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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 spiraling
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.
     

CHAPTER VII
     
    0h, 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 meager light by comparison with the streetlamps half a