Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (13 page)

I smell strong of the curse on my breed right now, he
thought, and turned the mare up on the
trail
beside the creek, but after a few yards had to swing down out of the
saddle and lead her, the pitch was so steep.

Just below the crest of the first ridge the pines
opened about a pile of great, rounded boulders, hedged along the base
by manzanita. The trail turned south there and leveled out. Arthur’s
boot heels and the mare’s hoofs made faint, stunted echoes among
the boulders, and then only their own sounds again. They came to the
edge of a short, deep ravine.

There once more the cat had rested, sitting so it
could look back down the slope. Arthur stood for a moment staring at
the many overlapping flower tracks, the circle of the haunches and
the wide sweep of its tail. Then he turned up again around the
boulders and beside the ravine. The trail became so steep here that
the mare behind him scrambled and slipped and he had to wait every
time for her to catch herself and make a new start. Above the
boulders it became easier again up a slope of sand under the snow,
and along the edge of a rising thicket of manzanita nearly drifted
under. Out of the manzanita there rose abruptly another formation of
rock, the true peak of the foothill. This one wasn’t rounded, but
tilted up and weathered sharply into three edges, like spires when
seen from below, two on the north end, close together, but the
northernmost much smaller, like a child at its mother’s shoulder,
and one, lower and apart from them, and bulkier, almost a half-dome,
swelling over the trail and the edge of the ravine. The new snow
marked their sides in gothic fretwork and lay in a narrow triangle,
point up, between the two close spires and in a wide, inverted
triangle between the highest spire and the half-dome.

Arthur stopped, looked up at the rock, and smiled a
little. It was the formation they called Cathedral Rock. He had come
there a good many times to sit alone and whittle, and once in a while
with Grace, making it a goal for their ride. It was a good place to
sit. The rock rose clear of the trees and the whole valley was spread
out below. It was high enough to look over the hills on the other
side too, and show the desert mountains rolling range beyond range
into the east. The mind opened and grew quiet and solitary with that
reach before it. Even as he looked up at the rock, though, a shadowy,
less happy meaning, even a little fearful, stirred beneath the clear
memories. But then he saw the cat's track going up under the
half-dome, and the brief darkness passed from his mind while he
remembered the shapes of the mountain above the rock.

A nervy brute, for a fact, he thought. Going back
already; maybe in at the head of the canyon. He could make it down
that creek chimney, maybe, if he couldn’t get up it. Or going to
keep an eye on his kill, from the edge. Standing to breathe and let
the mare breathe, he looked up at the rock again, and thought of the
hours he’d spent there, his mind exploring while the little wooden
figures took shape under his knife. In the summer the smell of hot
granite, faint and clean, mingled with cooler airs from above, full
of pine and cedar. The small, quick sounds of birds and chipmunks
busy around him, like notes from an instrument plucked in drowsy
inattention, became part of the warmth and sweet air. And everything
came together, became bigger and easier and more durable, when he
glanced down from his carving into the valley, where tiny,
white-marked cattle moved slowly on the meadow stretches, and the
tule marshes shone like metal in the sun. Then, always, he was led by
the shape of the valley to look away into the northeast too, through
the pass to the black, shimmering wall of the first desert
mountain,
where the road turned south for Reno, and beyond the black wall,
farther and wider over the sea of desert hills flowing in the heat,
to the narrow white rim on the eastern horizon, that might have been
a rear guard of departing clouds, but was really a snow-capped range
way out toward the middle of the state.

The extent of the view was great enough to show the
curve of the horizon, and give the feeling that the world was
floating in space, and sometimes, under its influence, his mind would
sweep together, as the hand sweeps together scattered cards on a
table, the many troublesome, fragmentary thoughts of weeks, or even
months, into the one big answer they had all been looking for, the
answer that, like all good answers, was only a beginning of a bigger
question. When that happened, so that he finally rode home moving
happily, for the time being, in a new and larger realm, he would
always keep a particular fondness for the figure he had been carving
then. To get that figure out during some closed-in evening of a
winter, and finger it, and set it on the kitchen table in the rim of
light beyond the shadow of the lamp bowl, like a little idol in the
deliberate light of a temple, would be enough to bring the whole
afternoon back to him, its near, clean smells and little, plucking
sounds, its space and shining, its questions and answer and the new
question. He could have made a gallery from among his whittlings that
were scattered around everywhere in the house, especially in Grace’s
room and on top of the bookcase in the kitchen, that would remind him
of fifteen or twenty such afternoons. They were a kind of secret
diary, those whittlings, a notebook of his private living and all
that was important to him. If he were to set them up in a row, in the
order in which they’d been made, they would furnish an encouraging
evidence, a proof that he could touch, that he was moving, however
erratically and with whatever troubled intervals. The question that
went with the last piece mattered more than those before it, as the
piece itself was better cut, simpler and meaning more. He never would
set them up like that, of course, except in his mind, but he could
have.

Those gains had come more often in the fall than in
the summer, he thought. The best time of all on the rock was in the
Indian summer of late September, or of a better October than this was
turning out to be. The mild warmth and the stillness that came then
opened him more gently and more widely, without any effort on his
part. It removed the last strain of anguish and contest from his
thinking, and let his findings assume proportion and perspective
almost by themselves. Then was the season of big answers and of
resigned, late-afternoon wonder, when the mote-filled roads of light
came straight down through the passes onto the yellowing meadows, and
the pines and golden aspens stood under them in motionless, smoky
blue shadow, and a single hawk, perhaps, wrote his attentive silence
widely upon space below.

Looking up at the rock and remembering, he wanted, as
a kind of token thanks for these hours, to go up and sit against it
now, and maybe finish Joe Sam’s cat for him. He smiled a little at
the notion, and shook his head gently within the hood, thinking what
Curt would say if he came hurrying up here with his snowshoes and his
food and found him sitting on a rock with snow on it, whittling and
looking at the valley.

“
Well, come on, Smudge," he said, and tugged
gently at the reins. The little mare heaved forward and began to move
up behind him, and he put the reins over his right shoulder and led
her, the carbine in his left hand almost touching the snow as the
pitch steepened again. He
realized then that just
the memories of the rock had served him almost as well as if he had
gone up there and sat for a while. The painful fist within him had
opened as if his thought had
balanced out the
killing, or nearly.

I must tell Hal to bring Gwen up here before she goes
home, he thought, and smiling a little added, They'l1 have to get out
of that kitchen, anyway.

He was under the half-dome rock, though not there at
all in his thoughts, when suddenly the mare neighed shrilly, in
extreme terror, and wheeled toward the ravine. Before he  
could let go of the reins, he was dragged over backwards and to the
side. He fell into the stiff springing hedge of brush at the edge,
and half entangled there saw the big cat above him, crouched on a
slanting ledge of the rock, its hind quarters gathering under it,
like pressed springs, for the leap, and its long, heavy tail lifted a
little for balance and curling and uncurling slowly at the tip, as if
separately alive.

His body, after an instant, struggled fiercely to get
free onto the solid trail, and to pull the carbine up out of the
tangle of branches into which its weight had drawn his left arm and
shoulder. His mind, though, quite independently and scarcely
disconcerted, mocked him gently, saying, The shell in the chamber’s
empty, my friend. Dreaming again, Curt would say.

He let go of the gun and tried to roll in the
breaking and clinging of the brush, but the panther leapt, spread
like a launching bird, and he froze under it, staring up at the
great, nervously grinning head bent toward him, fangs bared, between
the reaching forelegs, the pale, enormous eyes, lambent within,
fixing his own as their target. Even then his mind made one more
little jest against him, saying quickly, Not even a black one; not
the belly, at least, and then he saw on the pale belly the long,
blackened wound the bull had dug. He felt it torn in his own flesh,
and made one more convulsive effort to roll free, but got only one
hand, the bare one, and one knee onto the trail, and then, with a
small moan of surrender, squeezed out of his body without his knowing
it, had only time to brace himself and turn his face down from the
darkening fall.

Far away, separated from him by the distance between
the living and the dead, he heard the terrified mare crash in the
thickets below and cry wildly.

7

Curt sat by the table, working the last of the hot
beef fat into the buckskin pacs that had dried hard and wrinkled
during the summer.

He looked across the table at Gwen again, and said,
"Well, if it’s a black one, and that big, we’ll make it into
a blanket for your wedding bed. You’ll need it, with a hard winter
coming up, and a bashful kid for a husband. And think how peaceful
you’d sleep under it, when you got around to sleeping. Why, he’s
the cause of all the trouble in the world, that black painter. Joe
Sam says so. Arthur says so. Grace says so, though that don’t count
so much, because she always says what Arthur says. Even young Hal
there, though he don’t spread his opinions
quite
so easy yet, is beginning to think so. There must be something in it,
if all our thinkers think so. Imagine how easy you could rest, with
the end of all the troubles in the world right there over you to
prove there wasn’t anything could go wrong."

He grinned and stared into Gwen’s eyes with the
hawk look that made her defend what he ridiculed. It didn’t work
any better now than it had from the start. Gwen just sat there across
from him, with her chin in her hands, smiled a little, and looked at
him out of her dark eyes, with their slight, Oriental tilt, and said,
"That would be fine," without showing anything she really
thought.

Because she repulsed him so easily, and because there
wasn’t much time left, he was suddenly angry. He stopped kneading
the greasy pac, and stared at her, and the little fluttering of rage
was in his eyes, so she had to look away from them, but by now he
knew this didn’t mean a gain. When the fury in his mind thinned
enough to let him think words, he looked down at the pac and rubbed
the grease twice more into the creases of the instep and tossed the
bit that was left over into the wood-box.

Goddam, superior bitch, he thought. He began to work
the pac fiercely between his hands to seem busy and in control of
himself. A black mucker’s daughter, for Christ’s sake, he
thought, playing the superior bitch with me. A whore, ten to one.
They all are, at heart. And play-acting a dumb virgin. Saving herself
for her puppy love. By God, just let a man get hold of her once,
and...

Grace came out of the storeroom under the landing,
closed the door, came across to the table and put on it an oilskin
packet that bulged with what it held.

"There’s your lunch," she said. "I
put in just what you asked for, but I still think you ought to take
more."

"Thanks, that’ll be plenty," he said, not
looking up.

He pulled on the pacs and began lacing them over the
blue woolen pants he’d put on instead of his jeans and chaps. Or if
this Grace would quit poking her long nose in, he thought. If I could
just get the little bitch alone for an hour once. What the hell can
you do in here, with Grace always poking her nose in, and the old man
falling asleep over his liquor already, and the old lady there . . .

Grace said, from the front window, where she stood
looking out into the yard, "Hal’s bringing Kentuck out now."

Such a hell of a hurry to get me out of here, Curt
thought, like I was going to ruin her right here in front of ’em,
or something. Does she think Mother’s ever going to let her baby
marry the little tart? What does she think the old lady’s been
sitting there all this time for then, and not even paying any
attention to things I been saying she’d jump down my throat for
most times? And did, before they come out, for that matter.

He jerked the laces of the second pac tight and wound
them twice around the ankle and knotted them.

"He’s been long enough at it. Let him wait,"
he said. He stood up and began working his feet forward into the toes
of the pacs, to loosen them.