The moviemakers had a lot of work to do, too. Fahd and Data had organized the cameras – they already had Fahd’s video and had borrowed another from Mr. Dillinger – and Data was even helping Sarah work out a plot outline on his laptop computer, but they still needed to know more.
Simon was worried about how they would ever get film of bears around Tamarack.
“There are always bears out at the dump,” Jesse said.
“That’s hardly what we’re looking for,” Nish, the Hollywood director, argued. “You’re talking about bears ripping apart green garbage bags. I’m looking for bears that rip apart people!”
“How are you going to arrange that, Movie Boy?” asked Sarah. “Or are you going to volunteer?”
“Very funny,” Nish said. “We find the bear – then we worry about how we make it look like it’s attacking two policemen. Maybe we use dummies. With a lot of blood and guts and quick cuts, no one will be able to tell the difference.”
“There’s only one dummy in this movie,” Sarah shot back.
The team meeting about the horror movie did not go well. Some of the Owls were beginning to lose interest in Nish’s project. Others wanted to abandon the idea of a local story in favour of another crazy idea from Fahd. Fahd wanted to use one camera to film closeups of frogs and toads and salamanders and snakes and spiders, then use the other camera to take shots of downtown Tamarack, and run the two together and call it Invasion of the Creepy Crawlies.
“Brilliant,” Nish said with all the sarcasm he could muster. “Positively brilliant, my dear Fahd.”
“Thanks,” Fahd said.
“C’mon, Trav,” Nish said, scooping up the notes he was making in an unused school exercise book, of which he seemed to have dozens. “We’re wasting our time here.”
Travis and Nish headed out River Road on their mountain bikes. Both carried their lacrosse sticks carefully tied along the crossbar and hanging out in front. Travis had a ball stuffed deep in his pocket. Nish had his backpack, and in the pack he had Mr. Dillinger’s video camera. They were going, Travis had told him, on a “scouting” mission.
“Fontaine invited you out?” Nish had asked Travis.
“Yeah,” Travis said. “He said he had something for me.”
“Maybe a bullet!” Nish said, giggling.
“That’s not funny.”
Travis didn’t really think he had anything to worry about, going to old man Fontaine’s place in the bush, but he was nervous enough not to want to do it alone. He’d convinced Nish to come by saying they’d be able to gain a better sense of setting, and if they took the camera they could stop in at the dump on the way and maybe get some footage of bears.
“Fine with me,” said Nish. “Mr. Dillinger’s camera has an unbelievable zoom – it’ll be like you’re close enough to reach out and touch them.”
It was now mid-July, the roadside filled with white daisies and orange devil’s paintbrushes and yellow buttercups. The farmers along River Road were in the fields, and the air was ripe with the smell of the fresh-cut hay. It was a wonderful day for a bike ride, and Travis only wished he could enjoy it more. His stomach was jumping. He had no idea what Mr. Fontaine wanted him out here for.
They came first to the town dump. It had changed dramatically from when Travis was younger. Sometimes, on a cool summer evening, his family used to drive out to sit in the car and watch the bears pick through the garbage. Occasionally, bear cubs would walk right up to the cars – there might be six or seven bears in all – and sometimes a mother bear would race over and scold her offspring for getting so close.
No cars came out in the evening any more. The dump was fenced off now, and the entrance gate was chained at the end of each day. An attendant was always on hand to ensure that no one dumped toxic materials or paint cans or old tires, and there were recycling bins for everything from glass and plastic to egg cartons and newspapers.
“Still open!” Nish shouted back as he neared the gate.
They pedalled inside and over to the attendant’s shed. Travis and Nish both knew the man on duty – an older brother of Ty Barrett, who sometimes helped Muck out with the Owls’ hockey practices.
“Looking for ‘garbage’ goals, boys?” he asked.
“Good one!” Nish said, though Travis could tell he didn’t really mean it.
“Any bears?” Travis asked.
“A couple, now and then,” the attendant said. “Not like before, though. The ministry came in and shot a few of them this spring, you know. Called them ‘nuisance’ bears – but who they were bothering is beyond me.”
“Damn!” shouted Nish. “We could’ve filmed that!”
The attendant looked at Nish, waiting for him to explain.
“School project,” Nish said. “Trav ’n’ me are working on a film about area bears, good or bad.”
The attendant lifted his cap and scratched his balding head. “Isn’t school out?” he asked.
“This is for next term,” Nish explained.
“Would it be all right if we filmed one, if there’s one around?” Travis asked.
The attendant took his cap off entirely. His thin wisps of hair were tightly curled and greasy. Travis was struck by how the man’s cap left a line that split his face into two distinct parts: one that had seen too much sun, one that had seen no sun at all.
He looked about, almost as if expecting to find a surveillance camera hidden in the pines that bordered the pit where the garbage was thrown.
“Come with me,” he said finally.
Nish hauled Mr. Dillinger’s camera out of his backpack and the two boys leaned their bikes against the shed as the attendant set off for a far corner of the pit.
Travis’s nose felt like it might burst with so many smells, most of them foul and sour. There was only one sound, however, the ill-tempered screeching and calling of hundreds of seagulls. They were everywhere, fighting over the garbage, rising in waves as the attendant kicked a loose green garbage bag down and into the pit, then falling back like a soft blanket of white feathers as the bag settled.
They came to a small stand of pines with cedars growing below. The attendant held his finger to his lips to hush them, then pushed through ahead of the boys.
The branches were in Travis’s face. He was hot, and sweating, and the garbage dump stank beyond belief – but then, in an instant, he forgot everything but what he saw before him.
Two black bears were standing over a half-torn garbage bag!
Travis’s heart pounded. Sweat dripped down his nose and into the corners of his mouth. A mosquito landed on his cheek and he couldn’t even bring himself to slap it for fear of scaring off the two bears.
Scaring them off or, worse, attracting their attention!
Nish was already filming. “Man-oh-man-oh-man,” he muttered. “This is just what the director ordered.”
Travis worried that Nish might be making too much noise. But the bears seemed to be paying no attention. Travis stared at them, fascinated. At first they seemed smaller than he expected, but then one of them stood on its hind legs and sniffed the air, and Travis knew if he were beside it the animal would tower over him, easily.
The other bear poked his nose at the bag, grunted, and then swiped at it casually with one paw. The paw seemed to move in slow motion, yet despite the lack of effort the bag exploded into a shower of paper and empty containers and plate scrapings.
Travis imagined those same claws hitting a human head. He shuddered.
Nish was filming furiously. “Why-oh-why-oh-why does that have to be a stupid green garbage bag?”
“You’d prefer a body?” the attendant whispered, amused.
“Can you arrange one?” Nish answered.
“Sure,” the attendant smiled. “Just walk out there and try to pet one of them.”
“L-look!” Travis suddenly found himself saying. He pointed beyond the two bears. Up the hill, stopping every now and then to raise a long, pointed nose to test the air, came the largest bear Travis had ever seen. It was at least twice the size of the two bears who had just given Travis shivers and shudders with one casual blow of an open paw.
The bear paused, rose onto its haunches, sniffed the air, and turned. It had white hair along the far flank – almost as if someone had spilled bleach along him.
“Silvertip,” the attendant said.
Travis’s mind raced. The Silvertip? Impossible! He would have to be forty or fifty years old.
“Not the one they wanted to kill?” Travis asked.
The attendant shook his head. “Naw. The old guy who works here with me says there was another Silvertip back sometime in the seventies that they hunted but never caught. This one’s young – but I still call him Silvertip. Maybe he’s a grandson or great-grandson or something. He’s a mean beggar anyway. I think maybe we’d be smart to head back.”
Travis and Nish didn’t need much convincing. The big bear – Silvertip – was now up to the garbage bag the other two bears had been fighting over. The smaller bears had scattered like seagulls on his arrival, both of them scooting back down the bank with their tiny tails between their legs. The boys would have laughed except they had no desire to attract Silvertip’s attention.
The big bear stood on his back legs, sniffed, and seemed to stare towards the boys.
Travis’s heart stopped. He’s twice as tall as I am!
But the bear must not have seen them. He half-flicked a paw at a bag and, again, the garbage flew. He buried his head in the trash, grunting and pushing with his nose.
The three spectators backed away through the low cedar.
“Great footage!” Nish kept saying. “Great footage!”
But Travis wasn’t thinking about movies. They still had one more stop to make on this journey.