The Cat Dancers

54

Thirty minutes later, he sensed that the gorge was narrowing, which meant he should be getting closer to the entrance. He was sweating despite the cold air as he worked across a slope that was densely padded in pine needles. He had nothing like the clear view of the formation that he had seen back at the base camp, but the north face of the canyon was no longer terraced, and he remembered threading his way through this dense stand of pines on the way in. After this, the canyon walls would converge at the entrance. He wondered if the stepping-stone rocks were still above water, and what he would do if they weren’t.

He stepped into a hole and went down with a grunt of pain, barely catching himself on the limbs of a tree. He pulled his wet foot out of the hole and massaged his throbbing ankle. A gust of wind came down the canyon and bent the tops of the pines with a high whistling sound. He was startled by a brace of quail that flashed out of the trees some fifty feet behind him in a hard flutter of wings.

And then he heard the cough.

He froze as the hair on the back of his neck rose. Something had flushed the quail. And he’d heard that guttural cough before.

The wind rose again, bending the pines this way and that, lifting some of the needles up off the ground in little dust devils. The sunlight seemed to be changing color, turning from yellow to silver.

He couldn’t just sit there. He had to get down the canyon, closer to where the others were. They’d have discovered he was gone by now, probably at sunrise. They’d know where he’d gone. They’d be coming in, or at least Mary Ellen would. He hoped so at least.

He got up and tested his ankle. Passable. He hauled the. 45 out and checked the action. Stiff with cold, but serviceable and mostly dry. He took his bearings and began to walk east, down the slope, keeping the high stone walls on either side of his line of advance. He walked while turning in slow circles, fully aware that the cat had all the advantages in here. It should be injured after that fall, but maybe not-house cats survived falls from trees. He decided not to stop and listen-the cat wouldn’t make noise, and he couldn’t hear much over the sound of the river and the wind anyway.

Keep moving, he told himself. Keep going down. Away from its den and territory. He had a fleeting vision of Kenny’s body washing out of the little cove and being tumbled down the river gorge. He wondered if he ought to fire a shot to alert them. They had to be wondering where the hell he was, and maybe the shot would scare off the cat. Right.

He lifted the. 45 high and fired once. The noise was incredible in the confines of the canyon, the shot echoing back and forth off the rocks walls. If one was good, two was better. He fired again, this time into the pines behind him, in the general direction of that menacing cough. And then once more, make it three, the standard signal for distress in the woods.

C’mon, rangers.

He didn’t stop moving, though, continuing his ungainly pirouette through the pines, watching every shadow, where he was putting his feet, ignoring the shooting pains from his ankle, and still sweating. From exertion, he told himself. Sure. Would these damned trees never end? He realized he’d started moving slightly uphill, so he adjusted his course back down toward the now-muffled sound of the river, brushing pine branches out of his face, imagining that huge cat slinking along his trail, nose down, tail switching, unimpressed by the gunfire. He strained to hear any answering signals, but there was nothing but the sound of his own breath and the constant swish of pine branches as he pushed through the grove, the trees seeming denser now as he batted at branches with the gun barrel, always turning, watching for any signs of the tawny beast. Had it fled? Did it even know what gunfire was? How the hell had it survived that fall?

The sound of the river suddenly grew louder. He plunged out of the stand of pines into a small clearing, where at last he could see where he was. The river was a hundred yards down and to his left, hidden behind a boulder field. It sounded much stronger now. The canyon’s entrance was no more than a quarter of a mile in front of him, marked by a sharp prow of granite to his right, which curved north like a big stone paw.

Then he realized something: The river came out of the canyon and turned north. He was on the south side of the canyon. He didn’t have to cross the river. He could just keep going, right? Now that he thought of it, why in the hell had Kenny brought him that way, crossing the river not once but twice? He tried to shake the sleep out of his eyes. He sensed he was forgetting something. He was very tempted to find a warm rock and rest for a few minutes. But then he glanced back at the distant tops of the big ridge and saw that the dark cloud bank now extended in both directions for as far as he could see. Something was pumping up the river, and it had to be coming from that approaching front.

The pines ahead of him were larger, but there was lots more space between them. There’d be no getting through that boulder field until he got down to the actual canyon entrance, so he elected to keep going on the southside bank. He listened carefully for any signs that there was something following him in the dense grove at his back, but he could hear only the river. Where were the rangers? Had they heard his three shots?

He set out for the canyon entrance, keeping an eye on his back trail as he moved in among the large pines. He was conscious after awhile that the ground was rising to his right, the carpet of pine needles changing to a fine granite gravel. He passed through a blowing mist of falling water coming from a weep high up on the rock walls above him. He kept watch for the cat. He had two rounds remaining in the. 45, since for safety reasons he never carried a round under the hammer. One round had done in the previous cat, so all he’d have to do would be to hit it. Assuming he saw it coming, that is.

He stopped in midstride as he realized he could see a small slice of the river to his left and below him. Why was he climbing? He was tempted to climb one of the trees to see where the hell he was in relation to the actual entrance to the Chop. Why not? he thought. I should be able to see the base camp if I get high enough.

But then there came the sound of something behind him. He backed up to a big tree and froze, gun held in both hands. He could just barely see his footprints in the gravelly ground, and he stared through the trees from left to right, trying to see what had made that noise. Colder air began to settle through the tops of the pines. He looked up and realized that the soaring stone walls of the canyon were closer now. They should be opening, not closing on me, he thought.

He hesitated. He was beginning to get the sense that he was walking into a trap. He was definitely forgetting something important. It had to do with why Kenny had brought him across the river twice. He closed his eyes and tried to visualize what he’d seen when they landed yesterday, but he couldn’t raise the image of the Chop’s entrance. Dark and too many trees. Plus, he was very tired.

Climb a tree, he thought. See where you are. Orient yourself. Then proceed. He looked up and sighed. What with the altitude and his own fatigue, he wasn’t sure he could climb a tree right now. And the last time he’d climbed a tree, that damned cat had come up after him.

Okay, climbing a tree was out.

He pressed on, no longer bothering to watch his back in order to make better time. He was intent on getting out of this canyon. The rangers had given him forty-eight hours, but the weather front was obviously not going to wait that long. He didn’t want to be in this canyon if the river really rose up, and he sure as hell didn’t want to get back to the meadow and find only one tent standing.

He came to another line of dense-pack pines, stubbier than what he’d been going through. The river had changed its tone, sounding more like a flood than a rapid. He plunged through the pines, sure that the way out was just on the other side, and finally burst out onto a wide gravel beach. A blaze of sunlight revealed that he’d made it to the canyon entrance. The river swung north to his left in a wide silvery arc, although it looked to be twice the size of what it had been before. The meadow up above a stand of pines on the other side was visible, and the little cluster of tents was still there. That was the good news.

The bad news, however, stopped him cold. He now understood why Kenny had brought him across on the other side, because where the river made its turn, the current had scoured the south bank away to nothing. The gravel beach narrowed down into a spit that lay submerged about a hundred feet in front of him, after which there was only a sheer rock cliff rising out of the flowing water a couple hundred feet up the south wall of the canyon. The river swept through its turn with barely a ripple along that southern edge, indicating deep water. The distance to the other shore from the gravel spit was a good two hundred yards. The benevolent sunshine seemed to mock him as he stood there, trapped on the wrong side of a rising river.

As he surveyed his predicament, the mountain lion stepped casually out of the pines about thirty feet away and looked his way.