Клайв Баркер – Sacrament (страница 7)

ii

The bears did not make a liar of Adrianna. When she and Will got to the dump, the remnants of the day still with them, they found the animals cavorting in all their defiled glory, the adolescents – one of them the best proportioned female they’d yet spotted; a perfect specimen of her clan – scavenging in the dirt, the older female investigating the rusted carcass of a truck, while the male Adrianna had been so eager for Will to see surveyed his foetid kingdom from the top of one of the dump’s dozen hillocks.

Will got out of the jeep and approached. Adrianna, always armed with a rifle under these kind of conditions, followed two or three strides behind. She knew Will’s methodology by now: he wouldn’t waste film on long shots; he’d get as close as he could without disturbing the animals and then he’d wait. And wait; and wait. Even amongst his peers – wildlife photographers who thought nothing of waiting a week for a picture – his patience was legendary. In this, as in so many other things, he was a paradox. Adrianna had seen him at publishing parties grinding his teeth with boredom after five minutes of an admirer’s chit-chat; but here, watching four polar bears on a piece of wasteland, he would sit happily mesmerized until he found the moment he wanted to seize.

It was plain he was not interested in either the adolescents or the female. It was the old male he wanted to photograph. He glanced over at Adrianna, and silently indicated the path he was going to take between the other animals, so as to get as close to his subject as possible. She’d no sooner nodded her comprehension than Will was off, sure-footed even on the ice-slickened dirt. The adolescents took no notice of him. But the female, who was certainly large enough to kill either Will or Adrianna with a swipe if she took a mind to do so, ceased her investigations of the truck and sniffed the air. Will froze; Adrianna did the same, rifle at the ready if the bear made an aggressive move. But perhaps because she’d smelt so many people in the vicinity of the dump, the bear wasn’t interested in this particular scent. She returned to gutting the truck seats, and Will was off again, towards the male. By now Adrianna had grasped the shot Will was after: a low angle, looking up the slope of the hillock so as to frame the bear against the sky, a fool-king perched on a throne of shit. It was the kind of image Will had built his reputation upon. The whole paradoxical story, captured in a picture so indelible and so inevitable, that it seemed evidence of collusion with God. More often than not such happy accidents were the fruit of obsessive observation. But once in a while, as now, they presented themselves as gifts. All he had to do was snatch them.

Typically, of course (how she cursed his machismo sometimes) he was going to position himself so close to the base of (he hillock that if the animal decided to come after him he’d be in trouble. Creeping close to the ground he found his spot. The animal was either unaware of, or indifferent to, his proximity; it was half turned from him, casually licking dirt off its paws. But Adrianna knew from experience such appearances could be dangerously deceptive. The wild did not always like to be scrutinized, however discreetly. Far less adventurous photographers than Will had lost their limbs or their lives by taking an animal’s insouciance for granted. And of all the creatures Will had photographed, there was none with a more terrible reputation than the polar bear. If the male chose to come after Will, Adrianna would have to bring the beast down in one shot, or it would all be over.

Will had by now found a niche at the very base of the hillock that suited him perfectly. The bear was still licking its paws, its face now almost entirely turned away from the camera. Adrianna glanced back at the other animals. All three were happily engrossed in their sports, but that was of little comfort. The geography of the dump allowed for there to be any number of other animals scavenging close by yet out of sight. Not for the first time she wished she’d been bom with the eyes of a chameleon: side-rigged and independently manoeuvred.

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.’

V

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.