Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (25 page)

When the old man returned, he balanced in the doorway
and peered at the table. "Where’d you put it?" he asked.
He left the door open, and steered carefully across to the table. The
cold air and the fresh smells of snow and pine came in behind him. He
leaned on the table and looked around over its top. "Where’d
you put it?" he asked again.

Then he grinned knowingly. "Is no use," he
said. "Think you can hide things from me, eh?"

"I was just picking up, Dad," Harold said.
"It’s in the sideboard. You’d better get some sleep now,
though. You look tired."

The old man was touched by this sympathy. The tears
welled up over his red lids, and began to trickle down his cheeks.
"Tired," he said. "Waited up all night for him. Better
get some sleep."

He worked his way to the foot of the stairs, and
there, holding onto the rail, drew himself up and turned to face
them.

"Beg your pardon, young woman," he said to
Gwen. “Inexcusable. ’Solutely inexcusable." He said
inexcusable very slowly and carefully, and didn’t miss a syllable.
Then he turned back and began to pull himself up the stairs, using
both hands on the rail and pausing on each step.

Harold came over to the foot of the stairs, and he
and Gwen stood watching every move the old man made. His heavy
breathing and the crack of the stairs under his weight were loud in
the room. A step or two above the middle of the stairs, he stumbled
and swung back on one heel. Gwen uttered a little, nervous cry and
put her hands up to her cheeks quickly. Harold
sprang
up the stairs. The old man caught himself with the rail behind him,
and hung there, his chin down hard against his chest, and his eyes
closed. Harold got up to him, and steadied him above the rail. After
a minute, he drew the old man’s arm over his own shoulder, and,
still holding him around the waist too, started him up again. They
went very slowly, the father sagging and letting his head roll, but
pulling with one hand on the rail. They reached the landing, and
paused while Harold got a new hold to take the whole weight, and then
shuffled in through the bedroom door. Gwen sighed, and let her hands
down again slowly. She stood there a moment more, listening, and then
turned back to the sink. She was still quiet, though, not touching
the waiting dishes. She heard their voices speak briefly above, and
then the old man made a long, relaxing groan. Harold said something
more, and his boots sounded loudly, coming out onto the landing. The
door was closed, and the boots came down the hollow stairs.

"Fell asleep the minute he hit the bed,"
Harold said.

He didn’t say anything more about it, though. He
carried in wood from the pile against the house and filled the
wood-box and built up the fire. Then he brought the mother’s cup
and plate from the bedroom, saying softly, "She only drank the
coffee again," and blew out the lamp over the table.

Gwen had Joe Sam’s cup and plate ready then. She
gave them to Harold and went ahead of him to open the door.

"Make him eat something this time, Hal,"
she said.

Harold nodded. "And you get some rest," he
ordered gently. "You’ll get a little peace for a while now.
You let the dishes wait, and get some sleep."

Gwen took hold of his coat with both hands and raised
her face toward his. They stood in the doorway, with the idle flakes
turning against them and their mouths together. Finally Gwen gave him
a quick little extra kiss and let go of him. She stood in the doorway
until he had gone around the corner of the house.

14

Harold let himself into the bunk-house, saying,
"Here’s some breakfast for you, Joe Sam," and knew before
he was done speaking that the old man wasn’t there. The fire was
almost out and the whisky smell and the staleness of sleep-breathing
were heavy in the cooling air. Joe Sam’s bunk was empty, but his
clothes were still lying across the foot of it and his moccasins
still stood together under the edge of the stove.

Holy cat, Harold thought, he’s gone out with
nothing on. I should have seen his tracks when I came up, he thought,
and for a moment felt again the fear and bewilderment that had made
him sweat in the clearing in his dream.

"He made tracks, all right," he told
himself aloud. "You just didn’t have your eyes open."

He set the plate and cup down on the box by the
stove, crossed quickly to the trash keg, and tilted it so the light
from the window showed the inside of it. The bottle neck wasn’t
there. He let the keg back and went to the door and looked down the
hill toward the house. The fear took hold of him again. There were
only the two lines of his own tracks, one already softened by new
snow, the other still sharp-edged and clear. For a moment he wanted
to run back down to the house and see with his own eyes that Gwen was
all right. He wanted to touch her and hear her speak. He was briefly
possessed by a superstitious notion that everybody on the place was
changing toward something strange and evil, but all of them together,
and so  radually that no one could see what was happening except
when some little hint of the unnatural got out, like this. But then
he saw the tracks, and they were real enough, only already blurred by
the new snow too. They went close along the side of the bunk-house,
and then straight up into the edge of timber, where he lost sight of
them in the brush. Reading the tracks as far as he could see them, he
could imagine the old Indian making them, advancing slowly and
watchfully, and stopping often to look around, like a timid,
dangerous animal stalking something or escaping. He’d be holding
that bottle neck ready all the time too, like a knife.

"This is the craziest yet," he said aloud.
"Have to lock the old bastard up next," and again wanted to
run down to the house and be sure everything was all right before he
did anything else.

"You just came from there," he told
himself. "Let’s not everybody start playing crazy games."

He pulled the door shut and started up the slope
beside the line of prints left by the small, square feet. Where they
turned into the thickets, he stopped and looked warily ahead,
stooping a little to take cover in the bushes. Except for once in a
while a startling fall of snow from an overburdened bough, there was
only the white and shadowy quiet under the pines. There were hiding
places everywhere, though: the walls of snow-drifted brush and
granite boulders as tall as a man, and all the dark tree trunks. He’d
have to keep his eyes open, be sure of the tracks far enough ahead so
they couldn’t circle back on him without his knowing it. He could
feel between his shoulders the thought of the little, dark man with
the bottle neck in his fist and the secret joke in his good eye,
creeping out of some cover behind him.

The tracks went south across the hillside above the
house. They never came down out of the woods, but zig-zagged from
hiding place to hiding place up and down the slope, and deepened in
each hiding place, as if Joe Sam had stood or squatted there for a
long time. Where the pines had kept the tracks free of the morning
snow, Harold stopped too, to stare down. It made him uneasy to see
the print of a naked human foot in snow. It wasn’t right there. The
split-heart print of a deer, the dots and dashes of rabbits, the fine
tail line and tiny forget-me-nots of wood mice, or even the big,
broken flower of a panther or a bobcat, those were all as right in
snow as black letters on paper. But this complicated, unique print,
not even a little like any of them, was all wrong. There was too much
time forgotten between. He
shook himself out
of the wondering, and moved faster along the trail, sometimes taking
short-cuts where he could see both legs of a side trip.

South of the house the tracks curved out toward the
valley along the low, descending ridge
that made
the ranch into a kind of little bay. They led down out of the pines
and into the manzanita and then the high, feathery sage where the
quail lived. The quail startled him once, breaking up out of cover
with a soft, multiple thunder of wings. He caught his breath and
stopped where he was. The quail all tied upslope from him, but
farming out toward the valley and the mountain. Toward the top of the
ridge, they began to drop out of sight again in the brush by ones and
twos, and one bunch of a dozen or so together. The silence came back,
and he was ashamed, and a little worried, because he had let them
startle him. He should have seen them first, and he certainly should
have noticed the spidery writing of their tracks everywhere in the
lanes through the brush. But he hadn’t; he’d seen only the heavy,
human track he was following through them. After that he was ashamed
of his worry. It’s still only Joe Sam, he told himself. A little,
old man half your size, and full of whisky and dreams.

He was still worried about that bottle neck, though,
and because he couldn’t guess what Joe Sam was up to. He tried to
remember something that would tell him for sure whether Joe Sam had
broken that bottle on purpose or by accident. All he could find was
his own  dream-groggy first impression that it hadn’t been an
accident, and he didn’t trust that now. He thought he discovered
something else, though. That was what made the shot, he thought. It
was too close for Curt to make it. He was still clear up at the top
of that avenue through the trees. That’s how I got into the bedroom
and saw the hole come in Arthur’s face. That was when Joe Sam broke
the bottle.
 
What difference does
it make? he thought. I didn’t see him break it. He took it back out
of the keg, though, and maybe that does. He wants it for something.
He was saving it for something all the time, he thought suddenly. He
put it down so carefully when I told him to drop it. Well, what of
it? When he gets to thinking black painter—

He stopped short again, telling himself sharply, Wake
up, will you? The trail had entered an open space in the brush with
tracks all over it, and fiecks of blood and the slaty blue feathers
and tawny down of a quail. It was a mess that would show from yards
off, and he’d walked right into it before he saw it.

A coyote or a bobcat got one, he thought, and Joe Sam
stopped to look at the marks, like I am. But then he saw that there
weren’t any tracks but the quail writing and Joe Sam’s, except
one wandering line left by a hopping rabbit. He looked around until
he saw where Joe Sam’s tracks went on out of the open space. There
were no blood marks going with it. He hunted around then until he saw
the dead quail. It lay under a sage bush a little way above him and
to the right, and there was no track going up to it, not the bird’s
or any other. He climbed to the place and picked up the quail. It was
a valley quail, with the black top-knot curving forward like a plume
on an old lady’s bonnet. Its round, gray body was already cold, and
it didn’t weigh enough on his hand. The head, with the half-closed
eye, hung away limp over his finger tips, and he could feel that the
neck was nearly cut through. He turned the quail over on his hand. On
the other side the feathers and down were torn away from half the
breast and shoulder, and the wound showed. It was circular, with
several deep punctures around the edge. Flesh had been torn out of
the center of the wound till the bones showed, but there was no wet
blood in it.

Not much blood, he thought. Not much dry blood, even,
and then thought, quickly, The shape of that wound, and lifted his
head and looked carefully all around, but saw only the motionless
brush, with the light, separate flakes of snow falling silently upon
it. Sucked the blood, he thought, looking down at the hole again. Ate
some of the meat raw, and then sucked the blood.

He dropped the bird back beside its bush, giving it a
small, pitying thought, but no more, and went down, and out of the
trampled clearing along Joe Sam’s trail again. He went much faster
now, and kept a watch around him all the time. The tracks curved down
along the north slope of the ridge, and then, where the brush thinned
out and grew smaller, and the grass began, they changed. There were
hand prints, and only narrow rakings of the toes, and deep pits,
always two together and a little staggered.

On his hands and knees, Harold thought, watching the
houses. And he still has that damned bottle neck, he thought, seeing
the print of its teeth several times, spreading out of the ball of
the right list.

From there only the footprints showed ahead, though,
dwindling in a straight line toward the house. And running, too,
Harold thought, seeing them farther apart and the snow between them
only lightly marked and sometimes not at all. He broke into a run
himself, peering ahead at the house all the time, now that the trail
didn’t need watching. There was nothing moving in sight, except the
cluster of steers that had come in off the snowy range and were
waiting by the fenced haystacks, and more of them coming, far off in
the north.

At the corner of the house he had to stop again.
because the trail divided. There were crawling tracks again, along
the base of the south wall. They ended under the bunk-room window,
and then came back, making a confused double trail. It thinned out
into a single, clear trail along the back of the house.

Looked in at the window, Harold thought. Watching
Grace?

He followed the single trail. It stopped again under
the kitchen window, and then under the west window of the bed-room,
beside the bed where Arthur was lying. Looking in every place, Harold
thought. He didn’t try to get in, though. What’s he want to watch
them for?