Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (56 page)

He didn’t pause even to taste this significant
triumph, but, alternately working and watching, blew upon the little
flame until it had come up whiter through several spaces in the ball
of lining, and then busily rearranged the twigs to lie above the
center of tire. This time the twigs took suddenly and brightly, and
then arose a noisy fire as big as his hand. He drew a bough to him
from the pile and hastily cut more twigs onto the fire. There was
still snow on the bough and the new twigs sputtered and the flames
sank as the snow melted and dripped into them. Frantically he stooped
and blew into the fire. He continued to blow until he was so dizzy
that the clearing was swinging in uneven circles. The fire saved
itself. He straightened up, sighing with relief, and reached for
another bough. He shook this one free of snow and when he judged the
fire could stand it, laid it on whole. At last he stood up and began
to lay more boughs on, first carefully shaking each bough free of
snow. The blaze grew with a hostile
crackling and
spitting until its jumping light reached all the way across the
clearing to the trees.

"There, goddam you," Curt said to the
trees.

He was shaking from the long time he had squatted
there denying his fear in order to nurse the fre, and from the cold
which had worked back into him, but he was also triumphant. In his
triumph he stood guard boldly erect beside the fire, with the carbine
in the crook of his arm and gazed scornfully about the clearing. When
the fre began to weaken, he fed it with the generosity of a victor.
The new blaze rose higher than the frst and cast its light farther,
even into the alleys of snow among the trees. He grinned at the trees
along the north edge.

"Black or not black," he told them, "you’re
as scared of a fre as any of ’em, ain’t you, you murderin’
black bastard."

He continued to stand with the carbine in the crook
of his arm and the belittling grin upon his face, and to congratulate
himself with silent bursts of satisfaction, for it was clear to him
now that the fire was an ally who would see him through the night.

"And once I got daylight to see by again . . ."
he said, and grinned even more widely.

It wasn’t until the fire began to shrink once more,
and the shadows to advance slowly from the edge of the woods, that it
came to him, like a blow in his middle, that there were only a few
boughs left of the pile he had cut.

"Geez," he whispered, dismayed anew that
his fatuous relief should have made him overlook this first
essential. He whirled and counted his reserve. "Four," he
said desperately, "four measly little branches. For God’s
sake, man,” he prodded himself, "wake up, will you? Wake up.
And it’s sinkin’ into the snow too. The goddam snow’ll put it
out if you don’t."

He looked all around the clearing, but saw no
movement that didn’t, after a second look, resolve itself into a
trick of the fire. He crossed hastily to the trees along the south
edge and stood the carbine up in the snow and began to hack at boughs
once more. When he had a good armload, he got hold of the carbine and
went back to the failing fire at a bent-kneed half run. He tossed the
boughs onto the snow and fed half a dozen of them into the fire one
at a time, and when they had taken well and the clearing was lighted
to the trees and even up among them again, he stood the carbine up
and knelt and cross-wove half a dozen boughs flat upon the snow and
carefully, using two of the larger boughs for tongs, lifted the fire
onto them and poked it back together again.

"There," he said. "That’ll hold you
for a while."

He fed the bright ally as fully as he dared and
returned to the south edge with the carbine and the knife. He kept up
the cutting for a long while this time, resting only when his
trembling hand and wrist refused the work entirely, and now and then
to trudge hastily back to the fire and throw more fuel on it and dump
all the extra boughs onto his new reserve pile on the
downhill
side. He carried the carbine back and forth with him on every trip.

At last, when his hand was bleeding and his shoulder
cramped and there wasn’t much to choose between the blade and the
back of the knife except for the nicks, he carried his final armload
out and threw it all onto the reserve pile. It made a very impressive
pile then, low compared to its length and width, yet taller than he
was, fir and cedar and spruce and pine, and the biggest boughs he
could cut, so the real burning would go on a long time after the
needles had dared off. He surveyed the magnificent pile from his
bloodshot eyes and grinned. He wasn’t steady on the webs, even with
the carbine as a prop, but there was in that grin the confidence of
one who sees his way clear to the end of a difficu1t problem.

"There, goddam you," he said softly,
addressing the patient, invisible cat. "And I won’t move again
till it’s daylight; so help me, I won’t."

He counted boughs into the fire until it was taking
steadily and sharply and casting its bright looks on every tree
around the clearing, and then laid another iioor of boughs between it
and the reserve pile. He leaned the carbine against the pile and
squatted on the floor of boughs and unlaced the webs and stood them
up together beside the carbine. He sat down and leaned back against
the cushioning pile and stretched his feet to the blaze. Laying the
carbine handy across his lap, he made and lit a cigarette and then
let his head fall back into the boughs too, and smoked slowly. The
smoke in his long freshened lungs and on his empty belly made him
very dizzy at first, but it tasted good and it helped to ease his
hunger. He was too tired, too cramped, dull, shaking tired to be very
hungry any more anyway. After the third drag at his cigarette, he
said once more, but very softly this time, "Not till it’s
daylight, by God; not till it’s daylight, so help me."

29

He could not, at first, maintain a confidence which
justified this little boast. He didn’t feel safe sitting down and
in that open place with the firelight on him. The movements of the
light in the edge of the woods alarmed him repeatedly and made him
long to jump to his feet and raise the carbine against some shadowy
threat. His long laboring muscles jerked independently when he
relaxed and grew tense at each alarm. His sore and tired eyes moved
with independent fearfulness in his head, trying to keep guard all
around the edge of the clearing, but particularly along the north
edge, opposite the fire. They went back to the north edge after each
glance elsewhere. Without knowing it, he even shifted his position a
little at a time until he was half facing the north edge.
Occasionally his eyes more than doubled an alarm by detecting a
fleeting, shadowy passage in the very place they were watching, a
movement just beyond the reach of the light and out of rhythm with
the flickering of the fire, so that he put both hands to the carbine
and even began to lift it. He wished to smoke his cigarette slowly
and deeply, but unless he kept his mind on doing so, he sucked on it
quickly and blew out the smoke quickly too, and hard, so that it
wouldn’t screen his vision. When an alarming shadow moved, he
stopped smoking altogether and let the cigarette hang motionless from
the corner of his mouth, smoking only by itself, at the tip.

Gradually, however, the warmth and the light
reassured him. The small, inclined world of the
clearing,
which was all he could see and all his weariness would allow him to
consider, became more and more a sufficient margin of safety, a wide
and blessed nakedness into which the enemy dared not venture so long
as there was light. He gained faith in the power of the fire itself
to hold the cat off.

"Scared of a little fire, ain’t you, you black
son-of-a-bitch," he murmured, and a little later, "I could
go to sleep right here, and you still wouldn’t dare make a try."

In his mind he commented, It’s all his game in the
dark, the sneaky, black bastard, but while I got a fire and this—he
patted the stock of the carbine with his mittened hand—it’s all
mine.

"I’ll wait you out, all right," he told
the cat.

He didn’t wholly believe in the truth of any of
these daring remarks, but the monitor protested each of them a trifle
less vehemently than the one before it, and he felt that he was
gaining an internal victory, a success in home politics, as it were,
that was a further guarantee of the ultimate triumph of his strategy.
Several times he repeated, either aloud or silently in exactly the
same words, "Not till daylight, by God," and with each
repetition the promise became less a boast and more a simple reminder
of the immediate tactics necessary to sustain the greater plan. The
shadowy alarms came farther apart and with decreasing force until an
occasional glance around or just at the critical salient on the north
edge seemed enough to maintain his defenses.

The heat of the fire was doubled where he sat by the
pile of boughs behind him. The ice on his moustache melted and began
to drip. He threw the wet butt of the cigarette into the flames and
pressed the ice out of the bristles of the moustache with short,
quick flips of his forefinger, and there was another minor irritation
gone. He hadn’t noticed it at all, being busy with much bigger
troubles, but now he was relieved by its absence. His body relaxed as
the warmth worked into his garments, and then through them. The knot
the branch-cutting had tied in his shoulder was loosened and the ache
in his hand and wrist diminished. The unpredictable jerkings of his
arms and legs became only twitchings and finally ceased, and much of
his apprehension departed with them. Even the busy chewing of his
stomach on itself eased off, and that was where every fear began. His
feet suffered a period of excruciating tingling as the feeling came
back into them, but he flexed them slowly and steadily inside the
steaming pacs until he knew all their parts again and each toe could
move by itself, and actually gained a small, perverse pleasure from
the tingling. It gave him something to work the feet against, and
afforded him a minor but certain triumph within the great triumph of
fire and clearing and rest which he could not yet permit himself to
celebrate without reservation.

He took off his left mitten too, and with his warmed
hands dug up snow from around the edge of the platform of boughs and
pressed it slowly into ice-balls. When he had set four of the wet,
gray balls in a row beside him, he reached back, congratulating
himself on the arrangement which made all these tasks so easy, and
pulled down five boughs, and leaned forward and laid them on the fire
one by one, taking care that their solid stems should cross so they’d
keep burning after the flare of the needles. Then he made another
cigarette and lit it
with a twig from the fire,
and picked up an ice-ball and leaned back again. He meant just to
suck slowly at the ice-ball but the first wet in his mouth made him
so eager that he bit off chunks and chewed them to get the water
faster. With the second ball, however, he took his time, alternately
sucking it and drawing at the cigarette, and the third ball was an
indulgence. He breathed out a thin plume of smoke insultingly, in the
manner of one who is secure before a detested enemy, and turned his
eyes slowly to look at the north edge of the clearing.

"I hope you freeze out there, you bastard,"
he said. "I hope you’re drooling for a taste of me."

He chuckled at the picture his mind made of the
panther crouching in the shadow of a spruce tree and staring with
great flickering eyes at the savory man at ease between his support
of boughs and his sentry fire. He was amused by the indecision of its
gaze, the torment it was enduring between fear of the fire and the
urge to get at him. He made it slaver a little and then gulp its
spittle, and chuckled again. He saw this against the fire, and
without concern, as he might have looked at a colored illustration in
a child’s book. Indeed he was beginning to find it difficult to
look beyond the happily moving fire at all, and almost as soon as he
had created it, the picture of the great cat lost the power to hold
his full attention. It began to change shape and dilate and blur, so
that the head of the cat became much too large and bright and, to his
faint, departing amusement, assumed the iridescent halo of the fire
as its own before it disappeared.

"Thinks it’s a damned saint now," he
murmured. "Damned cat thinks it’s a saint."

He was standing on the paving blocks of the
Embarcadero in San Francisco. It was the middle of the morning and
the sunlight was warm and clear and full of the curving, arrowy
flights and scattered settlings, like fruit blossoms falling, of
hundreds of pigeons. He was dressed expensively in clothes that he
must have put on for the evening before, and wore a gray derby and
carried a cane. With his head back, like a man for whom there is
neither hurry nor care, he was breathing out the smoke of a very
large and costly cigar. In fact the cigar was so remarkably large as
to amuse him. He was watching, with wakeful eyes under indolent lids,
the passage of three hurrying women, all laughing alarms and sudden
scurryings, across the wide plaza full of drays and carriages,
clatter and calling, from the Ferry Building to the safety of a
Market Street sidewalk. He had divined as they passed, in the quick,
laughing glance of the woman nearest him, that it might be worth his
while to follow them. Certainly the glance had been more than
accidental, and its brightness not entirely the result of her
adventure in the traffic. She had observed him quite completely for
so short a look, and had ended by gazing directly, even with a kind
of boldness, into his own eyes, before her companion in the center
had drawn her by. Also there was something about the woman that was
familiar, and he believed the familiarity to be promising in itself.
He had seen her before somewhere, and their relationship, whatever it
had been, gave her look a significance that could not be mistaken.
The other two women wore long coats and great, flowered hats upon
high-piled hair, but the half-remembered one was wearing a yellow
suit with a pleasingly snug jacket, and no hat at all, but only the
coppery wreath of her own braided hair. While he was watching them
out into the center of the plaza’s confusion, she lifted the yellow
skirt and folded it forward over her thigh while making a graceful,
curving escape from the path of a huge, black dray horse with little
plumes, like the plume of a band
leader’s
shako, on its harness, and large, yellow and peculiarly human eyes.
Her escape was both more fearful and more revealing than the danger
warranted, for although the horse was large, upon second thought
unnaturally large, as arresting as a gigantic statue in the midst of
the life-sized turmoil around it, it was advancing slowly and was not
near enough to threaten her. He took the pleasant little exaggeration
to himself.