arthur angrily, with an open,
mittened hand beating rapidly on the air, to come slowly too, and
keep quiet. The creaking of the saddles and the blowing of the ponies
sounded too loud. Their breath made little jets of quickly vanishing
steam in the cold air.

Up ahead only the broken base of the mountain, where
trees were taller and began to fill ranks, showed clearly. Above
that, the trees became spired shadows, dimming as they rose, until
there were no trees, but only one great, uncertain shadow of
mountains, and then only the gray snow mist, in which the mountain
could be imagined reaching any height into the sky. Arthur was
pleased with this mountain that couldn’t be seen, feeling it revive
the dream that was not worked out of him yet. He watched the drifting
mist, trying to see into it to rocks and trees until Curt, up ahead,
swung down from his saddle. They were close under the crest of the
reach, and early onto the mountain too. The small pines were more
numerous around them, and there was a feeling of being watched, as if
the trees had eyes, or creatures with eyes were hidden among them.
Arthur swung down too, and they climbed a little farther on foot, one
behind the other, leading the ponies, until a little fort of broken
rock stood over them on the north. There Curt halted, and imperiously
signed Arthur up to him, and when he came alongside said quickly, but
keeping his voice low, "Hold them while I take a 1ook."

Arthur nodded and took the red’s bridle and stood
between the two horses, smiling a little in his beard in the shadow
of the cowhide hood.

"And hang on, will you," Curt said, "or
you’ll lose them when I shoot."

He drew the mitten off his right hand and stuffed it
into his pocket, and began to climb by
short
switchbacks, jerking impatiently when he slipped in the snow or on
the broken rocks moving under it. Arthur stood below, watching him
grow smaller until, like a tiny, jerking toy, he clambered into a
break in the rock fort, stooping already, so he wouldn’t show over
the top. There the miniature figure lay forward, the red coat making
a bright spot on the stone and snow, and crawled up, a little on its
side, to keep the carbine free, and lay still, with spread legs,
looking through the notch into the canyon beyond. There was no shot.
The tiny red figure lay motionless up there for two or three minutes,
searching the canyon carefully, and then stood up, and after looking
down a moment longer, turned and began its descent. It came slowly at
first, on the rock of the ridge, and then with long strides straight
down the slope, growing rapidly larger, until the shape of the
sombrero became clear, and then until the face showed in the black
circle of the scarf bound around the head, and the fierce moustache
stretched across it like small, black wings.

When he had come down to Arthur, Curt said, still
breathing hard from his almost running, "Damn your advice. I
should have known. He’s in there, all right, but you can’t 
see him. He’s clear up at the head, in the box canyon. The cliff
hangs over there, hides him. But he’s in there. There’s a little
bunch of steers down in the bottom by the willows; all headed
up-canyon, taking the wind right in their faces. We’d of had him by
now, if we’d gone on in, goddamit. If only he don’t run out. . ."

He took the red’s bridle from Arthur and swung up
into the saddle, turning the pony in the same move, and led off
upslope and toward the valley, commencing the top stroke of the
great, uptilted Z their tracks made on the flank of the hill. Arthur
turned the gray, mounted more slowly, and followed. Ahead of him
Curt’s back bent forward eagerly to the climb. The thin, dark line
of the carbine across the saddle in front of him was like a spear
through him that he carried in his body, Arthur thought, and then
thought, smiling in the hood, Them that live by the ride.

Curt turned the red still more steeply up, and
crossed the ridge, well below the rock fort, but almost as far above
their first turn. Arthur saw him and the red show dark against the
milky sky for a moment, and then, turning west again, sink behind the
ridge.

The gray came onto the ridge blowing, and of her own
accord turned down after Curt’s pony. Arthur felt the wind that
moved up there, not strong, but cold and heavy with the promise of
more snow, and saw the base of the north wall sloping up white to a
greater height than he rode on, and then crowned with the long, dark
fort of the rimrock. Curt was already far down the slope ahead of
him. Arthur saw him look back up, and then point down with his bare
right hand. He looked where the hand pointed, and saw the tiny steers
in the bottom, out against the screen of red willows that hid the
creek. There were five steers, standing in half a circle, with their
rumps in the willows and their faces out and turned up-canyon. Two of
them had their heads raised now, testing the air. Most of the yellow
leaves still clung on the willows behind them.

Curt was putting the red down the slope recklessly,
but kept his arm pointing, and swung it along the course of the
willows. Looking there, Arthur saw, like a faint, dotted line in the
snow, the tracks climbing the bottom beside the willows and then
beside the aspens. The
aspen leaves were bright
even under the clouded sky and in the ravine, and danced with a fine,
continuous shivering in the cold down-draft along the creek. The
trail went up into the broken rock under the platform of the box
canyon, and was lost there, where the creek came down over terraces
of ice.