Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (41 page)

His mind didn’t really consider these
possibilities, which were all familiar from many hunts. It merely
tabulated them, turned the tracking over to his body, and closed
around the little fears and the flights about the black panther, and
about finding Arthur that way, and having to send him home face down
over a saddle. The slow, steady motion of his climbing lulled him,
and the floating mists slowly parting above him and the diffused
radiance that filtered through them, made it like climbing in a dream
on a mountain that wasn’t real.

Even in the upper woods, the dream persisted for a
while. The light was only a half light, and the shadows of the trees
were only half shadows, the moving vapors blending and transforming
them. The sleep thinned out when the track of the cat disappeared
among the trees up ahead, or when a sudden sound of movement near him
demanded attention, but his eyes quickly found the track again,
always farther up and a little farther north, or at once explained
the interruption: a bough had dropped its burden of snow and sprung
back higher, or a junco had launched off a chinkapin twig and flitted
away downslope, and his attention withdrew from the world again. He
had no sense at all of the time that was passing, either. It was
transformed like the shapes of the mist, seeming now to be none at
all, and now to be half a lifetime, a kind of sum of all the winter
hunting he had ever done.

As he approached the crest of the first ridge,
however, the timber thinned out, and the wind, drawing down at him
out of the northwest, grew colder and stronger. It broke the mist
open in many places, making little, spasmodic blizzards over an acre
or two of the mountain, and clearing the air between them and after
them. Where it had passed, the light entered in full strength, and
was painfully bright on the snow. The cold and the dazzle fretted
him, and after two of the small whirling blizzards had sucked over
him, nicking his face and making him close his eyes and bow his head,
he drew up the hood of the parka, and that woke him still more. His
eyes didn’t trust themselves to watch alone in such a narrow range.
He saw too that the blown snow was powdering over the cat’s tracks,
and felt a little alarm, and a need to climb faster. So it was that
he saw the cat, where he might have missed it half an hour before.

The trail led him out to the edge of a deep ravine,
and then turned almost straight up toward the crest. The trees below
him in the ravine, and over on the far wall too, were larger than
those about him, all old, twisted growth in an insecure rooting of
sand and boulders among patches of brush. He paused on the edge, with
no purpose except to look down, and the tiny movement on the far
side, high up, near the head of the ravine, a movement less than that
of a fly on a window rubbing its wings, caught his eye. In an instant
he was wide awake. The cat was distinct in tiny, black silhouette
against the snow, just below the skyline. It must have moved, for the
movement was what he’d seen first, but now it was perfectly still,
and broadside to him, though above him. The north wing was higher
than the one he stood on, with a bald ridge, clear of timber and
broken only by shapes of rock. He believed the cat was standing with
its head turned at him, but he couldn’t be sure. It was too far
across the airy upper spread of the ravine. The sudden pain of guilt
and loss his mind let out into him moved him as if his insides were
being twisted, but he didn’t know it. He believed the catch in his
breath came from excitement, for he was trembling, as he slowly
turned the carbine in his hands. The weakness angered him.

God Almighty, he thought, I’m like a kid on his
first time out, and forced himself to move slowly and attentively.
Even so a tiny dancing remained in his hands and his knees, and there
wasn’t time to wait it out.

Shaking like a goddam girl, he thought, and didn’t
raise the carbine to attempt a standing shot, but let himself down
behind it instead, bracing his left elbow upon his raised left knee
and bringing his eye over behind the sight in the same movement.

He’s above me, he thought, and the wind’s a
little down-canyon, though mostly from him to me, and made allowance
for those variations even while he was drawing the breath to hold.

The cat moved, advancing a step or two and starting
to turn up. Curt held himself with difficulty, and didn’t make the
quick useless shot he wanted to. The cat stopped again. He was sure
it was looking across at him now. He let his breath half out and held
it, lifting his sight again toward the center he had chosen, just
above and ahead of the shoulder, and slowly squeezing the trigger to
slip home just when the least tip of the sharp front sight came
there.

Only a guess how far, he thought. Hard to guess over
a canyon, like this. The cat and the tip of the sight drew together.

The cat moved again, though only slightly, just as
the trigger’s tension broke. While Curt was still enveloped in the
roar of the report, the tiny black cat on the point of the sight
jerked visibly, a twin jerk, it seemed to him, with that of the butt
in his shoulder.

Hit, the black bastard, he thought, like a white
flash of joy in his head. But at once the flash dimmed while the
report was spreading, for the tiny cat turned above the sight and
went up in leaps toward the place where the north ridge became the
mountain.

Moved, the bastard, he thought fiercely, while he was
leaping to his feet and springing the lever of the carbine, and
lifting it to his shoulder again. The echoes fired back the first
shot from the far wall, twice sharply, once more slowly and thickly,
and finally, just as he thought, Nearly stern on, and bobbing; high,
left, and come down to meet the jump, in a final, deep, prolonged
roaring below. The carbine leapt again, but while the blow of the new
report still closed his ears, and without a hitch in its smooth
bounding, the cat became an instant hair upon the bald summit, and
was gone. The thin receding scream of the ricochet went into the sky
behind it.

Clean miss, the bastard, the goddam bastard, Curt
raged, pumping a new cartridge home with the words. But then he held
the carbine lowered, and the ravine returned his fire multiplied,
exactly as before, two sharp, one muffled and slower, and the roaring
like a rockslide down out of sight. Still hearing the ricochet, like
a white rocket streak up across the black roaring, he knew there had
been none after the first shot.

The thunder dimmed away among the boulders below, and
he thought, more slowly, Maybe fleshed it at that. Or got sand, he
warned himself.

He turned up along the edge of the ravine, walking
quickly, and sometimes half running, replacing the used cartridges as
he climbed, and then carrying the carbine free in his right hand to
lengthen his stride. He didn’t even look at the tracks now, but
only quickly picked out his footing ahead. If he didn’t catch sight
of the cat at the summit, he could pick up the trail where it had
gone over.

Gained on the bastard all the way, he exulted, and
it’s still going up. It’s hurt. It wants to rest. No rest, you
black bastard, he exulted.

The exultation sank away as he saw what he’d been
thinking all this time. Not black, he corrected himself. It only
looked black that far away and against snow. He was troubled,
nonetheless, by a swift, superstitious passage of the black flight,
and by half a notion that this cat wasn’t even the one he had
started to track; that this one was black, and was leading him, with
a purpose like a man’s, a thinking enemy’s, into a trap. He
didn’t stop climbing, but there was a moment when he wanted to
stop, when something in him wanted to turn and go back down.

"Black painter," he said loudly and
scornfully, against this impulse. "Didn’t you see it jump, you
son of a bitch? It can feel lead, all right. And it’s running. It’s
hurt, and it’s running. Black painter, my eye."

He went on up, now striding swiftly from rock to rock
under the snow, now half-running where the footing was better. From
up on top, with only thin timber all around, he’d be able to spot
the cat a long way off. He might even get another shot. At any rate,
no tricks were going to do it any good. From a lookout like that, he
could see the whole map of the range. He could guess in one look what
it was up to, whether he saw the cat or only its trail. Then it
wouldn’t be just a stem chase, a long dogging. They would begin to
match wits, and that was his game, not the cat’s. You’ll have to
be a spook then, you bastard, he thought, exulting.

Suddenly the bright snow he climbed on was darkened.
The light just faded away downward, behind him, and the whole ridge
came under a shadow. He glanced up, and saw the new snow mist
reaching up out of the ridge like smoke. It was coming up without a
break in it. The farther west he looked, the thicker and more
shapeless it was. The wind felt colder under the shadow too, and
heavier.

It won’t help you now, though, you black butcher,
he thought savagely. It’s way up still. It won’t snow for hours.
Maybe it won’t snow at all, he thought. Just the tail end of the
storm blowing over. It can’t snow forever, this early.

Nevertheless, he felt hurried. He realized suddenly
that he had no real idea how long he’d been out, and then it felt
late under the shadow of the cloud, past the middle of the afternoon.
The sun had been way west of the ridge, that was sure. The arms of
the snow mist had cut it off long before they came over him. They
were just coming over him now, for that matter.

When he came among the last, stunted, wind-bent
trees, with all their branches reaching east like tattered banners,
he went up carefully, just the same, with the carbine held ready. He
let himself down onto his knees against the granite backbone of the
ridge, and crawled up slowly, not to appear suddenly against the sky,
and at the very top crawled on his belly. If it was really so late,
if there was really snow in the new darkness, it was all the more
important not to miss a shot now, and not to make himself a running
target by carelessness if he had a chance for a sitting one. He eased
his way up to where he could see all along that end of the ridge.
There was only the long, gray stone, swept almost clean of snow by
the wind, and west of him, clearly separate from here, the big range,
with the snow much deeper on it, its upper fields an unbroken white,
and over the big range, and west of it as far as he could see, a
dark, moving sky of snow clouds. Here and there the white wall of the
big range was already veiled by falling snow bent a little southward
by the wind.

He stood up then, and came onto the ridge with one of
the leaning trees behind him, so he wouldn’t show. From there he
could see the whole long blade of the ridge, clear to the sky on the
north, and even farther south, two or three miles, perhaps, to where
a long dragging screen of snow already falling came through a pass in
the big range, and, sweeping slowly up the one he stood on; shut off
everything beyond. He could see down the ridge on the west side too,
clear into heavier timber and the whitened forest on the valley
floor. The cat wasn’t in sight anywhere, nor was there a single
track that he could see anywhere in the snow below him.

For a moment the cat became more than natural again.
There was no cover on the ridge, and
there
couldn’t have been time for it to get down into timber below. With
nothing there, with only the wind streaming over the rock ledges, and
far across, only half seen as his eyes searched nearer him, the
gigantic, slowly changing drama of the storm in the big range, it was
as if the cat had turned the joke on him after all, and really
vanished, dissolved, become wind itself.

Then he thought, It wouldn’t go down yet. It's deep
snow down there, hard going, and a deep trail behind him. It’s gone
north, the other side of the height of the ridge.

Leaning a little against the strong wind, feeling it
fill the hood and belly it out, he went north swiftly on the good
rock footing, and down toward the head of the ravine, where the cat
had come up. He found the track there, already dim with blown snow,
but it only led him back up onto the trackless rock. On the ridge
again, he stood for a moment, looking all about quickly, and then
went north once more, half running. At the skyline the granite
shelved down steeply, and only a little below him the snow had banked
against the ledges. There were no tracks in it. He let himself down
to the edge of the snow, and then followed it around to the west and
south again until he was opposite the tree he had first stood up
against. The snow edge wasn’t broken anywhere, except by gray rock
or the curving blade shapes the wind had given it. Once again, for a
moment, the cat formed and was able to vanish in his mind, and its
first form was big as a horse and black. Then first the white snow
showed faintly through it, and then the twisted tree, and finally
even the gray ledges, before it was not there at all. His waking
mind, now angry and hurried, pressed the brief vision aside at once,
as less than the enemy shapes a child makes for himself in a dark
room.

"Must have gone south, then," he said
aloud. "Nowhere else it could have gone."

With a moment of fear, half made up of the time he
had already lost on the ridge, he thought, But the bastard must have
plenty left to move that fast. He couldn’t have been hurt too bad;
not bad enough to do any good.