Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (44 page)

He turned upslope, and climbed as rapidly as he could
with the webs sinking a foot into the snow at every step. He couldn’t
see far through the heavy, floating snowfall, and everything within
the circle of his vision was changed by daylight and the new depth of
the snow. The dwarf trees at timberline, when he came among them,
were only a field of small, white domes, and some of them didn’t
even make domes, but had vanished completely under wind-flattened
drifts. It was easy to tell when he reached the fish-shaped ridge,
though. There was snow on it too, now, but the wind had kept it
shallow, and he could kick through to the dark rock anywhere on it.

He turned south and began to move faster, the shallow
snow supporting him at once, and the light, steady, south-eastward
suck of the summit wind helping him along. He still moved in a small,
snowed-in circle by himself, though. The trees below him faded down
quickly into a white bank, and when he looked out straight above
them, there was only the gray-streaked curtain of falling snow. He
could barely make out the constant, gray wall of shadow above him on
the right, that told him that he hadn’t got quite to the top of the
ridge the night before. He watched the snow in front of the webs
attentively, until he felt sure he’d gone well past the place where
he’d found the tracks in the evening, and after that he watched all
around him, the best he could, for any remnant of a mark in the snow
that the wind hadn’t made.

It was hard, though, in that small, all white world,
to keep his mind working with his eyes. The whiteness everywhere made
as good a screen for his memory to work on as the darkness of night
or of his shelter under the fir tree, and the steady drifting away
before him of the falling flakes was hypnotic. He almost missed the
retreat in the ledge above him because his eyes saw it inattentively
through Gwen in the yellow blouse sitting across the kitchen table
from him, and coffee and hash-brown potatoes and ham in front of him.
He had gone several yards beyond it before his mind, changing to show
him Arthur’s body in the red coat going down over the edge across
the saddle, let him know for a moment what his eyes had just seen.

"Geez," he said aloud. "Now who’s
dreamin’?" and the little fears stirred in him again.

"Keep your eyes open, stupid," he warned
himself. "The bastard could of had you any time the last half
hour."

And then the fears stirred once more because he
realized that he had no trustworthy impression of the passage of time
either. It might have been a half hour, but it might just as well
have been ten minutes, or two hours.

"We’ll take a look," he said aloud and
boldly, and turned up toward the cave, watching it
attentively,
and holding the carbine ready. It showed at first only as a long,
narrow, blue shadow in the snowing, almost at the end of his vision.
As he came closer, it darkened, and he could see that it was larger
than he’d thought, because he’d only seen the higher south end of
it. The drifting snow had made a long, curving dyke in front of the
north end. He couldn’t tell how deep the cave was, and he climbed
at it slowly, stopping every few feet and trying to peer into the
shadow behind the dyke. When he could see clear to the back of the
open end, and knew it was empty, he circled a little to the south to
make his final approach at an angle that would let him see in behind
the drift. There was nothing in the cave.

When he had made sure of this, he climbed over the
drift and knelt and worked in under the ledge. There was a sifting of
sand on the stone floor, and again he believed that the sand had been
disturbed as the wind couldn’t have disturbed it.

"He was here, all right, damn him," he said
aloud and cheerfully.

He laid the carbine down and took off the bear-paws,
and used one of them to shovel out the snow fill and let more light
into the low, sheltered, north end. Then he crept in on his belly and
peered very closely at the wall and the door, and even took off his
right mitten and searched them with his hand. Finally he found it,
more with his fingers than with his eyes, a little tuft of hairs
caught on the rock at the back. He crawled around into the light with
them, and examined them closely. They were short hairs, just the
right length, and properly coarse and wiry too, but they were very
dark. They could have been called black without stretching things
much. The swift, numerous flight started across his mind again, but
he cut it off by grinning and speaking aloud.

"Real hair, and it came off," he said.
"He’s a dark one, all right. Maybe Joe Sam brought his old
friend south with him after all, but he sheds, and he bleeds, the
bastard."

And, he thought, standing up and letting the little
tuft of hairs go out of his fingers into the wind, After eighteen
years, he must be a son, or even a grandson. Spook stock must be
shrinking some these days, too. He was a good deal short of the size
of a horse, that one, to get in there at all.

He picked up the webs and the carbine, and scrambled
back over the drift onto the open ledge, and stood there looking at
the snow all around him. The swift, chittering flight went over his
mind unchecked, this time, for he was thinking about what he saw.
There were no tracks anywhere in the snow except his own. He stood
the bear-paws on edge in the drift and circled the cave, crossing the
overhang that made its roof, and coming back around the north end.
There were no tracks anywhere, but only the wind-smooth snow.

He stopped the birds this time, by saying aloud, with
a little chuckle, "Must be light enough on his feet to see
through, for a fact." It was not a successful joke.

"Hell," he said, arguing boldly against the
stone and the snow and the easy wind, "he just got off too early
for me, that’s all. They been rubbed out."

He laced on the webs again, and took the carbine and
stood up with it cradled in his arm, and peered all around, thinking,
But if he waited for daylight, there hasn’t been much wind. It
wouldn’t cover up for him, anywhere but up here. And he didn’t
double back, or I’d of met him, or seen where he went down. He
could of gone over the top, but it’s ten to one against it, or he’d
of done it last night. This must be about the end of his territory.
So it has to be
south again.

"But you’re chasin’ spooks for a fact now,
Bridges," he told himself aloud. "And there’s gotta be a
strict time limit to that sorta fun. Let’s see where we are."

He went carefully over the course of the hunt so far,
and tried to estimate the distances roughly by the over-all time. He
couldn’t be very sure of his guess, because his pace had 
changed so often, and because he was so uncertain about the time he’d
left Cathedral Rock and about what time it was now. He believed,
however, that he must have come back south along the two ridges even
farther than he’d gone north on the first tack.

"Hell," he said cheerfully, "the
bastard’s practically leadin’ me home."

And less than half my grub gone, he thought. Half the
bread, and less than half the jerky.

"You’re not out of this yet, brother," he
announced. "You gotta start back down somewhere," he went
on, commencing to shuffle south again, and down the ledge to keep an
eye on the deeper snow below it. "And when you start down this
time," he said happily, "you’ll leave a track like a
flash-flood."

Snow’s lettin’ up some too, he thought, a little
later. He was seeing farther and more easily, and with the shadowy
shapes of the trees and ledges to hunt among, his mind was resisting
the moving whiteness better. He watched all about him, pushing the
hood part way back on his head to increase the span of his vision.

Nevertheless, the notion persisted in his mind,
though he didn’t allow it to become more than a notion, that the
cat had outguessed him, that some time before daylight, so the wind
and snow had erased its trail, it had circled back north and waited
for him, and that now it was trailing him. Several times he stopped
and turned all the way around, to take a good look behind him, but
there was never anything but the long spears of snow floating at him
across snow.

As time went on, and he did nothing but drag along at
the same slow, steady pace, even the opening mountainside could not
prevent the monotony from lulling him. He was still tired from
yesterday’s run, and from the cold sleep. Several times he came to
suddenly, and realized that he had been moving for a long time, how
long he couldn’t guess, without really seeing anything around him.
Then the little fears would stir again, though now they seemed to
move less within him that at some distance behind him, and either
above him, among the ledges of the summit rock, or below him, in the
edge of timber. After each startled waking, he would stop and look
all around him, but particularly north, and when he went on again, he
would move in a shuffling, spread-legged trot for a while, to get
warm and to wake himself
up.

The most alarming of these starts came when he woke
to realize that it wasn’t even snowing around him any longer. The
heights were still shadowy dark, and the wind was up again, so that
at times the flurries of ground snow around him were thicker than the
real snowing had been, but there was no new snow falling where he
was. The effect wasn’t encouraging, however. The wind had divided
the storm for a while, that was all, and the ridge he stood on was
aloft and clear between two forces, with only a thin veil of gray
high above it, torn here and there so the blue showed faintly
through. On his left the lower range and the valley between the two
ranges were completely hidden by the base of a great wall of cloud,
which rose until its paler, billowing top towered into the sky far
above the ridge. On the other side, separate reaches of cloud, like
rolling smoke, were already advancing obliquely down the slope, and
behind them, though at some distance still, came the dark main body
of the new storm of which they were the scouting columns.

Once he had clearly seen that storm upon the west,
Curt, though he continued to go south along the ridge, and to watch
below him on the left, went much more quickly, often breaking into
that shuffling trot, and he watched at least as much for some opening
in the cloud below him that would let him guess where he was, as he
did for tracks.

The break didn’t come. The front storm remained
trapped in the valley, only drifting southward and changing shape
within itself, while the dark storm above him in the west continued
to advance, though sliding mostly along the blade of the ridge, and
only slowly working over it.

Trotting almost constantly now, until he was panting
with his hurry, and glancing up more and more often at the near,
moving darkness, he came to a place where the ridge began to slope
gradually downward ahead of him. Here and there the ragged tops of
dwarf trees showed through the snow again, and as he descended, they
became more numerous. The wind lost its full force behind him, too,
and turned gusty, so that instead of moving with his feet invisible
in the long tide-rip of surface snow, he was repeatedly caught in
whirling clouds of it that forced him to stand for several seconds
with his head bent and his arm across his face, until they had passed
on over him and were skirmishing and twisting a hundred feet in the
air out over the hollow.

It didn’t look like a true pass he was coming down
into, but only a wide, shallow depression, a scoop at the south end
of the long col he had been following. If he knew the place, he
didn’t recognize it now, in his hurry and confusion, and under all
the snow that had drifted into it, and with the first, long scouting
tendril of the storm sucking darkly down into it from the west. He
had never hunted this high when there was anywhere near so much snow,
and he could remember a lot of hollows that might have come to look
like this one when they got drifted in. If it was the one he thought
most likely, though, he was still way north of the ranch. He must
have gone much farther north from Cathedral Rock than he’d
realized.

He hurried on down the slope, finally no longer even
pausing for the most blinding of the snow dervishes that whirled
across him, but only putting his head down, and holding the hood
across the right side of his face. Even so, the
new snow caught him in the bottom of the hollow. Then he was forced
to stop. The air darkened around him and the snow drove thickly at
him, seeming to come from every direction. He meant only to wait out
the first blast, but it didn’t let up. It even seemed to be getting
thicker and wilder. Coming down into the hollow, he had only been
thinly frosted over by snow crystals, but now, in a moment, the parka
was so thickly plastered that its red patches vanished.
 

And this is only the first of it, he thought slowly,
the words coming separately and far apart in his mind. He didn’t
dare wait for a lull, but began to push forward, dragging the webs,
bracing himself in one direction or another at every step, and half
the time with his eyes nearly closed against the black whirl of the
snow. He kept twisting his body away from the storm, trying to get it
to ride up off him on the blade of the hood. It didn’t work,
though, for whenever he got set in one direction, the snow would
suddenly be coming from another. The hollow seemed a mile across at
least, and it was only by the slower laboring of his legs, and the
need to bend forward a little to keep his balance, that he knew when
he began to climb out of it on the other side.