Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (53 page)

When he came right under it, he stared up at it and
said softly, "God, a blind cat with no nose could of picked it
out. And knocked it in, too," he added, "knocked it in like
nothing."

He went straight up toward it as far as he could, and
then climbed sideways in what was left of the steps he had made that
morning. When he reached the top of the tallest slope he went across
at once to the corner of the wall that had no snow on it. There was
no time to waste mooning over the strange hold the cave had on him.
He would knock in a few slabs of the shale and reach out the oilskin
packet without taking off the webs, and get going again as fast as he
could. At the thought of having the packet, of opening it and finding
the buttered bread and the salt jerky, his mouth filled with saliva
so that he had to spit. He would eat it all, and go the rest of the
way tonight, wherever he was when it got dark. That’s the way he
would do it; no more dallying, no more silly notions.

He pushed, and the loose shale fell, clattering with
short, thick echoes inside, and let in enough light so he could see
the ledges he wanted to see. There was no sign of the yellow oilskin
of the packet. He reached in as far as he could, and felt to the back
of one ledge after another, but couldn’t End it. Everything
else—time, distance, darkness, the now only half-believable
cat—vanished from his mind. Nothing mattered except to get hold of
that packet. His watering mouth and the growling hollow of his
stomach demanded it fiercely.

He leaned the carbine against the cliff, and tore
away the rest of the wall, throwing it down the slope behind him,
shale and snow together. When the opening was large enough, he
crawled up into the cave and searched in the crevices, at first
carefully, but then, before he would be convinced, with his mittens
of and frantically. There was nothing in any crevice.

After a moment of kneeling there, blank with despair,
he unlaced the webs and let them fall outside, by the carbine, and
then crawled along over the stones he’d pushed in, and searched the
other end. He found the sheath of the knife, and slipped the knife
into it, and dropped it back into his pocket, but the oilskin wasn’t
there either, on the floor or in any of the crevices. He thought
wildly, for an instant, that he must have taken it with him after
all, and lost it somewhere along the side of the mountain in the
snow.

He corrected the notion savagely. "No, by God,"
he declared, "I left it here. I didn’t eat this morning. I
never touched it this morning. It’s gotta be here."

There was only once chance left. He began to hurl the
slabs of shale from the floor out the opening onto the slope. He had
thrown out only four or five of them when he saw the yellow patch
between two stones on the bottom, and exulted. Furiously he tossed
away the last slabs that kept it from him, and then, suddenly, with
his hands out in the air, ready to grasp another
slab,
he knelt there motionless, staring down at it. The oilskin itself had
been clumisly unrolled and then ripped, in places practically
shredded, and there was not a single visible crumb of bread or scrap
of jerky in it.

At first it seemed to him that the mountain itself
must have developed a malignant spirit, an evil, trivial,
crumb-eating thing that delighted in tormenting him. Then it crossed
his mind that the cougar might have entered the cave after he was
gone. A moment more, however, during which his disappointment and
revived despair brought tears to his eyes, and he knew that it must
have been the work of some of the little rock mice or chipmunks of
the heights. They must live in there under those back ledges, farther
than he had been able to see or feel. This guess did nothing but
embody the malice he had imputed in general to the mountain. He
continued to kneel there for some time, staring blindly down at the
empty, shredded oilskin.

At last, slowly, almost as dazed as when he had left
that morning, he crawled out onto the edge again, and laced on the
bear-paws and drew on his mittens. He lifted the carbine into the
crook of his right arm, where it felt now like part of himself
restored, and stepped slowly, both feet upon each step, down the
slope of snow into the bottom of the pass again.

"Even the mice now," he muttered. "Even
the darned, stinking, little tiny bits of mice now. Everything. Every
goddam thing in the wor1d."

It was a dispirited summary, however. He didn’t
feel very strongly about anything, even the mice. Half asleep he went
on through the pass to its east end, and out of it to the north, and
up onto the high ledges in the sun. There the cold wind struck him
fiercely once more, full of the dancing, glittering particles of
snow, like faults of his vision, and the dagger of time struck into
him again, and woke him a little. He began to hurry but he felt his
weakness all the time now, and knew it for what it was.

"That’s done it," he muttered. "Oh,
the goddam, stinking, little bits of mice, danmed if they haven’t
done it." He kept on trying to hurry, just the same. The fact
that he was already up to his knees in the shadow of the ridge made
him feel that he had to hurry. It was a constant reminder, almost as
if he were wading in icy water. Also, in spite of the fact that it
would take a long time, two or three hours anyway, to change what he
could see from up there enough to help him, he kept glancing
anxiously into the northwest, and even more often downslope to his
right. There were four big mountains up there in the northwest, with 
snow plumes streaming straight off their peaks. One of them had to be
Pinto Peak, but he couldn’t tell from here which one. The ridge
swelled and wandered ahead of him so that he couldn’t guess yet
which peak it was leading to, and none of them, seen from this angle,
and in their heavy new snow, had a shape he could be sure of.

It was even worse below him, a jumble of snow-covered
ridges and ravines he didn’t know at all, and then, over beyond
them, on the east, what looked from this side like a broken range of
separate mountains, miles across, and some of them nearly as high as
the ridge he was on. There was nothing to do but keep going north as
fast as he could, get far enough north before dark to be among
mountains he knew, or to see over into the northeast. What he wanted
to see more than anything else was the pass that went out of the
Aspen Creek to the northeast,
the opening through
the low hills, with the dark, desert mountain across the far end of
it like a wall. That, at least, was something he couldn’t possibly
make a mistake about. But so far, all he could see in the northeast
was the long, flat line of clouds, with sunlight on it, that was the
rear guard of the departing storm. It would be bad if he didn’t
find something he knew before dark. The stars would do to tell north
by, but they wouldn’t help much with anything smaller, and
mountains became even stranger in darkness than under snow. He didn’t
have enough left in him to trust to just big directions, North and
East, with their indifference to a few miles of error.

So he kept on hurrying, even though the weakness
stayed in his knees all the time now, and the wind was so strong
against him he could practically lean on it, and getting colder fast.
Even half running, as he was, and with the hood of the parka pulled
around from the left to shield his face from the little blizzards of
ground-snow, he was no longer warm. His right hand, holding the
carbine in the crook of his arm, was growing numb inside its heavy
mitten, and his feet in the pacs were beginning to feel dead and
lumpy too. It hurt his throat and chest to suck the cold wind in
through his mouth, but he had to, or slow down.

Just after the shadow of the ridge had reached the
skirt of the parka, he failed to see before him a knife-edge drift of
snow curving down from a ledge above him. The drift was packed hard
by the wind, and his right snow-shoe swung straight into it. His
knees gave way at once, as if only the habitual rhythm of their
movement and the lack of any obstacle had kept them working, and he
fell across the drift, pushed over onto his right shoulder by the
wind. The carbine leapt out of his arm, slid across the sharp crest
of the drift, and vanished down the other side. For several seconds
he lay still where he’d fallen, unable even to muster up any anger
about the accident. He felt only weak and ready to weep. It didn’t
seem to him, while he lay there, that there was the slightest chance
left for a man who was so far gone he could be knocked down by a
snowdrift.

Then suddenly his body granted him the saving anger.
"Goddam snow," he yelled. "Nothing but goddam snow,
snow, snow," and he struck fiercely into the drift with his left
fist, as if it were a human being who had played a practical joke on
him. He struck the drift three times, to match the "snow, snow,
snow," he was yelling. At the third blow, his fist slid 
upward and broke the blade-shaped crest of the drift. The loosened
snow, torn off by the wind, struck him full in the face, blinding
him, and blew down inside the hood in big clots. At once his anger
was transformed into caution. He became greatly alarmed that he
should be lying there, still miles of deep snow from home, and with
daylight nearly gone, pounding a snowdrift as if it had tripped him
on purpose. Part of his alarm, indeed, arose from the fact that the
drift had struck back so promptly and effectively. The sudden caution
was that of a man who has unexpectedly encountered a superior foe.

"Geez, boy," he admonished himself, "use
your head. You got nothing to spare for that kind of nonsense."

With difficulty, he got himself upright on the webs
again, and then he had to stand there, leaning against the wind with
his head bowed and his eyes closed, because he was so  dizzy.
His knees were jumping too. After a moment the dizziness passed, but
his knees kept right on
trembling. His whole legs
were trembling. He opened his eyes. The mountains to the northeast,
where he was looking, swayed and flowed together, and tiny black
spots, like the swarming flakes, only there were no flakes swarming,
circled rapidly and flew back and forth across one another at a great
distance. The mountains soon drew apart and became firm again, but
the swarming slowed down and thinned out very slowly.

Like damn bats, he thought, like damn bats hunting.
He closed his eyes again, and waited until the bats stopped flying on
the whiteness inside his lids, after becoming, during the last
instant, white bats upon black snow fields. Then he opened his eyes
again, and there were only the fixed black points of timber in the
distant snow.

"Take it easy, boy," he advised himself.
"Slow and steady is what gets there."

His mind went on by itself, Left out of the pass,
half a day north, right, and go till you see it; left out of the
pass, half a day north . . .

At that point he managed to stop its jabbering.

He worked his way carefully up over the drift, and
started north again, saying, "Slow and steady," and
carefully refusing to let the advice become another chant. He had
shuffled perhaps twenty steps before he understood that he felt queer
because there was nothing in his right arm, which was nonetheless
crooked as if the carbine still lay across it. He was badly
frightened by this lapse. For the first time since he’d left the
pass that morning, the real flight of the small dark birds swept over
him.

"Jesus," he yelled at himself, "wake
up," and then promptly, because he felt how his strength was
drained by the anger, he whispered, "Take it easy."

And don’t cuss, the monitor said. Now, of all
times, don’t take the name of the Lord in vain.

He returned almost to the drift, and then saw where
the carbine was lying, the groove of its descent, and the well it had
made a few yards below. He went down and picked it up, and dusted the
snow off it with his mittens, and climbed back up until he could
start north again in his own tracks. He went slowly now, lifting each
foot as little as possible, sliding it around and forward through the
loose top-snow. He took the steps slowly too, trying to stay within
the bounds demanded by his failing energy and to lessen the
light-headedness, which wouldn’t leave him, and prevent its
maturing into another swarm of bats.

This careful husbanding of his remaining powers did
not last long. He couldn’t keep his thoughts or his will upon
maintaining it, and the dark, internal traitor of time gained power
over him steadily as the shadow of the ridge came higher. Gradually
he began to increase his pace again, and at the end of half an hour,
he was once more shuffling along as fast as he could, bent forward
into the wind, and making little bleating noises when he breathed.

Caught in a sudden and unusually vindictive spray of
snow, he faltered, and stepped with one web onto the other, and fell
again, half burying himself. No rage came to his rescue this time.
He
lay there for a minute or two, weeping a little, but easily, not even
with desperation. It was finally only the slow return and growth of
fear which drove him to undertake the labor of struggling to his
feet, and picking up the carbine, and moving on.

He had gone only a short way, when he realized that
he was entirely in the shadow of the ridge now, and the wind,
although it seemed to be slacking off a little, was very much colder.
He had to get into the light again. He didn’t reason about it. It
was simply that the shadow and the cold in the shadow were
intolerable. Slowly, on a gradual slant, he climbed to the crest of
the ridge and into full sunlight again. It wasn’t much help,
though. It was only light now, a deepening, end-of-the-day kind of
light, without any warmth in it whatever, and the wind up there was
even worse. The sun stood far down on the west, gilding a low and
infinitely distant horizon of clouds into a city of domes and
enormous banners that extended as far as he could see into the north
and into the south. Everywhere the light of that low sun struck, it
frightened him with the sense of lateness. There were many more
shadows than lights on the sea of mountains, and where high, angled
snow fields took the light it was no longer dazzling, but only softly
glowing.