dark: eight hundred, nine hundred pounds some of them, with indiscriminate appetites and unpredictable behaviour patterns. In a fortnight, they'd be out on the ice floes hunting seal and whale. But right now they were in scavenging mode; come to befoul themselves in the stinking rubbish heaps of Churchill and Balthazar, and - as had occasionally happened - to take a human life. There was every likelihood that they were wandering within sniffing distance of him right now, beyond the throw of Guthrie's jaundiced porch-light, studying Will, perhaps, as he waited on the doorstep. The notion didn't alarm him. Quite the reverse, in fact. It faintly excited him that some visitor from the wilderness might at this very moment be assessing his palatability. For most of his adult life he'd made photographs of the untamed world, reporting to the human tribe the tragedies that occurred in contested territories. They were seldom human tragedies. It was the populace of the other world that withered and perished daily. And as he witnessed the steady erosion of the wilderness, the hunger in him grew to leap the fences and be part of it, before it was gone.

He tugged off one of his fur-lined gloves and plucked his cigarettes out of his anorak pocket. There was only one left. He put it to his numbed lips, and lit up, the emptiness of the pack a greater goad than either the temperature or the bears.

'Hey, Guthrie,' he said, rapping on the blizzard-heater door, 'how about letting me in, huh? I only want a couple of minutes with you. Give me a break.'

He waited, drawing deep on the cigarette, and glancing back out into the darkness. There was a group of rocks twenty or thirty yards beyond his jeep; an ideal place, he knew, for bears to be lurking. Did something move amongst them? He suspected so. Canny bastards, he thought. They were biding their time; waiting for him to