Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (62 page)

"We’ll leave the horses here," he said.
"Too much snow, and they’re spooky already."

He swung off, and Joe Sam let himself down more
slowly. They led the horses into the willows and tied them by ropes
around the bases of two clumps, and took their snow-shoes off the
saddles and laced them on, Joe Sam the small home-made bear-paws, and
Harold the longer, narrow webs.

"I go that side, hwh?" Joe Sam asked,
pointing across the creek.

Harold nodded. "Keep where I can see you."

Joe Sam worked along the willows, until they thinned
at a shallows, and went through and across.the creek and up on the
other side until Harold could see his head and shoulders against the
snow. Then they went up canyon slowly, keeping abreast of each other
and alternately scanning the snow close before them and looking up
ahead into the heavy shadow between the cliffs that were too steep to
hold snow except in their scars.

It was Joe Sam, perhaps instructed by the tracks that
came down on his side, who pointed across toward the south wall, and
held his hand there, pointing, until Harold saw the dark, anonymous
bulk under a shelving drift, with the rim of the drift partly fallen
over it. Then he could pick out the broken trail that led from it
down to the willows too. He nodded, and they moved up again. Harold
didn’t stop at the track, but only read it with a tightening of the
chest at what it promised. The great pad marks, like broken flowers,
were in the furrow on top of the sharper, split hearts of the hoofs,
and only thinly covered with snow the wind had blown in. He took off?
the mitten from his trigger hand, and watched scrupulously from the
willows to the south wall ahead of him, and more often up into the
shadow.

When he saw the next tracks way ahead, but going up
along the willows, so they showed plainly, he guessed, and looked
almost as soon as Joe Sam pointed across, and saw where the cat had
gone up diagonally toward the new trail from its kill under the south
wall.

Curt was right, he thought. Not even for fresh meat.
A killer for fun, and pumped the first cartridge into the barrel,
slowly, to be as quiet as he could.

And not only of cows, he thought grimly. Just let me
get one crack at you, just one good crack, that’s all I ask, he
practically prayed, even moving his lips a little, but then warned
himself off, feeling the excitement hurry his thoughts and tighten
his body.

He came into the deep rut he’d seen ahead, and
found it made by three steers, two lumbering so close together they’d
jostled each other, and one running alone, ahead of them. Where the
two trails came together, just above the first aspens, the flurry of
marks was too wild to read quickly, but following the heavier marks,
he saw the two red hulks down among the aspens, and then went on up,
the blue canyon shadow coming over him coldly, because the flower
prints went up too, and sometimes blurred the last hoof prints.

He found the fourth one, a young brindled heifer,
above the next bend, where the canyon on his side began to rise
steeply from the creek, so the aspens were gold bushes below him,
only their tops standing out of the snow caught against the slope.
The heifer had started down there, and lost her footing in the drift
at the edge, and the cat had caught up with her. Her head was
stretched into the snow and half covered by it. The hide had been
ripped away raggedly from her shoulder, and the flesh chewed out
deeply and widely, so the white joint showed, and the first ribs
behind it. The blood was still liquid and bright in small pools in
the wound, and short comets of it still flecked the snow red in many
directions out from where the heifer lay, like the pattern of a
little, scarlet bomb-burst.

The panther’s tracks still went up beyond this last
kill, along the ledge above the creek, where the wind had kept the
snow shallower, and then Harold thought, peering, not quite certain
in the blue gloom under the high walls, zig-zag up the high fall of
boulders, smoothed almost into the canyon slope by the snow, and out
of sight onto the shelf at the head.

Right into the trap, he thought. And not minutes ago,
not minutes, he added silently, glancing again at the blood in the
great wound in the heifer’s shoulder.

Once more he checked the dangerous excitement. If Joe
Sam hasn’t found where he came out, he thought. He looked down
across the creek, and after a moment found Joe Sam’s brown face,
much lower than he’d expected, looking up at him through the yellow
leaves and the pale snakes of branches. The old man saw him, all
right, but he only waited there, makin no sign.

So it's in there still, he thought, and felt himself
tighten again in spite of all he could do.

He nodded largely to Joe Sam, and made a fierce
woodpecker signal in the air toward the head of the canyon to warn
him. When he started up again, the motion easing him a little, he
rebuked himself for his officious gesture.

Don’t waste your time worrying about him, he
thought. His one old eye’s better than your two young ones. And
there’s something else works in him, he thought, remembering the
halt
on the south ridge. He was sure of this
before he saw a track.

Thinking that, he remembered what Curt had said about
the steers and the bull that had been killed up there on the platform
ahead. Back to the scene of the old crime? he wondered, smiling a
little, tightly, in his mind, but his eyes searching carefully before
him, all along the curving fort of the platform.

At the foot of the rock slide, where the cat had
begun to make the switch-backs going up, he paused and hunted with
his eyes down among the aspen tops for Joe Sam again, and this time
found him farther in than he was himself, and higher than he
expected, already above the level of the aspens and working up the
slanting base of the north wall still farther to see onto the
platform before he exposed himself. The old man wasn’t looking over
at him at all now. He wasn’t looking where he was going either, but
feeling his way up and watching the edge of the platform all the
time. He was carrying the old Sharps ready across his body.

You’ll worry yourself to death yet, my friend,
Harold told himself, and made the thin smile in his mind at this joke
too, wondering a little that he should be making any jokes right
then, and above all, jokes of that kind, but pleased that he did.

He turned toward the south wall, where the tilt of
the canyon floor rose into the platform more gradually. That was
where the tracks said the cat had gone up also. He paused after each
two shuffling steps to look all along the rim of the platform and to
listen, he didn’t know what for, just anything that shouldn’t be
heard there. But there was only the wind once in a while, beating
hollowly over the canyon head, and always the subdued conversation of
the creek in the snow and ice.

In the corner where the platform of rock joined the
cliff, he squatted on his heels to stay hidden, and prepared the last
step of the attack. The carbine was ready, and he was holding it
ready, and he was far enough back from the platform to swing it where
he had to. He must raise himself slowly, with his head against the
dark cliff, and he must make the first shot count; the first shot
must be at least seriously crippling. If a panther like this one ever
reached him, if it ever got inside the muzzle of the carbine with
even one second of life left in it, it would take him apart like
tearing paper; it would break his neck like snapping a dry splinter.
There were two considerations which worried him. The panther might be
so close to him when he saw it that he couldn’t get even the one
precious shot, and the snowshoes, when he thought of such a sudden
attack, seemed dangerously clumsy. He could discover no remedy for
either trouble, though. There was no way to know where the cat was
except to look, and in these drifts, he’d be even more helpless
without snowshoes than with them.

He experienced a brief loathing for close quarters,
blind spots, and the airiness of new snow, which surpassed any
natural loathing he’d ever known before. Then it occurred to him
that if he waited too long, it might be Joe Sam that the panther
would be tearing like paper, and snapping like a dry splinter. He was
compelled to act promptly, and there were only two things he could
afford to think of; he must see the panther first glance, and if
possible, before it saw him, and he must keep himself perfectly
steady in order that the all-important first shot should be neither
too hasty to do its work nor too slow to do that work in time.

This tactical conference was actually more a matter
of feeling than of thought, and was concluded in a few seconds. As he
began to inch up against the cliff, however, his mind, quite by
itself, and without distracting his attention at all, made another
unexpectedly humorous comment.

Darned if I think there’s any cat there at all, it
declared. Darned if I don’t think it’s Joe Sam’s cat after all,
and there’ll be nothing to see in there except snow and three dead
steers. The critter’s killed seven in all, now, and never been
seen. Why on earth, then, should you expect it to show itself in
broad daylight, and in the one place it couldn’t get out of? It
won’t, of course; it simply won’t be there, and you’re making a
fool of yourself with all this caution.

The panther was there, though, and in spite of trying
to ready himself for anything, Harold was surprised. In part he was
expecting to find it way over by Joe Sam’s edge with its back
turned; and in part not to find it at all, but only empty snow and
the grinning black cliffs. Actually, as his eyes and the muzzle of
the carbine came above the snow, he saw the panther only at third
glance, and then farther away than he had thought of, back under the
cliff and over near the falls. And in spite of his care, it had taken
warning in some way. It was looking right at him. Also, he’d
forgotten about the snow. He was prepared to see the whole huge,
clever, dark cat at once. Actually only its head and shoulders showed
and the curling tip of its tail above them.

Arranged that way, dark upon a platter of snow, the
head appeared black and impossibly large, and for a moment Joe Sam
was the one wise man among many fools and the carbine became a
useless toy against the cold panther will that was measuring him out
of the yellow eyes.

Yet even then, his independent mind repeated its
first joke. Beside the cat he saw, without looking away from the
fascinating eyes, a red and white bulge of steer’s hide, and he
thought, Yes sir, back to the scene of the crime.

That small humor of disbelief freed him to raise the
carbine, but at the same instant the watchful trance was also broken
by some sound or movement Joe Sam made on the other side. The cat
turned its head and saw the old Indian on the north slope raising the
Sharps as he came up into sight. The two threats so far apart made up
its mind for it, and it moved at once. Baring its great fangs in a
snarl of fear, it swung away toward the back corner upon its right,
but saw at once that it couldn’t climb out there, and swung clear
around again toward the other corner, where the cliff sloped a little
in the narrow creek chimney bearded with ice and snow. It cleared the
drifts on the platform in two great bounds, crashed through the ice
that covered the basin, screaming wildly at this sudden failure of
its footing, and leapt into the chimney. It clawed its way up
unbelievably on the ice and stone to three times its own length above
the basin. While its scream still beat back and forth between the
cliffs above him, like enraged eagles, putting his teeth on edge and
raising his back hair, Harold forced the muzzle of the carbine up
after the climbing cat. Its scrambling stiffened and slowed, the
talons of the forepaws scraping desperately, and failing. It glared
down over its right shoulder, the long snarl rattling in its throat,
and braced its left hind foot high to drive it out over the pool when
it fell. It hung there for an instant, motionless, clinging dark and
spread-armed against the
mottled crevice of rock
and ice. In that instant, Harold fixed the blade of the front sight
in the notch of the rear, and just under the straining shoulder, and
jerked the trigger home. Dimly through the jet and the drift of the
smoke, while the blast still closed his ears, he saw the panther
launch out and drop away, like a great bat, toward the narrow snow
under the north cliff. Its second scream pierced the deep echoes of
the report that rolled among themselves around him, yet he saw that
the fall was not helpless, but had the tense line of purpose, and
thought, even as he quickly lowered the carbine and sprung the lever
again, God Almighty, missed, and felt a fleet return through his body
of his loathing for the snowshoes and encumbering drifts.

The cat struck, snarling continuously now, floundered
for an instant in the drifts, and bounded away down canyon and toward
the creek. The snow dragged heavily at it, but even so it had raced
below the platform before he could sight on it again.

Jesus, right at Joe Sam, he thought, and yelled,
“Look Out, Joe Sam," so that his voice and the last of the
cat’s scream and the rocky thunder of the report fought all
together for a moment in the shadowy air.

The turmoil had scarcely begun to diminish, when it
was renewed. The Sharps boomed somewhere below the ledge, and the cat
suddenly broke its snarl with half a scream, and at once the cliffs
again multiplied and deepened the report and gave wings to the
scream. Joe Sam yelled below, but excited, not wailing. Shuffling
half-around to watch the lower slope, cursing, in his mind, the
screen of aspens, Harold saw the cat going down, making the dark,
serpent-curving leaps, but more slowly, he thought, staggering a
little at each drop and fumbling the take-offs more than the snow
explained.