She looked back at Will. He had crept up the slope just a little, and had his camera poised. The bear, meanwhile, had given up cleaning its paws, and was lazily surveying its wretched domain. Adrianna willed it to move its rump; turn twenty degrees clockwise and give Will his picture. But it simply raised its scarred snout into the air and yawned, its black velvet lips curling back as it did so. Its teeth, like its hide, were a record of the battles it had fought. Many of them were splintered and several others missing; its gums were abscessed and raw. No doubt it was in constant pain, which probably did nothing for the sweetness of its mood.
The animal’s yawn afforded Will a chance to move three or four yards to his left, until the bear was facing him. It was clear by the caution of his advance that he was perfectly aware of his jeopardy. If the animal took this moment to study the ground rather than the sky then he had a couple of seconds at best to get out of its way.
But luck was with him. Overhead, a flock of noisy geese were homing, and the bear idly turned its gaze their way, allowing Will to reach his chosen spot and settle there before it dropped its head and once again sullenly surveyed the dump.
At last, Adrianna heard the barely audible click of the shutter, and the whir of the film’s advance. A dozen shots in quick succession; then a pause. The bear lowered its head. Had it sensed Will? The shutter clicked again, four, five, six times. The bear let out a sharp hiss. It was an unmistakable warning. Adrianna levelled the rifle. Will clicked on. The bear did not move. Will caught two more shots, and then, very slowly, began to rise. The bear took a step towards him, but the garbage beneath its bulk was slick, and instead of following through the animal faltered.
Will glanced back towards Adrianna. Seeing the levelled rifle he motioned it down and stealthily stepped away. Only when he’d halved the distance between the hillock and Adrianna did he murmur:
‘He’s blind.’
She looked again at the animal. It was still poised at the top of the hillock, its scarred head roving back and forth, but she didn’t doubt what Will had said was true. The animal had little or no sight left. Hence its tentativeness; its reluctance to give chase when it was not certain of the solidity of the ground beneath its paws.
Will was at her side now. ‘You want pictures of any of the others?’ she asked him. The adolescents had gone to romp elsewhere, but the female was still sniffing around the truck. He told her no; he’d got what he needed. Then, turning back to look at the bear, he said:
‘He reminds me of somebody, I just can’t think who.’
‘Whoever it is. don’t tell them.’
‘Why not?’ Will said, still staring at the animal. ‘I think I’d be flattered.’
When they got back to Main Street, Peter Tegelstrom was out at the front of his house, perched on a ladder nailing a string of Hallowe’en lights along the low-hanging eaves. His children, a five-year-old girl and a son a year her senior, ran around excitedly, clapping and yelling as the row of pumpkins and skulls was unravelled. Will headed over to chat to Tegelstrom; Adrianna followed. She’d made friends with the kids in the last week and a half, and had suggested to Will that he photograph the family. Tegelstrom’s wife was pure Inuit, her beauty evident in her children’s faces. A picture of this healthy and contented human family living within two hundred yards of the dump would make, Adrianna argued, a powerful counterpoint to Will’s pictures of the bears. The wife, however, was too shy even to talk to the visitors, unlike Tegelstrom himself, who seemed to Will starved for conversation.
‘Are you finished with your pictures now?’ he wanted to know.
‘Near enough.’
‘You should have gone down to Churchill. They’ve got a lot more bears there—’
‘—and a lot of tourists taking pictures of them.’
‘You could take pictures of the tourists taking pictures of the bears,’ Tegelstrom said.
‘Only if one of them was being eaten.’
Peter was much amused by this. His arranging of the lights finished, he climbed down the ladder and switched them on. The children clapped. There isn’t much here to keep them occupied,’ he said. ‘I feel bad for them sometimes. We’re going to move down to Prince Albert in the spring.’ He nodded into the house. ‘My wife doesn’t want to, but the babies need a better life than this.’
The babies, as he called them, had been playing with Adrianna, and at her bidding had gone inside to put on their Hallowe’en masks. Now they reappeared, jabbering and whooping to inspire some fear. The masks were. Will guessed, the shy wife’s handiwork: not gleeful vampires or ghouls, but more troubled spirits, constructed from scraps of sealskin and bits of fur and cardboard, all roughly daubed with red and blue paint. Set on such diminutive bodies they were strangely unsettling.
‘Come and stand here for me, will you?’ Will said, calling them over to pose in front of the doorway.
‘Do I get to be in this?’ Tegelstrom asked.
‘No,’ Will said bluntly.
Affably enough, Tegelstrom stepped out of the picture, and Will went down on his haunches in front of the children, who had ceased their hollers and were standing at the doorstep, hand in hand. There was a sudden gravity in the moment. This wasn’t the happy family portrait Adrianna had been trying to arrange. It was a snapshot of two mournful spirits, posed in the twilight beneath a loop of plastic lights. Will was happier with the shot than any of the pictures he’d made at the dump.
Cornelius was not yet home, which was no great surprise.
‘He’s probably smoking pot with the Brothers Grimm,’ Will said, referring to the two Germans with whom Cornelius had struck up a dope-and-beer-driven friendship. They lived in what was indisputably the most luxurious home in the community, complete with a sizeable television. Besides the dope, Cornelius had confided, they had a collection of all-girl wrestling films so extensive it was worthy of academic study.
‘So we’re done here?’ Adrianna said, as she set about making the vodka martinis they always drank around this time. It was a ritual that had begun as a joke in a mud-hole in Botswana, passing a flask of vodka back and forth pretending they were sipping very dry martinis at the Savoy.
‘We’re done,’ Will said.
‘You’re disappointed.’
‘I’m always disappointed. It’s never what I want it to be.’
‘Maybe you want too much.’
‘We’ve had this conversation.’
‘I’m having it again.’
‘Well I’m not,’ Will said, with a monotony in his tone Adrianna knew of old. She let the subject drop and moved on to another.
‘Is it okay if I take a couple of weeks off? I want to go down to Tallahassee to see my mother.’
‘No problem. I’m going back to San Francisco to spend some time with the pictures, start to make the connections.’
This was a favourite phrase of his, describing a process Adrianna had never completely comprehended. She’d watched him doing it: laying out maybe two or three hundred images on the floor and wandering amongst them for several days, arranging and rearranging them, laying unlikely combinations together to see if sparks flew; growling at himself when they didn’t; getting