‘Don’t look at me,’ Will said. ‘Keep your eyes on the animal.’
Cornelius looked back towards the bear, which had begun its implacable approach. This wasn’t one of the playful adolescents from the dump; nor was it the blind old warrior Will had photographed. This was a fully grown female; a good six hundred pounds.
‘Fuck…’ Cornelius muttered.
‘Just keep coming,’ Will coaxed him. ‘You’re going to be okay. Just don’t let her think you’re anything worth chasing.’
Cornelius managed three tentative backward steps, but his equilibrium was poor after the dervish act, and on the fourth step his heel slid on the slick ground. He flailed for a moment, then recovered his balance, but the harm was done. Hissing her intentions, the bear gave up her plod and came bounding at him. Cornelius turned and ran, the bear roaring in pursuit, her body a blur. Weaponless, all Will could do was dodge out of Cornelius’ path and yell himself hoarse in the hope of distracting the animal. But it was Cornelius she wanted. In two bounds she’d halved the distance between them, jaws wide in readiness—
‘Get down!’
Will threw a glance back in the direction of the voice and there, God save her, was Adrianna, rifle raised.
‘Con!’ she yelled. ‘Get your fucking head down!’
He got the message, and flung himself to the frozen dirt, with the bear a body’s length from his heels. Adrianna fired, and hit the animal’s shoulder, checking her before she could catch up with her quarry. The animal rose up with an agonized roar, blood staining her fur. Cornelius was still within swatting distance, however, if she chose to take him out. Ducking to make himself as small a target as possible. Will scrambled towards him, and, grabbing his trembling torso, hauled him out of the bear’s path. There was a sharp stink of shit off him.
He looked back at the bear. She wasn’t finished; nowhere near. Roaring so loudly that the ground shook, she started towards Adrianna, who levelled her rifle and fired a second time, at no more than ten yards’ range. The animal’s roar ceased on the instant, and again she rose up, white and red and vast, teetering for a moment. Then she reeled back like a breaking wave, and limped away into the darkness.
The entire encounter – from the moment Cornelius had named his nemesis – had perhaps lasted a minute, but it was long enough for a kind of delirium to have taken hold of Will. He got to his feet, the snowflakes spiralling around him like giddy stars, and went to the place where the bear’s blood had splashed on the ice.
‘Are you all right?’ Adrianna asked him.
‘Yes,’ he said.
It was only half the truth. He wasn’t hurt, but he wasn’t whole either. He felt as though some part of him had been torn out by what he’d just witnessed, and had fled into the darkness in pursuit of the bear. He had to go after it.
‘Wait!’ Adrianna yelled.
He looked back at her, trying his best to block out Cornelius’ sobbing apologies, and the shouts of people on Main Street as they came sniffing after the bloodshed. Adrianna was staring straight at him, and he knew she was reading the thoughts on his face.
‘Don’t be a fuck-wit, Will.’ she said.
‘No choice.’
Then at least take the rifle.’
He looked at it as though it had just pumped its bullets into him. ‘I don’t need it,’ he said.
‘Will—’
He turned his back on her; on the lights, on the people and their asinine questions. Then he loped off towards the shoreline, following the red trail the bear had left behind her.
Oh, all the years he’d waited. Waited and watched with his dispassionate eye while something died nearby, recording its passing like the truthful witness he was. Keeping his distance, keeping his calm. Enough of that. The bear was dying, and he would die too if he let her go now; let her perish in the dark alone. Something had snapped in him. He didn’t know why. Perhaps because of the conversation with Guthrie, which had stirred up so much pain, perhaps the encounter with the blind bear at the dump; perhaps simply because the time had come. He’d hung on this branch long enough, ripening there. It was time to fall and rot into something new.
He followed the bear’s trail along the shoreline parallel to the street with a kind of exulting despair in him. He had no idea what he would do when he caught up with the animal; he only knew he had to be with it in its agonies, given that he was to some degree their author. He was the one who’d brought Cornelius and his habits here, after all. The bear had simply been doing what she would do in the wild, confronted by something threatening. She’d been shot for being true to her nature. No thinking queer could be happy with his complicity in that.
Will’s empathy with the animal hadn’t totally unseated his urge to self-preservation. Though he followed the trail closely most of the way, he gave the rocks a little distance when he came upon them, in case there were more animals lurking there. But what little light the lamps of Main Street had supplied was now too far behind him to be of much use. It was harder and harder to make out the bloodstains. He had to stop and study the ground to find them, for which pause he was grateful. The icy air was raw in his throat and chest; his teeth ached as though they were all being drilled at the same time, his legs were trembling.
If he was feeling weak, he thought, the bear was surely a damn sight weaker. She’d shed copious amounts of blood now, and must be close to collapse.
Somewhere nearby a dog was barking, her alarm familiar.
‘Lucy…’ Will said to himself, and looking up through the flickering snow saw that his pursuit had brought him within twenty yards of the back of Guthrie’s shack. He heard the old man shouting now, telling the dog to shut up; and then the sound of the back door being opened.
Light spilled from it, out across the snow. A meagre light by comparison with the streetlamps half a mile back, but bright enough to show Will his quarry.
The animal was closer to the shore than to the shack, and closer to Will than either: standing on all fours, swaying, the ground around her dark with her free-flowing blood.
‘What the fuck’s going on out here?’ Guthrie demanded.
Will didn’t look at him; he kept his eyes fixed on the bear – as hers were fixed on him – while he yelled for Guthrie to go back inside.
Rabjohns? Is that you?’
There’s a wounded bear out here—’ Will shouted.
‘I see her,’ Guthrie replied. ‘Did you shoot her?’
‘No!’ From the comer of his eye Will could see that Guthrie had emerged from his shack. ‘Go back inside will you?’
‘Are you hurt?’ Guthrie called.
Before Will could reply the bear was up, and turning her bulk towards Guthrie, she charged. There was time as she roared upon the old man for Will to wonder why she’d chosen to take Guthrie instead of him; whether in the seconds they’d stared at one another she’d seen that he was no threat to her: just another wounded thing, trapped between street and sea. Then she was up and swiping at Guthrie, the blow throwing him maybe five yards. He landed hard, but thanks to some grotesque gift of adrenalin he was on his feet a heartbeat later, yelling incoherently back at his wounder. Only then did his body seem to realize the grievous harm it had been done. His hands went up to his chest, his blood running out between his fingers. His yells ceased and he looked back up at the bear, so that for a moment they stood staring at one another, both bloodied, both teetering. Then Guthrie spoiled