Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark

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.