Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (43 page)

He worked his way into the fir until he could hold
its main stem. Clinging there, he laid the carbine across two 
branches, took off his mittens and stuffed them into his pocket, and
slowly, because his fingers were stiff and cold and tired,
unharnessed the bear-paws and
strapped them
together, and bound them to the joint of a branch. Then, pulling the
hood far forward over his face and holding the carbine, muzzle up,
against his shoulder, one hand covering the trigger guard against
twigs, he let himself slowly, spirally, down through the branches
onto the bed of old needles. No wind at all got down there and no
snow. The needles and twigs at the foot of the rock had only a thin
powdering of snow on them. It was very good to be down there, and
able to give up until daylight came again. It was as good as a
homecoming after a long time away.

He leaned the carbine carefully against the rock,
memorizing where it was by hand. Lying there on one elbow, under the
lowest branches, he drew the knife and the container of matches out
of his right pocket, and took the knife out of its sheath. Holding
them, he carefully went over in his mind the turns he had made coming
down through the branches. Then he lit a match and began to scratch
with the point of the knife on the rock wall beside the carbine. The
rock was granite, and made a fine tinsel glittering in the light of
the match. It was so hard that only a faint scratch appeared on it,
no matter how he dug at it. He burned six matches while he scratched
an arrow pointing north that he could really see, and eight more
matches to make a little 48 above it.

In the thick darkness again, he closed the match
container and put it back in his pocket, and pulled the oilskin
packet out of his other pocket, and unfolded it carefully on the
needles between him and the rock. There were six slices of bread in
the packet, his fingers told him, and a roll of stripped jerky as
long as the packet and as solid as a cut off a side of bacon.

Three meals at least, he thought. Maybe four. And
I’ll need it more by tomorrow night than I do now.

He allowed himself one slice of the bread, and three
of the thin strips of jerky. There was butter on the bread, and the
butter tasted wonderful. He was very grateful to Grace for putting
butter on the bread. He ate the buttered bread slowly, a small bite
at a time. Then he chewed the jerky even more slowly, not swallowing
it until it practically ran down by itself. The chewiness of it was
pleasing, and the juice it made in his mouth was very good. It was
salty, though. He’d only chewed a little of it before he was
thirsty, and realized that he’d been thirsty for a long time.

When he’d finished the jerky, he carefully rolled
up the rest of the food in the oilskin again, and pushed it well down
into the left pocket of the parka. He returned the knife to its
sheath, and slid it back into the other pocket. Then he began to draw
snow, a handful at a time, in from under the edge of the branches and
press it together. He worked at it patiently until he had a dripping
ice ball that nearly filled his hand. He stretched out on his back,
letting his body feel its weariness completely for the first time,
smiling a little at its twitching, which once or twice even jerked
his heels on the slick needles, and sucked the ice ball slowly down
to nothing. The snow water had a faint, stinging taste of granite and
dead needles, but it washed down the saltiness of the jerky, and
slaked his thirst enough to let his body rest better. He wiped his
hands dry on his pants, and reached inside the parka and got the pad
of cigarette papers and the little sack of tobacco out of his shirt
pocket. He had trouble rolling the cigarette by touch, and it came
out nearly empty at one end and limp in the middle. Holding it
between his lips by the empty end, he returned
the papers and tobacco to his shirt pocket, and got out one match,
and put the match container back too. Then he lit the cigarette,
defending the flame of the match with both hands, although there was
not a breath of air to move it, and carefully pinched the match out,
and lay back again, drawing slowly and deeply on the cigarette. Its
glow made a surprising amount of light in the closed darkness. The
shining points of the granite appeared faintly at each drag and he
could see every needle of the bough above him. He blew the smoke out
against the base of the rock, and held the cigarette there too, when
he wasn’t drawing on it. The smoke thinned out to nothing before it
rose very far along the granite. He was sure that not the least whiff
of it could get all the way up through the tree and the snow. He
considered that carefully. He was so tired that he had to consider
with care and determination every detail of each act he performed.

When the cigarette burned his thumb, he extinguished
the limp butt of it against the rock, put on his mittens, rolled onto
his side, with his back in the shallow cave at the base of the cliff,
and drew his knees up into the long shirt of the parka. Lying so, he
pillowed his head on one arm, and almost at once fell deeply asleep.

23

He was kneeling beside a small fire, with his
hands held close over it. He was trying to warm himself, and at the
same time trying hard to remember something. It disturbed him greatly
that he could not remember, because he was alone in the middle of a
darkness in which not a single star or mountain shape could be seen.
He was lost, and he believed that what he couldn’t remember had to
do with where he was, or with some danger which threatened him there.

Then he saw that he wasn’t alone. Arthur was
standing on the other side of the fire, looking down across it at
him. It comforted him enormously, after the first start of fear at
seeing him so unexpectedly, to have Arthur there too.

"It's Joe Sam. You know that, don’t you?"
Arthur said.

Curt didn’t understand this remark, but he knew
it was important. Arthur spoke loudly for him, and very seriously,
even urgently, as if he intended the remark to be a warning. Curt
looked at him intently, trying to understand what he meant, and then
he was no longer comforted by his presence. There was something bad
the matter with Arthur. His eyes weren’t open at all. Curt had
mistaken the blue, shadowy lids in the deep sockets for open eyes
looking at him. Also, his face was too hollow and still, and there
were four long, deep scratches across it, diagonally from the left
temple to his mouth, and his beard was full of twigs and clots of
earth and yellow willow leaves.

He was surprised to hear himself asking, in a
worried voice, "Where is the wooden Indian?" He hadn’t
intended to ask any such foolish question. Joe Sam wasn’t wooden.

"No," Arthur said. "I killed him. I
had to," and opened his eyes. They were enormous and frightened.
He stared down at Curt, and said, "Years ago," and held out
his hands for Curt to look at, as if that would explain what he
meant. Curt saw that his hands were red to the
wrists,
and that the red was fresh, and dripped between his fingers.

"It was the painter," Arthur said
unhappily.

That’s it, Curt thought. The painter’s wooden,
and that’s just paint on his hands too.

"Don’t say that, Curt," Arthur cried,
so suddenly, and in such a terrified voice, that Curt leapt up. Then
he was alone, and in complete darkness. Even the little fire was
gone.

"What?" he cried anxiously, but his voice
was all alone, and closed in against him, and thick. But he knew what
the danger was now. It was himself, not Arthur, the panther was going
to kill. Arthur had somehow escaped after all, but he, Curt, was
lying down there against the fir tree, under the boulder, and the
black panther was waiting for him on the snow above. It couldn’t
get down to him, but it knew he was there, and it knew he’d have to
come out sooner or later. It was going to wait for him. He could hear
it sniffing up there, at the edge of the snow around the tree. Then,
all at once, he was greatly relieved.

“
Not black, the son-of-a-bitch," he said
aloud, and remembered everything clearly.

He lit a match just the same, and felt much better to
see the fir bough over him, and the carbine leaning against the rock,
and the arrow and the 48 scratched beside it, just as they had
appeared by the last glow of the cigarette the night before. To see
the whole little hollow just as it had been, completely separated the
dream from what had really happened. He still couldn’t entirely
free himself of the feeling that the cat was waiting for him above,
but he knew better than to believe it. There wasn’t a sound up
there, when he really listened, and besides, the snow wouldn’t hold
the bastard up.

"I’ll really put something in the old belly
this morning,” he said aloud. "I’ll have to chase the
son-of-a-bitch again, God knows how far."

He stretched himself, and worked his shoulders inside
the parka and his feet inside the pacs, doing everything he could in
that low, narrow space, to break the cold that had hold of him, and
to reduce his stale weariness. He didn’t spend long at it, though.
He had a feeling that it might be hours after daybreak already, up
there on top of the snow, and if it was, the cat would have a long
start on him. As soon as his body felt usable again, he got out the
food packet and ate two slices of the bread and butter and six of the
strips of jerky. After that he packed two snowballs and sucked them
down to nothing. He considered making and smoking a cigarette,
thinking, Take your time and feel right; gets there fastest in the
end, but decided against it after all.

Waste too much time, he thought. Gotta get up there
and take a look around.

He didn’t admit to himself his other objection,
that he didn’t want to make a smell of tobacco smoke down there in
his hole.

He rolled the food packet up again, stuffed it into
the left pocket of the parka, and took the carbine, covering the
trigger with his hand again, and started slowly up through the
branches.
At first he began to repeat to himself,
"Forty-eight steps north," but shortly he couldn’t spare
the breath for it, and then he wasn’t even thinking it. It was much
harder going up than it had been coming down. The limber branches
wouldn’t support him very well, and the ones above kept pressing
him down, so that he had to squirm among them at each whorl to
discover an opening through which he could get up to the next level.
He didn’t allow himself to curse or thrash in his irritation,
however, because he wanted to hear anything there was to hear, and he
didn’t want to make any loud sound himself, in case there should be
something up there listening. When the trunk of the fir became
noticeably smaller, and he began, vaguely, to see the shapes of the
branches around him, he went still more slowly, and stopped after
every gain to listen. He also worried a little now, about how he
could get the carbine free in all that limber tangle, if he had to
use it.

He bumped his head on the snowshoes before he saw
them, and was briefly alarmed because they were so much harder than
the branches, and yet were dangling free. Then he was alarmed because
he had found them there, so far down under cover. A lot of new snow
must have fallen in the night. He wondered if the tree would support
him far enough up its tapering trunk to get out of the snow. He
worked the webs free of their branch and slung them around his neck.

I’ll be breakin’ out any time now, he thought.
Gotta keep around against the rock as much as I can. Have one side of
me covered anyway.

He worked his way around and up through one more
whorl, and then, suddenly, a shower of snow poured down on him, a lot
of it falling coldly inside the hood. When it stopped falling, his
head was up out of the snow, and he could see clearly. For a moment
he clung there, motionless with alarm because he had been exposed so
suddenly, and without time to prepare himself. There was nothing in
sight, however, except the slope of deep snow and the terraces of
snow-laden trees, and the new snow falling, but in big, quiet flakes
now, coming straight down. He was relieved about time, too, for there
was only a blue, very early daylight among the trees.

It was impossible to get his bear-paws on in the
tree, and when he reached a foot out into the bastion of snow, it
broke up and fell away through the branches below him in little,
whispering showers. Finally, furious after struggling against
something like that, something with no weight and no solidity, which
crumbled away at every touch, he scrambled recklessly up on the
boulder side until he could get hold on the edge of the rock, under
the snow. He flailed  some of the snow off the top with the
stock of the carbine, and threw the carbine up, well back from the
edge, and scrambled up himself, pitching forward into the snow. The
short fury, and the little triumph that came with getting off the
tree onto the solid granite, did him good, washing out the last of
the closed-in dream notions, and leaving him wide awake and out free
in the daylight.

He crawled up safely away from the edge, knelt in the
snow his body had packed, and laced on the bear-paws. Then he put on
his mittens, recovered the carbine from the bottom of the deep,
carbine-shaped well it had made in the snow, and brushed it off, and
cradled it in his arm, and turned north. Going as straight as the
trees would let him, and making his steps
short,
to match the tired, plowing steps he had taken the night before, he
counted the forty-eight, and stopped and looked around. There were no
signs of tracks. The new snow and the wind had smoothed the
mountainside perfectly, save for the curving dykes around the trees.
This didn’t matter too much for his start, but it worried him about
the chances of the cat having left any kind of a trace. His only hope
was that it had holed up for the night, and broken a fresh trail out
this morning, a trail he could get to before any wind came up, or the
new storm filled it.