Strange Hunting
Walter Van Tilburg Clark

Volume 3 Number 3

Old Harlowe, gray as his beard with the first light
And the translucent sleep his age afforded him under the storm,
Heard Cardo stirring in the kitchen, and went down,
Creaking the boarded stairway with his weight.
The house creaked too, under the shove of wind
That had been going all night long. He found the Indian
Crouching by the stove warming the withered rack of his dark body,
Rocking on his knees, and moaning. Another spell.
Cardo had many this autumn, reading the clouds climbing,
Seeing the sun strangely. Perhaps his age, lost toll,
Clearing the well of vision to the still conclusion. Ratty men,
This desert spawn of Piute, little-brained and runty, always old.
Nor were these thoughts strangers to Harlowe either, watching the bending back,
Hearing the voice of heavy-footed words without a meaning.
And yet the half-belief that Cardo saw was there again also,
Going through him like the year’s last chatter in fall canyons.
Cardo was ancient too, older than Harlowe, or these timbers,
Or the talk of white men on this land.
“What is it, Cardo?” he said sharply, in a wind lull,
The question real behind the speaking to a child.
“Painter,” the Indian said, “black painter hunts again.”
Moving unskillful hands Harlowe put coffee on to warm.
That dream returned, innumerable returns, a witless legend.
Lions were hunted out of the Sierras now, except a few,
And none of them were black. Yet every year
There was this killing in the herds, and always Cardo, bound to distance,
“Painter, black painter hunts again.”
 And when the boys would follow him, Cardo once more,
“Black painter never killed, black painter never killed.”
The tracks were real enough. So was the steer,
With his spine bitten through behind the ears
And the blood crusted in the snow, and the best flesh
Eaten to the silver shining bone.
With hearing it so often that crying out of Cardo’s,
As though of seeing tall doom imminent, was real now, right enough,
And had no ready laughter as an answer; or a hunt.
Gutless of them, and the best beef feeding the vision of a lunatic;
But one man bears a weight with solitary men,
Even an age-mad Piute. And the years were many.
They’d had the legend out of him one idle night,
A broken questing after words under the summer stars
With the coyotes barking on the knolls. Older than Cardo, that,
And always the one lion, black, and very big, and without death.
A mountain lion past a hundred years. Cracked skulls
To hold that sight, stupid Indians and the desert sun.
The old man snorted in his beard. “Coffee, Cardo.”
But the dark eyes and desiccated face distant, and still the swaying, and the wind.

Dawn broke on the world whitened westward to the steep skyline
Where the Sierras seemed, since nightfall and the storm-break,
To have climbed immeasurably upward from the valley,
The pale sun lying low across the drift of the new snow,
Far reaching and far shadowed to the foothills. Always the wind,
Blowing from the northwest, lifted a white sift from the banks, disseminating.
Curt Harlowe left his pony at the door, and came there misted with the blast.
With the gale edge in the room, before his father spoke,
The white haired Indian, drawn erect, his eyes deep in the bony head,
“No hunt the painter, Curt. The painter death, black painter death.”
“Well?” said his father. Curt laughed, a brittle, tightened laugh,
Unsteady with the chill. “Same thing. It wasn’t wind we heard.
Two killed this time, and the big tracks. We didn’t see him.”
“Where’s Dwight?” “Followed the tracks.
The snow’s not deep enough to stop a horse yet, but we’ll lose him in the blow
If one don’t follow ’fore they’re filled with driftings.”
The Indian moaned again. Curt’s face was set under the sweat
Of melting flakes. “Not this time, Cardo, black or tan or devil.
Dad, some of those steers have to come in. It’s cold as hell.”
The old man nodded, “Cardo and I’ll get ’em. Pack your grub.”
Then, while Curt tested snowshoes with stiff fingers,
“Cardo had the spell again.” “I see,” said Curt, “Still has.”
“You’re going anyway?” “I wasn’t dreaming when I saw those tracks.
We might put up a steer a year; Cardo’s an old man and crazy;
But two’s too many. No more medicine man. I want a hide.”
There was a keening of wind in the voice-still, and the horse,
Turning before it, knocked a hoof against the hollow doorstep.
Old Harlowe saw the Indian standing stiffly, and the ruin of his mouth.
The light was cold, even inside the room, coming off the snow.
The past, with sinuous fingers, crept along his brain.
“Your mother, Curt,” and what he would have said unsaid,
For Curt, angry with tension, “She wasn’t always straight herself.
She was afraid of Cardo; he scared her with that whining.
With even one more house and a woman in the valley
She’d have laughed. He’s crazy, I say, seeing things.
Let this go by once more he’ll have us all as bad.”
Then, putting food into the saddle bags,
“Remember, in October, on the upper range,
All of one day he did no work for staring at the clouds,
Seeing warriors and the dust, pinto ponies, drums and torches,
And stony cities that have never been, not here or anywhere,
And God knows what besides. All day he saw them there,
Just staring at the clouds shifting above the hills.
Saw them in the shadows too, the clouds made on the mesa.
For two days after that he wasn’t half a man, just sat
Trying to make out a reason for the visions. Cracked!
I don’t know how old he is; neither do you; neither does any other man;
Or he himself. But he won’t get much older.
He’s seen too often this year past. He never looks at anything these days,
Even a saddle hanging on the wall, without this freezing up;
Staring through it; talking to some godless, dried up dead.
I tell you, if we don’t go now we’ll all be crazy;
This damned house doesn’t feel right as it is.
Even when he’s ten miles in the hills you hear him here,
Downstairs if you’re up, and upstairs if you’re down,
Muttering and moaning like a lunatic. It’s in our heads,
And so’s this black painter, ’till we kill one with an ordinary color.”
Silence, and Cardo still standing, not hearing anything.
Then the wind returning, snow spit on the window, the old man
Speaking, bleak as the day, after the hot mouth of the young one,
“Your mother died, Curt.” “I know that. And you ’most killed him for that time.
Any man would guess right now and then. He senses things.”
“The lion hasn’t been this getting old,” the father’s mouth again,
“He saw that thirty years ago, Curt, you not born.
Every fall, sure as the suck of winter in the bones,
The first storm, like this one, and in the morning
Cardo down here with the lion in his dreaming.
And five years now the killing the same night.”
“A stretch from five to thirty,” Curt said grimly. “Doesn’t fit,”
And went out to his horse. The scream then, suddenly,
As of a harsh clawed agony raking the man;
Old Harlowe, breathing hard against the ice sliding his spine,
Fiercely, “Shut up, you idiot,” and yet the chill not gone,
Seeing the cavernous face turned to the door, the lips moving
With no sound after the one scream, the thin
And unbelievably old body rigid. The cold returned under his shirt,
Thinking that scream again. Never that scream before,
Nor any fit as long as this. Cardo would be dead two days
When it wore off, and cattle to be driven into shelter,
And the hay forked in. He stirred his coffee with a sound
Of the spoon rasping on the cup side, round and round.
The wind persisted, breaking past the ranch house walls,
Sleet sanding on the windows. The old Indian now
Was talking as before, unintelligible lip words, one low sound.

Curt Harlowe did not have the first hunting.
An hour from the ranch, his horse bucking the drifts with smoky breath,
In the low mountain trees, boughs laden to a bending,
The tracks suddenly pooled, a turmoil among boulders
Still naked granite on their southern faces;
Dwight was stretched under them, his legs thrown loose,
The stain deep in the snow, hardened but visible.
On one knee, with the carbine heavy through his mittened hand,
The living brother, looking closer, saw the perfect kill,
As of a buck bent earthward, fang slots in the neck,
The spine severed. No hesitance of death among the stones,
And not much bleeding. He remembered, through the door closed,
Cardo’s cry, and through the many openings of winter,
Storms under the eaves of the one valley house, the broken monody,
“Black painter never killed; black painter never killed,” a chant.
Cardo perhaps felt the jaws close into the falling bulk;
He said that often, that his body took the pain when seeing.
The time was close. His hand stirred Dwight as one piece now;
An hour to have frozen, and the tracks only a shadow on one side.
He stood again. With the tracks filling fast it was not time
For fighting Cardo’s disembodied voice, and eyes out of the dark.
But it came back, the dusty timbred voice, the drone,
The old mouth moving, the words in the hollow of his head re-echoed
“Black painter hunts; black painter hunts again.”
No ordinary lion this, whose tracks went upward dimly on the slope,
Whose mouth, still red with torn steer meat, turned the hunt.
Here only the wind talked among the rocks,
The surface sliding snow hissed in its passage.
Cardo’s voice was always in his ear holes, the scream, the past foretelling,
And through it, round it, over it, bending, and serpent-like
In the white desolation, creeping on its belly,
A black lion, always about to spring; the sinuous back,
The long tail twitching at the tip, mouthed ivory blades;
The tongue-drip suddenly sucked to the last crouch;
And out of the black death preparing, startlingly
The yellow, inner-lighted, oval eyes, lambent increasingly,
Fixed to each move with the slit, staring pupils.
And no way to lose it; everywhere the darkness and the staring,
The silence of the legs drawn under tensely. Cardo was crazy.
But his lion; years ago had Curt seen it in shadows
At the ranch house, hearing Cardo prophecy, and many times between,
And had the frozen dreams, waking with his body wet between the blankets,
To look into the moon and shadow dreadfully. Cardo was crazy,
But the lion had been with the Harlowes years, and now had killed.
Killed what? You cannot tell a lion’s color by his tracks
Or the incisions his teeth make in a man’s neck.
(Neatly cut; the edges hard now, and not bleeding.)
Time went by with this, the track fills slowly rising.
More than a steer to answer for; the carbine heavy with its purpose.
The horse was no use for the upper hunting; deep snow there, and the shale bad.
He lifted Dwight’s bone-hardened body, empty death-case with the senseless face,
Beard stubble black, the hair stiff with the first snow melt, the slower freeze,
And bound it on the saddle rigid, no bending it; turned the horse down,
Seeing beneath him shadows of the tree peaks, the valley levelled off,
On the white plain the fence line and the single house,
The flat smoke stream, and in the wind-streaked whiteness
Dark moving forms, the weak steers driven, only one man riding.
Cardo was still muttering in the house; the snow drives of the gusts
In a gray beard. An unpleasant thing to send, old man,
This on the slope below. Later there shall be something else.
Then, on snowshoes, he followed the dim spoor upward;
Out of the trees the peaks visible, the running clouds regathering,
Heavy the shadows concomitant on the crags.

In the ranch house at night the old man sat, tired with too much riding,
Hearing, under the stove’s crackle, the mumbling unbroken,
Beyond the walls, lighted by one oil lamp, its circle steady on the ceiling,
The wind lessened, the snow falling heavily into the darkness.
Then suddenly Cardo drew upright, made the long wailing,
Coyote cry in a lean man-throat, tendon pillared,
And from the consequent fixity, “Black painter hunts; black painter hunts.”
The old man’s wolf bark bit the plaint, high pitched and straightened,
“Christ Almighty, Cardo, shut up or I’ll break your back.”
The chill was greater than the morning’s, hearing this,
Like the blade flat of a knife along his back flesh.
Not the Indian’s fault of course, he being taken wholly;
But the wail that morning, then Dwight’s horse, then Curt’s
With its stiff burden: a great deal for a man to take within one day,
And Curt still in the mountains; and this dark monkey must gibber after that.
He spread his thick hands slowly, looking at the Indian.
But Cardo was kneeling again in the red, faltering light,
Only his maunder sounding, the flame hiss, a penned steer bawling distantly.
After a wait for nothing more he climbed the stairs to his bedroom.
He’d known that Curt would hunt this out when he sent Dwight home by himself.
Through the long floor-board crevices the stove light came inconstantly,
Cardo’s voice various with it, only at intervals the manless quiet.

Curt slept in the snow-well under a hemlock,
His body warmth impressing a slight chamber, and his rifle covered.
No hunting in this snow, with not even the starlight.
The lion would be holed, the traces gone.
But no lion could go far with this depth, and more settling.
Food holding out he’d have him; and the snow was good.
No danger of a freeze while it came this way, softly, steadily,
Reiterated padding endlessly on the bough burden there above him.
With webs his going now was better than the cat’s.
He didn’t eat much, not only for the length of such a hunting,
Unfed his blood stayed freer, he kept warm in his pocket.
Half asleep he thought, but momentarily, that he heard Cardo.
He forced himself awake rather than sink away with that thought in him.
He realized it then, that all day, certainly, he had been trailing
A black lion with illuminated eyes. No reason drove it out.
All day the tracks stepping upslope before him followed a black cat’s feet.
He thought to have forgotten that in the high mountains,
Divided from the jawing Indian, the place full of the dreams.
Now, oppressively, it seemed to him a right thing;
The heavy trees here, the snow falling, the peaks close above;
Also his brother dead, strange killing for a fed lion;
The night had Cardo’s voice vastly. He hunted a black lion.
He knew better, of course, but it always came back to that.
He couldn’t see it any other color, always black.
His sleep, when it came in, was not a dreamless sleep.
He saw Dwight talking without sound, his face frozen,
Blood tongues darkened where they crept around his throat;
Also he stirred, and talked himself, guttural as Cardo by the stove.

Dawn woke him to a crouching consciousness,
Listening through the stillness of the last snow flakes,
Isolated floating in dead light, for other sound
Than an increasing cold might make, a lone intensity pressing the drift.
Nothing whispered. What he had heard was a mind’s crossing then.
Out of his hole, standing on snowshoes in the winter depth,
He still saw only the white unity of space below him,
The white ridge above, last height a man might venture skyward,
The sky-level gray upon the peaks, over the endless churn of mountain, gray;
As far east as he looked only the white upheaving, steely roofed,
Not enough light anywhere to make a shadow. And now
The cold crept downhill stealthily, filling the space the storm left.
Somewhere the black panther; he would show strongly on this field.
Having no trail he cast to his own senses, without insensate reason,
And followed the range south, edging up toward the timber line,
Above which there seemed nothing but the cragged snow, and,
Strange from this stillness, a continual wind
Trailing the white veils into space, silent with height.
Eating as he went forward, dried meat in one gloved hand,
Bearing the rifle in his elbow crotch, he thought
This would be slow going for a lion, with the fall still light,
The cold holding it so. See how it feathered over his foot shuffle.
Hours he went south, and yet no trail, and no pause showed
A movement anywhere; a carven world below the high piled peaks.
When he believed it noon, though there was not a difference in light,
The sun moving invisibly over the low sky, nor breaking it,
He went down from the storm covered, twisted tree-dwarfs
Into heavier timber, though still leaning southward,
Hoping to cross the marks in the laborious descent.
But he crossed nothing, and at dark had seen only the broken passage
Of the deer, taking this lull in opened winter to seek lower cover.
He slept as he had slept before, and the cold was an outer blanketing.
All night the black panther snuffed the hole rim, Cardo talked in the trees,
A house creaked with an old man always walking,
His boot heels, thunking boot heels, having all his weight and Dwight’s,
(Dead with a sift of powder in the line of his mouth, in the cups of his ears.)
Twice he woke in the upright tunnel of the dark where he lay coiled,
Feeling it vibrant with a presence; once his neck cold with the teeth;
The second time the wind going across, a star to be seen in one break.
Clear hunting for tomorrow, and this prey would not stay bedded then,
Even after so good a kill, so deep a blood-sag in the belly.
But when he came out snow had sheeted him, he had to break
The heaping to the hole, the wind was full lunged under a lower sky.
Lean and light with slight eating he tried the snowshoes with numb feet,
Breathed and turned his eyes to outward looking slowly, distantly,
Seeking clearance of the bitter dream taste in his mouth,
The fibrils of dream chilled and penetrant in his long body,
The dread imbedding of the watching certainty behind him.
A long time he believed that he went north, retracing the day past,
Such was the world’s sameness under November’s shield.
Then the snow came again, and one gray prominence
Suddenly walling the diagonal fall of the white, high before him,
Clearly was strange. He remembered entering the pass
In the motionless dusk, making the root bed there.
He must have turned, putting his hands against a dream,
Gone out of the pass westward in the morning, so followed
The far side of the steep Sierra spine, and farther south,
Keeping the valley under his right elbow, as though he had returned.
There must have been snow in the night there too.
He set his jaw at the stupidity, turning into the wind,
Feeling the ice whip and the catching in his uncut beard.
Thinking the day half gone he wondered at the storm’s thickness,
Cleared his eye sockets of the cling, knew then the certainty
Of darkness diving in the mountain gullet,
The imperceptible single invasion, the shadow swoop
As of a hawk making no sound, which is the upland night
Towards the year’s end. He had slept long under the unknown fill before the dawn,
And now it snowed darkness, the fall and deepening simultaneous and silent.
So he slept like a borer in the drift’s core, and the dreams
Ran from his lean stomach, his brain quick with the half-fast,
The cramped hours hunted over and over of stealthy feet,
Pads only a printing in the snow, hot eyes enough alighted to be seen
Moving alone nocturnally, and always his way there before them,
The light of their watching hurting his back ribs, pointed reality.
Under the hunt, at one cry in his dreams he saw, and strangely distant,
Nothing a part of his living, but the great pool of red sun in a canyon,
A high rack, with a brown man’s body on it, bloody of the glow,
The light, furnace like, insistent everywhere,
Hot emanation of the sandstone walls, the gulch floor sandy.
There were the Indians alive too, looping the death platform in slow stolidity;
The thin gifts of desert givers, pottery and the parched grain,
Dry, echoing gourds in thong-tailed bundles at the posts;
And one of them, sharp bladed shoulders under a bright blanket,
Talked without sound, his mouth moving like Cardo’s,
Something cut out with a flint from stained solemnity;
And then together all the mouths moved, and no sound,
And there was no sound of the painted horses pawing
In the gully turn beyond; no sound with the seeing,
More than above the rim the yellow and withered desert talked under the glare,
Or there was the word of buttes, standing the long blue miles away.
Yet the face talking was old Cardo’s face; the black lion had killed
In somnolence of the foothill stones, was a god, and appeased.
Then darkness over the hot light and indistinct faces of the desert dwellers,
Tidal return, the ochre blaze at the cliff edge dwindled to eyes;
The overlying entire; and Curt woke with a chill as of new wind
From his own scream echoing hollow in him. He was the hunted.
One did not hunt the gods, and the storm was against him.
He recognized some reasonable things he would have said,
And knew them for another’s. Reasoned words
Are grain of grinding with the many; the vision is real.
(Life and the death are, after all, parts of the one; the hunting or the hunted, and still one.)
The body would bear no old talk with the black cruelty there snuffing
At the brink of the containing pit, with the wind in his scruff.
And the darkness awake was strong as the sleep in his skull,
Metallic daylight slow of entering; his bones chattered in the forthcoming,
Finding the snow still falling, seeing shrunken frigidly,
The fall steady, white, encircling, nothing past it visible,
Only the tree hulks, sheeted, ominous barrier.
No wind at all was moving the descent, the dreams remained,
The food was little, and he ate it moving.

In that day’s going the hunter in Curt was wholly killed.
He had only the flesh left to feel fangs; said to himself, “slowly,”
And ploughed faster, his eyes wet with the melting on his face;
And he could not know in the storm’s erection if the way were new or old;
But at night he was crazy with the hunger, melted snow to fill himself with water,
Saw the visions living, could not then have slept,
But talked to himself, did not know what he said,
Heard it as someone else; the chant and the monotony of mumbling.
The snow stopped at the edge of waking darkness, and, that motion gone,
The black cat came increasingly, nothing to check him, the trail clear,
The light deep blue into the heights, sinking into a gulf.
Sweat in the groove of Curt’s back caught his shirt,
The cling climbing into his brain wildly; sweat then
Under his hair also, and with the darkness crouching
He shredded mittens tearing away pine limbs, the sound
Of snow catch falling like his heart pitched in his body.
But the fire finally burned, with the knife-shaving tinder,
And a bough-sink in the snow. The flame jumping,
Fitful and hard, cleared space around him redly;
He heaped it then, and dreaded moving out to break the fuel.
At midnight Cardo sat across from him; he heard the voice,
And saying things that he could not have said; and always there behind him
Was the lion. He could see him as though will made eyes in his skull bone:
The crouch continual, the glaze of light across the yellow eyes,
The tongue suck for the jump; relaxed and the lolling again;
And then the sinking onto the forefeet, the fixity and quivering.
All of it was on the snow, without much weight, and yet growing.
He shot at it twice, and once the bullet screamed from granite,
And the roots of hair over his whole body were coldness,
And afterwards that was Dwight crying in the canyon.
And always Cardo, guttural moaning, monotony of seeing.
In the hours with dawn close at their backs he saw,
As one watching another world, without reason or pulse stir,
His brain wisely cold, and his hands asleep about the gun,
The darkness darker above the tower of light, the stars showing,
And more of them proceeding. That would mean cold, he thought,
But did not turn that thinking up again. The fire spittingly
Crept on the dull wood left, the embers welled in snow.
Always the cat behind him; now, before-dawn blackness full,
The stars beyond this, and Cardo was gone he saw,
Although the voice went on. It seemed he said the words,
And heard them as Cardo’s; but then, Cardo was gone.
Then someone calling up the slope. His father.
He was on his feet now, trying to call out, “go back,”
And no shape for the words in his mouth cave, the tongue stoppling.
The lion was not there, he saw, shaking his head slowly
Against the drawn invasion of something, a drunkenness. Go to his father,
Go home with him, see Dwight beside the stove, smoking,
Smell saddle leather in the room. And then he saw:
Tracks in the snow; the cat circled, all the fire’s ring
Walked twice about; and the press of the crouch,
And suddenly the snow under the lightless stars
Creaked to the wary paw’s impress. He screeched,
As a rabbit might screech ripped by the white owl’s talons
Diving from the darkness; screamed again; ran; plunged, fighting the drifts
Without snowshoes, and crushing into them; seeing behind him the cat,
Somehow fast on the surface, bright with night-shine,
Carrying crimson fire, running with his shadow where there should have been no shadow,
Long jumps and no sinking, the big pads picked up easily,
Square ankles limber to the fastidious following,
The stars swinging behind him, the trees around the fire
Turning with low-branched light across his haunches in the swift advance,
Long the line of the running, wave from muzzle to tail-tip,
The snarl rattling in his throat-hollow, shoulders upheaving alternate,
The gain rapid, death without question in the eyes,
The teeth ringing like metal in the heavy skull;—the run no longer;
Falling, caromed off in a side drift, the tumble of snow over him,
With his face buried, yet he saw the jump.
No scream for his plugged mouth, the snow suck in his nose;
Only the shock, that body-long; the twist, the flashing through his eyes,
And somehow knowing ivory blades in his neck cracking,
Blood jet and the dribble welling over, suction
Of the hot, wet, cavernous mouth. Death walking, all at once, quite slowly.
The man-brain dead only the body lay tipped in the drift;
Blue dawn proceeded among the trees, the silence,
The stars, and the fire alone on the edge of day, and dim.

Old Harlowe woke, and the scream was not a dreaming.
In the housed darkness, the stale cold, no stirring,
But Cardo screaming under him. Stars in the window.
No chill this time, but as though he had wakened to sleep.
There is an end of death sometimes before death.
Yet he was very old, his face hollow and yellow
Moving down the stair pitch above the lighted lamp.
With the light stream in the kitchen door the milk pails
Were lined silver out of the darkness. In the stove corner
The cracks were red, the light moving like water on the floor,
Cardo there as before, a bent shadow with bulk,
The scream channelled away in the roof beams, only the mutter.
Harlowe’s voice was edgeless wind in the press of the room,
“What now, Cardo? Curt too?” and no venom.
And Cardo’s face suddenly forward, the bones of his hands bent over it.
Dawn blue in the windows, star-dark dwindled under the still walls.