The Cat Dancers

by P. T. Deutermann

  53

  CAM POCKETED THE BINOCS and scrambled right down to the edge of the cliff, windmilling his own arms to stop himself as he felt loose gravel slide out from under his boots. He got down on his hands and knees and looked over the edge, but he could see nothing but the river as it crashed along its rocky course in the canyon. He felt suddenly exposed on this jutting, narrow ledge. Still down on his hands and knees, he backed away from the edge before standing up. His heart was pounding and he realized he’d been holding his breath. He had to get down there.

  Down where? He hadn’t even seen where they went in. If they went in, and weren’t both smashed on those huge boulders lining the river’s tumbling course. He picked up the binocs and went back to the edge to sweep the opposite riverbank, looking for any signs of Kenny’s red parka or the tawny body of the cat.

  Nothing. Not a sign of anything but that solid black current, grinding away at its evolutionary task.

  He rocked back on his haunches, trying to decide what to do. He had to go down there. Had to look. Directly below the cave, and then downstream. The river wasn’t deep, except where it poured into geologic holes, and there were plenty of big rocks midstream for things to hang up on.

  Daylight was coming on, and the cat was probably dead or so badly injured that it presented no danger, nine lives not withstanding. A hundred feet could smash the life and breath out of any animal hitting water. He had no illusions about finding Kenny alive. What the cat hadn’t done to him, the fall probably had.

  “Hold that thought,” Kenny had said. What the hell was it with these guys? Did being a cat dancer mean you really did want to die? It was almost like one of those guys who, when surrounded by cops with guns drawn and pointed, went for his. “Suicide by cop,” they called it. NAFOD: no apparent fear of death.

  He made his way down the slope, following what he thought was the same trail they’d come up the night before. Or this morning, actually, he thought. His heart was heavy. Kenny Cox had to be dead. He wondered what signs he’d missed all these years, how many times he’d ignored Kenny’s furious rants about how the bad guys were winning and how the lawyers and the judges were killing America in their cancerous pursuit of fees and power.

  He paid no attention to his surroundings as he went down, half walking, half stumbling across the slope, starting small avalanches of loose rock and coming close to spraining an ankle several times. By the time he reached the river, he was sweating under all the layers of clothing. The sun wasn’t visible in the canyon, but the sunlight was, painting the rocks and trees with vivid color in the pristine mountain air. He stepped out onto a large boulder, wondering if it had come down from the mountaintop and how long ago, and surveyed the river.

  Still no sign of Kenny or the cat. All he could do was head downstream, taking periodic looks from any rock high enough to give him a vantage point. He kept getting stuck among the boulders, climbing around some and over some and then finding that he couldn’t go forward at all. He was half-tempted to jump into the river and let that powerful current take him downstream to the mouth of the canyon. And freeze to death halfway there, he thought. Then he saw something red about a hundred yards downstream.

  Cam yelled Kenny’s name and tried to hurry, but he only got himself stuck again. He had to backtrack, splash through pools of icy water, climb a rock to see how to get farther downstream, and then get down and do it all again. Twenty minutes later, he was close enough to use the binocs. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked like Kenny was still in his parka, crumpled up against the face of a huge boulder in a tiny backwash of the river’s main channel. He yelled again that he was coming, then set out again to navigate the maze of tumbled granite.

  When he finally reached Kenny, he had to slide down the side of a boulder to reach the little sandy beach. Kenny lay in a sodden heap on the wet sand. The river was much louder down at its edge, a constant reminder of its unrelenting power. He realized that there was no way back up except to climb the wet rock. He knelt down to examine Kenny.

  The cat had done tremendous damage. Kenny’s face was clawed, as was the material of his parka. And his hands—Cam had to close his eyes for a moment. Kenny had his knees drawn up tight into his stomach, and the bottom of the parka was redder than the top. His face was a pasty gray, almost white, and his mouth was open slightly. Cam was sure he was dead, until Kenny’s chest jerked with a shallow cough.

  “I’m right here, man. I’m right here,” Cam said, loudly enough to be heard above the rushing water. He wanted to lift Kenny’s head off the wet rock, but was afraid to move him. Kenny opened his eyes, blinked, and then tried to focus.

  “I’m right here, Kenny,” Cam said again, feeling helpless. Right here, and there isn’t a goddamn thing I can do for you, he thought.

  Kenny’s eyes rolled out of focus for a moment and then came back to look at Cam.

  “Hoo-ah,” he croaked, and tried to grin, not quite pulling it off. “Pocket.”

  Cam didn’t quite hear him. “Pocket,” Kenny said again. “Camera.”

  Good God, Cam thought. All this, and he wants to know if he got his fucking picture—his “face.” He looked down at the parka and saw a small lump in the right-hand slant pocket. He reached into the pocket gingerly, got his fingers on the camera, and felt some squishy things under the material—things he didn’t want to feel. The camera was attached to the inside of the pocket with a nylon lanyard. Kenny groaned in pain as Cam unclipped and withdrew the camera. It was one of those little throwaways and it was soaking wet.

  “I got it, Kenny,” he said. “It’s right here.” He held it up so Kenny could see it. Kenny focused on the camera and then back on Cam’s face. He was trying to say something, but no words were coming out.

  “Don’t try to talk, man,” Cam said. “Just hold still. I’ll get us some help.”

  “No. Fucking. Way,” Kenny gasped. “I’m done. All done.” He grinned again, and for a moment Cam saw the Kenny of old. “One face too many.” His chest heaved in a wet cough and he blanched white with the pain.

  Cam sat back on his haunches and tried to think of what to do. Little wavelets swept into the pocket from the main river and then went back out tinged with pink. Kenny’s lips were working again.

  “Bomb,” Kenny said. Cam bent closer.

  “What, Kenny? Bomb? What about a bomb?”

  “Bomb,” Kenny said again, visibly weaker. “Not us.”

  “I know, man,” Cam said, putting his hand on Kenny’s broken head. “You told me that, and I believe you.” He wanted to ask who, if not them, but he was too choked up to care right now. Kenny Cox was leaving the building, and there was nothing he could do about it, not out here, and probably not even back in the world.

  Kenny said something, but Cam missed it. He bent down to hear. “Not us. Them. Tell McLain. Look in the mirror.”

  Cam blinked. Had he heard it right? Look in the mirror? Kenny’s left hand came up and grabbed Cam’s right hand. He squeezed tightly, surprising Cam with the strength of it, and then his head flopped back and he was gone.

  Cam pried Kenny’s lifeless hand off and stood up. Kenny seemed to shrink before his very eyes, and then Cam noticed that the water seemed to have risen in the little pocket. The sodden hood of Kenny’s parka was being tugged by a current that hadn’t been there before. Cam looked around. He was surrounded by fifteen-foot-high boulders, but the sunlight in the canyon was much brighter. Was it his imagination, or did the river sound different? And what could change that quickly out there to make it rise?

  He looked around again. It was definitely rising. Water was swirling around his boots and coming close to floating Kenny’s body. He wanted to get Kenny out of here, up onto the dry rock above, but there was no way he could get himself and two hundred–plus pounds of dead body out of this little pocket. He zipped the tiny camera into his own pocket and began to wedge his way up the slippery rock. When he got to the top, he discovered that the rock he was on was now an island,
separated from the shore by a six-foot-wide ribbon of swiftly flowing black water. The river was definitely wider now, casting other streams parallel to the main current throughout the rock-strewn canyon. He didn’t wait. He slid down the other side of the rock he was on and dropped into the water, which fortunately turned out to be only knee-deep. He struck out for the next rock, trying to ignore the vise of cold gripping his lower limbs. He got to the next rock and then the next, finally scrambling up onto a wide sandbar covered in baseball-size gravel.

  He sloshed across the gravel bar and five feet up onto what looked like the real riverbank, which was littered with shattered dead trees and muddy tufts of flattened grass. The main current was now invisible behind the bigger boulders, but it was definitely making more noise, and he could hear the sound of smaller rocks being cracked against bigger ones as the current reclaimed more and more of its channel. He felt a cold wind rise as he sat down and pulled off his soaked boots and socks. He looked west and saw the edge of a black cloud building up over the high ridge about six miles away. He thought he saw a curtain of rain sweep out of it, but it was probably sleet. Somewhere upstream, it was probably raining. Not good.

  He wrung out his wet socks as best he could and then put them back on, fighting with his boots to get them laced. He had to get back down the canyon and across that line of boulders at the elbow before they, too, became submerged and trapped him in the canyon. He had no illusions about what could happen: There were clear signs fifty feet above him of how high the river could run, and it would be even higher in the narrow defile below. He got up and started downstream as fast he could go, trying not to look at that dark horizon forming above and behind him as he threaded his way through the boulder field and the snags.

  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 s
ettle 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.