P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

“Ain’t she somethin’?” Mitchell said quietly, his eyes appearing to flicker in the firelight from the stove’s open door. “You oughta see her brothers.”

Cam was speechless after the cat’s pounce. White Eye seemed to levitate out of the rafters, dropping noiselessly into a momentary crouch onto the floor. He straightened up and offered Cam a hand up.

“What the fuck?!” Cam asked, trying to make his voice work properly.

Mitchell pulled out two chairs, pushed one over for Cam, and then sat down in the other. Cam looked around for the panther and found it sitting like any house cat by the door, but it was still watching him. He sat down gingerly, wondering if he could get to his gun, which was still in his jacket pocket, which, in turn, was hanging about eight inches away from the cat. No way, and besides, White Eye saw him looking.

“You don’t need no gun,” he said. “You need to be listenin’ to me now.”

“I say again-what the hell is going on here?” asked Cam.

“You train dogs, right? Well, I train cats. How ’bout them apples, huh?”

Cam just stared at him.

“You wantin’ to know about cat dancin’, ain’t you?”

Cam nodded, still vitally interested in getting his hands on the. 45. He’d shoot the cat first, and then Mitchell. That’s exactly what he was going to do. And where the hell were the dogs? He could still smell that cat’s foul breath on his shirt. He realized he was still shaking. Mitchell got up, went over to the front door, and retrieved Cam’s revolver. He came back and sat down, holding the. 45 casually in his lap.

“You go in there,” he said, indicating the bedroom with his head, “and git yourself dressed for some snow walkin’. Warmest shit you got. Extra everythin’.” He glanced down at Cam’s trousers. “Dry, too. Night-Night’s gonna come along’n watch.”

“‘Night-Night’?”

“Go on, now,” Mitchell said, waving the gun. “I ain’t got all damn night. And leave that door open.”

Cam got up unsteadily and headed for the bedroom, where his clothes were stacked on a chair. On some signal from Mitchell that Cam couldn’t see, the cat got up and followed him into the room, where it sat down in the doorway and began licking one of its enormous paws, watching him. He heard Mitchell get up and go into the kitchen.

He changed his clothes in the dark and started putting on layers. Night-Night, he thought. He eyed the cat while he dressed. It was a beautiful thing, he had to admit, until it stopped licking and stared at him, one massive paw held motionless right by its mouth. Its eyes glowed as if lit from within, and they were not friendly. It’s tame, Cam told himself.

When he was ready, he started for the door, but the cat changed its position in such a way as to stop Cam in his tracks. White Eye made a sound in his throat and the cat turned away out of the door. Cam smelled coffee when he came out of the bedroom. The fire in the woodstove was roaring now, and there was much more light in the cabin.

“Set ye down,” Mitchell said. Cam sat, moving awkwardly in all his layers of clothing. Mitchell brought over two mugs of coffee, pushed one across the table toward Cam, and sat down. “I reckon everybody’s tellin’ you that cat dancin’ is bool-shit,” he said.

“That’s right,” Cam replied. There were coffee grounds twirling in his mug. “The rangers said that mountain lions were extinct in these parts.”

Mitchell snorted. “Seemed real enough sittin’ on your chest, didn’t she?”

“They were talking about wild mountain lions, I think,” Cam said. “Not tame ones.”

“They’s wrong about that, too,” Mitchell said. “Jist ’cause they ain’t seen ’em don’t mean they ain’t up there. Them rangers like that warm office. Only one of ’em goes deep back country.”

“And cat dancing? How about that?”

Mitchell looked him over. “You git around in the mountains any?” he asked.

“Some. But not normally in winter.”

“This ain’t winter,” Mitchell scoffed. “Not yet. I can show you what it is you’re askin’ about, but you gotta come with me right now.”

“Tonight?”

“Right now. It ain’t winter yet, but it’s fixin’ to be.”

“Do I have choice?”

“You want to know about this stuff, or what? ’Cause if you do, I’m the man to see. That part you got right.”

“I want that gun back.”

White Eye shrugged, pulled the. 45 out of his coat pocket, opened the cylinder and thumbed the rounds out of it, and then handed the gun back to Cam. He dropped the rounds into his own coat pocket. “Leave it unloaded till you see what I got to show you,” he said. “Remember, you the one started this shit.”

“What’s James Marlor’s connection to all this?”

“Don’t know,” Mitchell said. He got up and kicked the door shut on the wood stove. “Let’s go.”

“Where are my dogs?” Cam asked.

“They run off when they got a whiff of Night-Night. They’s smart dogs. They’ll be back. Leave ’em some chow out front. And bring that coffeepot.”

Two hours later, they were grinding their way up a narrow mountain road in White Eye’s ancient Bronco, and Cam was thinking that road was probably not the right word. Track, maybe. Mountain-goat trail. Trace? The vehicle’s four-wheel drive worked just fine, but even with that, they were making no more than five miles an hour, if that, and often much less. White Eye had produced the vehicle from behind the cabin park’s office, where he’d also restored the electricity. Night-Night loped along behind the Bronco with seemingly endless ease, and Cam was grateful that she was outside and not riding in the backseat, two feet from his neck.

He had no idea of where they were. Mitchell had driven about a hundred feet down the county road toward town, abruptly turned right into what had looked to Cam like an empty meadow, and then pointed the Bronco toward higher ground. The snow wasn’t that deep, but it was crusted with ice, which made a crunching sound as they plowed through it, the nose of the Bronco permanently tilted up as they climbed.

About a half hour into the trip, White Eye had taken off his jacket and draped it over the center console as the heater began to kick in. Cam had done the same, piling his outer coat on top of White Eye’s. And then surreptitiously, using his left hand, he had picked Mitchell’s jacket pocket to retrieve three rounds. He’d quietly slipped these into his pants pocket. He’d have to figure out how to get the rounds back into the. 45 once he got his coat back on. He was pretty sure that White Eye meant him no harm.

And yet, he thought. Cam hadn’t forgotten the mysterious caller and the feline night visitor that little call had produced. Had that been White Eye’s work? How many trained mountain lions were running around out here anyway? He topped off their coffee mugs with the last of the coffee and put the pot into the backseat, which was piled high with gear.

“Where we going?” he asked finally.

“Catlett’s Bald,” White Eye responded. “Be there directly, long as we don’t hit no big drifts and the river ain’t full of melt.”

“What’s a bald?” Cam asked.

“Yonder’s some balds,” Mitchell replied. Cam looked through the windshield as the Bronco topped a rise, and the sight almost took his breath away. The entire Smoky Mountain range lay before them, wave after wave of moonlit humped granite ascending into the night sky as far as he could see from southwest to northeast. The nearest mountains rose up on either side of the track, thick with bare trees on the lower slopes but thinning out just below the individual summits, to be replaced with snow-covered domes. He knew from his maps that there were some six-thousand-foot-high mountains out here, but they all looked much higher than that from the vantage point of the twisting track.