The Track of the Cat Read online

  Track of the Cat

  Walter Van Tilburg Clark

  1949

  PART ONE

  1

  Arthur was the first in the Bridges’ ranch house to hear the far-away crying, like muted horns a little out of tune. The wind turned and came down over the shoulder of the Sierra against the house, shaking the log wall beside his bunk and hurling the snow across the window above him. It let go and slid away south, wailing under the eaves. The house relaxed and the snow whispered twice by itself, and than the faint, melancholy blowing came from the north.

  Arthur rolled over to lie with his back to the wall, and curled his arm up over his head, as if to protect himself from an attack he couldn’t fight against. The sound like horns sank away; the gale surged back over it, roaring through the pines on the mountain, and he didn’t wake. In the shallower sleep that followed, however, the sound became a human voice crying out in despair.

  It was the voice of someone he knew and loved, but the cry had come so unexpectedly, and he had been so deeply moved by the fear in it, that he couldn't remember who. He stood there listening, trying to close his mind against the continuous thunder of the wind, in order to hear that thin, plaintive cry if it came again. He had to know who it was.

  He was standing in deep snow on the edge of a very high cliff, and the gale, laden with snow, was streaming across him out of the northwest. He was wearing the cowhide parka the mother had made him for winter riding, the one his brother Curt made the same old jokes about every winter, when he first put it on, calling him priest or monk because it had a deep, peaked hood, like a cowl, or old woman because, he said, the hood looked like a poke bonnet, or medicine man because the red-and-white hair of the steer had been left 0n the hide. There was a heavy, lumberjack mitten on his right hand, but his left hand was bare. The bare hand was cold and he could feel the snow flakes driven against it. He wondered what he’d done with the mitten. He had drawn the hood of the parka as far forward as he could, to keep a breathing space between him and the flying snow. Only now and then a few flakes from the eddy about him turned in and touched him lightly and coldly upon his face above the beard. Within this sanctuary, he listened for the voice. He believed that if he heard the voice just once more, he would know who was calling, and could guess what the trouble was.

  At the same time, he knew there was nothing he could do. He didn’t dare move, for fear the wind should blow him off the edge of the cliff, or the snow and ice under him prove to be only an overhanging eave, and shear away at the shift of his weight. Even if he dared to move, it wouldn’t do any good, because he didn’t know where he was or which way to turn in order to get down off the cliff.

  He believed that he stood above the western edge of the home valley, the Aspen Creek Valley, and not far south of the ranch. The voice had certainly called from below and north, and the ranch was the only place in the valley. There was nobody in the valley to call him except someone at the ranch, one of his family, or Joe Sam. But he knew he couldn’t be on the edge of the valley. The only cliff in the mountains all around from which one could look out onto the valley was the one at the upper end of the Aspen Creek itself, and that was five or six miles north of the ranch, and not nearly so high and open as the one he was standing on.

  He didn’t know the mountain behind him, either. He could look at this mountain without turning his head or drawing back the hood, and he looked up at it through clear, thin air, too, although the abyss at his feet was filled with a river of snow pouring south in the wind. A vast, concave snowfield rose behind him from the edge of the cliff, and out of it reared the mountain, two lofty spires of pale stone together on the north, the northernmost slight, and carried like a child at the shoulder of the other, and a third peak, lower and blunter, a kind of half dome, apart from them on the south. There were glaciers between the peaks, the northern one narrow and pointing upward, the southern one wide and curved at the top, so that its point reached down and north into the snowfield. The mountain was thinly marked with snow in its crevices, and belted by a long, narrow cloud, which hid the summit of the blunt peak, but let the two spires rise through it and into the black sky.

  This mountain moved Arthur profoundly, though he didn’t know why. Also, it seemed to him in some way familiar, as the cliff he stood upon reminded him of the Aspen Creek cliff. Yet it wasn’t a mountain a man would forget, once he’d seen it, and he couldn't remember ever having seen it before. It seemed to him to belong somewhere as far away as the Andes or the Himalayas or the moon.

  He stopped thinking about the mountain, and his mind, with no purpose to work at, moved feebly against extinction. He wondered once more why his left hand was bare. He knew then that the hand was numb, and thrust it awkwardly into the pocket of the parka. There it encountered a small, familiar shape, one of the little figures he was always whittling because it pleased him to see them come out of the wood, and because whittling was the way he kept a hold on what was real while he was thinking. He’d been whittling, that was it. He was left-handed, and he’d taken off the mitten to whittle. He felt carefully over the little, wooden figure with his stiff fingers. It was a crouching mountain lion, and not quite finished. Of course. It was Joe Sam's black panther, the private, stalking god he had invented to mean the end of things. The first snow had begun, hadn’t it? It was snowing now. And he was wearing the parka, wasn’t he? He made a new black panther for Joe Sam every year, before the first snow came. The old Indian carried one on him all the time until the first storm was over, in a buckskin medicine pouch, decorated with porcupine quills and hung by a rawhide thong around his neck. Sometimes he wore it in later storms too. It was impossible to guess just what made Joe Sam decide the black panther was around again. Only it was always around in the first storm. So that was it. This was the first storm, but it was early this year, only October. He hadn’t expected the first snow so early, and the cat wasn’t finished. Joe Sam hadn’t made his medicine against the cat, and it was still free to hunt where he was. That was the danger which threatened the one with the beloved voice. The black panther was stalking the beloved one down there. He must get down some way, and help, or at least give warning.

  It came to him, in this urgent need, that if he turned north, he wouldn’t have far to go to get off the cliff onto a slope of shale he could go down. He turned very carefully upon the doubtful edge, but even as he turned, the voice cried out again. His body, already cold and tense, jerked at the sound. He opened his mouth to call back that he was coming, but then made only a terrified wail like the one he wanted to answer. The snow eave had given way, a long, jagged crack opening as suddenly as lightning along the edge of the granite, and he was falling helplessly into the abyss. It wasn’t snowing in the abyss now, and he could see in the clear darkness. He could see the broken pieces of the ice edge swooping down after him like phantom birds of prey. One of them was so close upon him that even as he fell, turning slowly in the air, he put out a hand to ward it off.

  His bare left hand was touching something cold and smooth, but it wasn’t ice. Extending his fingers, he moved them along the surface, and found it curved. He cupped his hand over the smooth curve, and smiled in the darkness, uncertainly mocking the remnants of the fear that still made him breathe like a man who has been running hard. It was an old test with him, this touching something real. He was awake now. His fingertips, exploring gently in above the peeled log, touched the flat, clay caulking. He· felt the powdery surface of the clay rub off on his fingertips, soft as the dust of a moth’s wing.

  He was still listening for the cry, though. He was lying in his bunk against the west wall of the bunk-room, and Curt and young Hal were in there with him. He couldn’t hear the cry
now, but he could hear Curt and Hal breathing, and he could tell by their breathing that they were still asleep. Hal, across the room by the east wall, was breathing softly and evenly and slowly, and Curt, against the north wall, was snoring. Perhaps there hadn’t really been any cry either. While he listened, Curt snorted twice, and muttered angrily. The leather straps of his bunk creaked, and there was a soft thud as his knee or elbow struck through the quilts against the wall.

  Arthur smiled a little, and thought, Always fighting some thing, even in your sleep. Or did you hear something too? He kept on listening, though, in spite of himself. The rest of the dream was letting go of him now, but the cry remained real, and he kept on listening for it. His hand moved farther along the log. It was icy cold. There was no sound of flame lapping in the old stove either. He turned his head off the pillow and saw only darkness, no lights shining in the cracks of the stove, or moving in their small, soft dance upon the floor. It must be very late, if the fire had burned out; it must be getting on toward morning.

  The melancholy left by the dream was renewed, and the feeling of time gone by without any good from it. He realized that he had been much younger when he stood on the cliff in the snow. His beard had been softer, and his body had felt full and powerful in the warm parka. Even his fear had been cleaner and more active, and that great love which he had sent out to the owner of the unknown voice had been a younger man’s love. He had been about twenty in the dream, perhaps, about the age he had been when they came to the valley. He’d felt the life like that, in his body inside his garments, when he was twenty. Now he was twice that, and he felt long and thin and tired in his bunk, and the quilts weighed heavily upon him. The dream weighed heavily upon him too. He didn’t come and go between the two worlds as confidently as he had when he was twenty, never confusing the events of one with the events of the other. Now he was still trying to remember who it was that had cried out like that in the dream. He kept listening, and he kept trying to remember. It seemed important to him that he should remember.

  Perhaps it was Gwen Williams, he thought, and mocked himself with the faint smile in the dark. I forgot her. I thought of the family and Joe Sam, but I forgot she was here too, now. Wouldn’t Hal like it if I told him I was dreaming about his girl already, when she only got here last night?

  I don’t know, though, he thought more seriously. Seems like it was a woman’s voice, but then, it would be. And a voice sounds different when it screams. You can’t tell.

  The wind came down again, shaking the log wall and his bunk against it, beating under the eaves, and throwing the snow like sand across the window over him. He knew that it must have been snowing for a long time already. There was a cold, thick quiet in the bunk-room that could come only from deep snow outside. He wasn’t surprised, though. He’d been out on the range since early the morning before, helping with the fall tally, and driving strays down out of the aspen canyons onto the yellowing meadows. He had felt the wind growing stronger and colder all morning, and in the afternoon, he had shivered in the saddle as the clouds, streaming southeastward out of the Sierra, had darkened the valley.

  Then suddenly his attention came to a single point and he was just listening, because that cry he had heard in his I dream was in the wind again, and he was sure he was awake now. It came faintly within the deeper blowing of the storm, and it was like the faraway blowing of several horns not quite tuned together and not quite steady. Then the wind drew off, and the blowing departed with it. A few last flakes of snow scratched on the window, and the wind rose into its hollow roaring across the mountain, not touching the house.

  Arthur knew what the sound was now. His mind came wholly over to the waking side of the border, and the unhappiness left in him by the dream became a foreboding, and also a disappointment. Slowly he turned back the quilts, and pushed himself upright, and swung around to sit on the edge of his bunk. A wide plank of the floor was cold under his feet. He stood up and moved slowly forward, holding his hands out ahead of him, until he felt the edge of the table. He groped over the top of the table and found the matches and struck one. Lifting the chimney 011 the lamp, he held the little flame to the wick. It took slowly. When the wick was burning clear across, he flipped out the match and tossed it toward the stove and set the chimney back on. The flame sank away, and then, as he turned the wick slowly up, it grew and brightened and became steady, and the shadows slunk back into their waiting places under the bunks and the table and behind the stove. Shining curves and points were picked out by the light, the silver conchas on Harold’s dress chaps hanging at the head of his bunk, the nickel edge of the stove top, the big buckle of Curt’s old leather bat-wings on their peg by the kitchen door, and the butt of his six-gun, and the row of little brass discs in his cartridge belt. The shining points winked like observing eyes around Arthur, and a tiny lamp burned mysteriously in space outside the window over his bunk.

  His face showed clearly at the center of the light, thin, with a high, narrow forehead and high cheekbones and a thin, dark beard with a narrow gray streak going down through it from each corner of his mouth. He straightened up slowly, and the one color the close lamp had given his face became two colors, weathered darkness to just above his eyebrows, and then white forehead his hat had bleached all summer. He looked at his brothers. Hal was sleeping with his head on his arm and his face turned toward the light. His arm was out straight on the pillow, and his big hand hung limply over the edge of the bunk. His wide, beardless face was calm, and his tousled hair shone gold in the light. Curt, sleeping with his face to the wall, was only a thick shape under the red-and-white quilt, and a dark head on the pillow.

  Arthur moved away from the light toward Curt’s bunk. He was a grotesque figure, with his long hair thick at the back, and his wrists and long, narrow hands protruding from the sleeves of the winter underwear he slept in. His shadow loomed over Curt, and then, as he advanced, grew shorter and narrower. He moved slowly, and as if still in a dream. His shadow came down off the rafters onto the wall, and dwindled there, and finally, when he stood beside Curt’s bunk, lay only across Curt’s head and shoulders. The shadow darkened Curt’s sleep, or the near presence oppressed him. He stirred uneasily, and muttered thick words of protest. Arthur waited, looking down at him. He didn’t know that he was waiting. He was thinking about the mountain in his dream. It still seemed to him that he should remember where he had seen that mountain before.

  The wind turned down from the Sierra again and leaned heavily upon the house and pummeled it for a moment, and then failed, and beat off south under the eaves, and once more the faint, melancholy blowing came after it. Arthur lifted his head to listen, and then drew a deep breath and sighed and leaned over and put his hand gently on Curt's shoulder.

  "Curt," he said softly. "Curt, wake up."

  Harold, with the light shining in his face, heard the voice like a whispering, and woke up. He didn’t move, but only opened his eyes and looked at once at Arthur bending over Curt, and after a moment asked quietly, "What’s up, Art?"

  The wind was beginning to play under the eaves again. Arthur, still with his hand on Curt’s shoulder, looked around and grinned. "Awake already? Thought you’d need your sleep this morning."

  Harold grinned too. "Slept plenty. The old man wouldn’t go to bed till we did. What’s wrong?"

  "Maybe I’m just hearing things," Arthur said. "You listen."

  He raised his left hand from the wrist without raising his arm and pointed to the west wall. "When the wind shifts."

  Harold raised himself onto his elbow and lay listening. He was going to speak once, but Arthur hushed him with the shy left hand. At last the wind swelled out of its fluttering, and thundered across the house. It spent itself and retreated south, and came again, less violently and almost straight from the north. The sound like faraway horns was in it, swelling and shrinking in the gusts.

  "Something’s at ’em up there," Harold said quickly, and swung out from under his covers and stood
up.

  Arthur nodded and turned back to Curt, saying, "Curt, wake up," and rocking him gently by the shoulder.

  Harold was pulling on his shirt already. He grinned and said, "Look out you don’t get a fist in the teeth."

  Arthur nodded without looking around. "He was fighting the wall when I woke up," he said, and went on rocking Curt, and said, more loudly, "Curt."

  Curt muttered, and struck loosely at the hand on his shoulder. Then he turned over suddenly and lifted himself on both elbows and stared up at Arthur. The down-curved wings of his big, dark moustache made an enormous, grim mouth in the shadow.

  "Huh?" he asked loudly. “What the hell now?"

  Arthur straightened up and made the little, left-hand sign to him to listen, but Harold, sitting on the edge of his bunk to pull on his socks, said, "Cows are bawlin’. Something’s at ’em."

  But the wind turned up without losing strength this time, lifting into the pines with a roar like a heavy surf, and the creaking in the walls died away and there was nothing else after it.

  Curt squinted his eyes as if he could see the sound, and when there was only the gentle sliding of snow at the window, said, "For God’s sake, do you have to wake me up to hear your dreams? Go back to bed," and rolled under the covers with his face to the wall again.

  "It’s no dream," Harold said.

  "You only hear it when the wind’s right," Arthur said.

  Curt twisted over onto one elbow and stared up at him again. There was no sleep in his eyes now; they were wide and unsteady with rage.

  "Look," he said, growling in the thick column of his throat, "all I want is a little sleep. If you have to hold somebody’s hand, hold Ha1’s. He’s hearing things too."

  The wind turned down toward the house and deepened again, and Arthur, with his head bent to listen, so that he smiled at nothing between himself and Curt, once more made the little sign with his left hand.

  Harold said, "Listen now," and sat motionless with one boot in his hands.