‘Birdshot’

The September dusk is pulled taut across the sky with haste, marking the shortening of days and heralding the autumn chill that will soon pervade the air. With the impending night comes the thinning of the herd of visitors to the reserve; twitchers with their camera bags and anoraks patterned like autumn leaves, parents hurrying after mewling children who skip joyfully and absent-mindedly over the precarious wooden walkways and hard, jagged dirt paths. Their presence and their occasional gawking is tolerable and harmless, but only when the gift shop shutters come down and the last of the family carriers chug their way out of the car park and up to the main road do I feel truly at peace.

Then you arrive to fell my peace as a logger does a great pine. You stick to the ever-growing shadows, throwing glances over your shoulder and squinting to see ahead of you, filtering through the dregs of remaining visitors who occasionally nod a greeting, who won’t think twice about you save for a quick musing about what brand of binoculars or tripod might be inside the camo satchel slung over your shoulder. You’re just another twitcher, and if anyone asks, you’ve even got a mental dictionary of slang to prove it.

Once you’re sure that all the weary sightseers are well and truly gone, you start to undress your façade, silently and smugly thanking the ever-darkening sky for its unknowing participation in your wicked plot. You don’t follow that winding path past the visitor centre that all those long-gone day-trippers take; no, you head straight for the thick crop of trees whose trunks are rooted in the tenebrous waters of the salt marsh that stretches for miles towards the tongue of the sea. You’ve been here many times before, and you know just where your quarry lies.

You step onto the wooden walkway, stealing one last look over your shoulder before breaking through the threshold where the evening’s half-light is swallowed by the encroaching limbs of foliage. You take comfort in the fact that in less than a minute, you’ll be almost completely out of sight. Almost.

A sudden warble trills from the branches of a looming birch tree, and, looking up with a brief explosion of shock at the sheer volume of the sound, you meet my gaze. I open my mouth and defiantly let out another alarmed, gritty chirp from deep within my throat, and I hope with every fibre of my tiny form that you know any amount of vitriol I can conjure up is for you. The indifference that’s now flooded your eyes tells me you don’t. It’s not me that you want; my kind is too common, my plumage and song too dull for the highest bidder to declare a bank-breaking figure just to have me on their mantelpiece.

I’ve watched you from afar on your inconspicuous walks around the reserve during the day, weaving amongst day tripping families and staking out this year’s twitcher spectacle; a nesting white-tailed eagle that resides in the branches of an alder at the edge of the forest, just before the brackish water becomes more open, and reaches a depth too great for a quick paddle, or even a sturdy set of waders. You could hardly contain your glee the first time you saw the creature, could hardly believe that such a gracious animal would settle in this part of the world, and within reach of your glue traps, your nets and your birdshot.

You advance further into the reserve and away from the lodge-style visitor centre, away from the parking spaces and display boards and wooden signs, and into the great swell of foliage that threatens to swallow the mouldering walkway beneath your feet. You’re alone now.

Your pace slows as you drink in the chill of the night air and the chirruping of wildlife, and I wonder for a moment if you had ever had any real reverence for the majesty of the wilderness, of once untouched places that you and many before you ventured into with spears, arrows, rifles and steel-jawed traps with which to plunder its inhabitants. Maybe in some other life you really would be carrying a tripod over your shoulder instead of a shotgun, but your heart is already rotted through. You’ve been doing this for a long time.

You’ve been walking for about five minutes when an animal call cuts through the stillness of the night, coming from somewhere far behind you. It’s familiar, but a name doesn’t spring to your lips immediately. You pause for a moment, half turning back to see if you can make out anything standing on the walkway, but the darkness and lush trees make short work of your vision, obscuring anything more than twenty feet away.

Muntjac, roe deer, red deer, sika deer, fallow deer. You frown as you pull from your memories the calls of each of these animals, playing them back again and again until you have to acknowledge, with some frustration, that it’s none of them. But you do know that call.

You’ve stopped completely now, still intently eyeing the gloom to see if anything moves or wanders into your field of vision. You’re thinking that if it called out again, if only it called out again, you’d know exactly what —

Another cry rings out, closer this time, and a weathered old candle flickers to life somewhere in the back of your head as one word comes to mind.

Elk.

It’s the unmistakeable shrill bugling of an elk, somewhere at the head of the path behind you. You know the sound well from the time you spent hunting them in northern Montana years ago; another place you should never have been.

Elk don’t live here though, and you know that. Elk haven’t lived here for well over a thousand years, so what is it exactly that you’re hearing out there in all that darkness?

The not-elk trumpets into the silent night again, and this time, there’s an answer.

That’s right, an answer. Another mournful cry comes from somewhere to your left, and it upsets your composure so much you almost leap out of your skin. You don’t leap out of your skin; you just look around with mild bewilderment written on your face, but I can tell from my vantage that you’re more than a little spooked.

Another elk call erupts from somewhere to your right, but this time it’s coming from…somewhere up in the trees? Before you even have time to contemplate how such a creature could be here at all, let alone find its way up into the canopy that towers over you, they’re coming from all over; a cacophonous trumpeting like a vast startled herd of them are being driven to flee by the presence of a fearsome predator. Perhaps they’re banding together to drive something out, you think as you squint harder still into the inky void behind you.

Then come the hoofbeats. They begin quietly, quieter than they should, like a recording struggling through a tinny AM radio. As they grow in volume, you can ascertain from the way they fall that it’s just one animal, just one elk, if it could even be an elk. You decide that you’ll wait. Yes, you’ll wait until you can see the shape of it in the gloom, until you can see the silhouettes of its great antlers painted against the dusk.

But now you can’t keep track of the hoofbeats. What had sounded seconds ago like the approaching footfalls of a single animal have doubled, tripled even, the rhythm of the beast’s steady trot now displaced, and gaining momentum with every second that passes.

You break your statue act and shuffle backwards, hoping that something will finally materialise at the bottom of that yawning path to put this mystery to bed, to explain away the fast approaching and thunderous galloping of two dozen or so phantom elk.

The noise of hooves on wood is like a roaring avalanche now, yet you can see nothing ahead of you; in fact, the web of lush branches above seem to cast shadows that grow darker and darker by the second, almost as if the absence of light itself is advancing towards you. Your uncertain feet shuffle your stubborn body backwards, and you take off running.

The fleeting glances you throw over your shoulder as you sprint further into these coastal wilds tell you nothing at all about what’s chasing you, only that the pathway is black as a whale’s gullet, and that no amount of cardio is going to prevent your pursuers from gaining on you. But you’re a professional, aren’t you? You’ve been at it for years, and you’ve been here before. You’ve walked this decaying path and stalked these marshes before, and you’ve got a pretty good mental picture of the place; so good in fact, that you could navigate it in the dark. Somewhere just up ahead is a gap in the wooden railing, the one you illicitly cut out yourself on your last visit just a couple of days ago, the one that’s just a stone’s throw from the eagle’s nest. It should be, no, it is wide enough for you to jump through, and even so, a mouthful of marsh water is better than being gored, or trampled, or both.

You wrench the flashlight from your pocket and throw the switch to “on”, and a tunnel of white explodes from it, illuminating the path ahead. The spectral herd shakes the earth behind your burning legs, and for a moment you swear that you can feel heat on the back of your neck and hear the tyre-squeal exhalations of what must be two or three bull elk that are leading the charge.

Just when it seems that you’re seconds away from being pulled under the carpet of hooves that are surely right behind you in all that impossible darkness, the man-made gap comes into view, less than ten feet away. You veer to the left with a flying step, and you take the leap.

A sharp jolt of pain blooms from your hip, and you collide with the waist-deep salt water about as hard as you expected to, but certainly harder than you had hoped you would. You’re engulfed by a cold, briny blackness that lasts one, two, three seconds as your right arm breaches the water, groping and fumbling until it finds the sturdy branch of a tree. You haul yourself up, and once the churning of the water has subsided, you find yourself staring up at the walkway, throwing the beam of the flashlight up to reveal… nothing at all. There’s no antlered audience standing up in the gallery silently observing your panic, no fading hoofbeats in the distance. Just me, tucked away at a lofty vantage, my round body an ink blot against the last of the twilight. Like I said, it’s not me that you want, and you know for certain that you’ll get what you want, stampeding ghosts or not.

Your bafflement turns to frustration as you shift your attention to the camo bag that managed to cling to your shoulder even when you fell into the water. You unzip it, your hands cavorting this way and that with newly ignited anxiety. I feel myself become even smaller as the shotgun rears its head from the depths of the bag; a cold hunk of utilitarian steel, black as moccasin’s hide. You check it over, and exhale deeply as you realise that it still works, that your meal ticket for the foreseeable future is still very much attainable.

You trek onwards, sticking to the path you’ve already plotted through the marsh. You wear a steely look upon your face as if to prove something to the land on which you’re trespassing, to prove that you’re unshaken by its warnings no matter how arcane, but you are afraid. Your finger rests upon the trigger of the shotgun, and you flinch at every chittering bird, every rustling leaf, because despite everything you’ve ever seen or ever heard, how do you explain away a great yawning void that crashes after you like a herd of elk a hundred strong, that trumpets and bellows and stinks and breathes like it’s composed of something organic despite its lack of form? Your only comfort now rests in the sulphurous innards of six birdshot cartridges, and you’d better hope they do their job.

You take the path to the lip of the submerged forest at a crawl, pointing the shotgun this way and that, and ensuring that you keep any noise to a minimum. You need that bird. You need to throw it and all its majesty inside a pitch-dark burlap sack, need its ragdoll body to be stuffed until it’s a graceless parody of what it was in life, and you can coax a healthy fee from the fat wallet of some trophy-drunk millionaire.

With your new-found caution, it takes you three minutes longer than you expected to reach the treeline, where the ground beneath you begins to slope into ever-deepening waters. You fix the flashlight band to your head and gaze slowly upwards, ensuring that your movements are anything but sudden. Your heart skips a beat in a kind of shocked relief as the beam settles delicately on the nesting white-tailed eagle. The thrill of the hunt floods your veins like an opiate, sedating your anxiety and lighting an almost pleasurable fire inside of you.

You still can’t believe your luck. Eagles are typically a chore to hunt, given that they nest mostly on sheer cliff faces, but white tails prefer trees. You’ve come to understand from your time studying the reserve and the surrounding area that the police presence is sparse at best, and surely none on duty would bother with the lone crack of a shotgun ringing out across the wetlands. You think it’s a true recipe for success.

Something splashes some fifteen feet out into the deeper water. It sounds big. You’re startled for a second, freezing up and then slowly turning, allowing the beam of the headlamp to graze the surface. The nerves stab at you through the intoxicating shroud of excitement, filling your head with more thoughts of spectral beasts come to get you. You recall your time spent in South Africa, where, aboard a whaling vessel, you pursued all manner of sea life with hooks, nets and cages. You rest on a particularly vivid memory from that time, of happening upon a bull shark that had swam into an estuary. A compatriot of yours had joked about how it was “the definition of shooting fish in a barrel” as you speared the creature and slit it from belly to jaw.

What if it was a big old bull shark out there right now? What if it was coming right towards you in the murk? You wouldn’t even know, wouldn’t have a second before it —

No. There are no bull sharks in this part of the world. No white sharks, no tigers, no hammerheads. If it’s anything at all, it’s a seal. Seals swim into these estuaries all the time, sometimes even play with people. You need to stay with your quarry.

You focus the flashlight beam back to the white-tailed eagle, finger poised over the trigger, your right eye peering through the crosshair. The eagle is gone. Your heart drops to your feet like a metal ball bearing, and you become all too aware of the rapidity and shallowness of your breaths.

The eagle suddenly swoops down from above, screeching a battle cry, and you feel the tips of its talons graze your face. The flurry of motion and the frenzied beating of the animal’s wings stuns you, so much so that it takes you at least three seconds to register that the water five feet from where you’re standing is alive with…something. It’s churning and frothing as though a saltwater crocodile is tearing apart a bison in front of you, or you’re beholden to a submersible emerging from the depths. It’s boiling, almost.

Something is rising from the gloom, but it’s no ghostly dark cloud. Not this time.

The first thing you see are a dozen coal black eyes, staring wetly at you, unblinking, clearly bovine in nature. The way they appear to you is an impossibility; none are nestled in the skull of any animal you’ve ever seen, rather it seems that they’re embedded in some kind of…membrane? A wall of organic matter?

The marsh roars and groans louder still like furious coastal winds, and more of the creature is revealed. Curling ivory horns emerge from the dark water, larger than that of any living beast, and at their root is a hulking head, cow-like, also punctuated by those same bovine dolls’ eyes. What you had previously believed to be a wall of biological tissue is just a mere fraction of the thing’s colossal body; a great tumorous archipelago. Mired by disbelief and fear, you recall a series of images from a history book you had seen long ago, one that detailed the existence of a creature that no longer roams these lands, not for several hundred years now.

The animal is an auroch. An extinct wild cow. You’re almost certain of it, but its gargantuan size is far greater than any text ever speculated, and the flesh of its hide is a stark shade of pink, glistening with a viscous fluid sheen that renders its visage almost fetal in some strange way.

Allowing your paralyzed eyes to drink in the sight, your ear catches a muffled sound underneath the snorting of the titanic thing; a kind of screeching, screaming, like…

Trumpeting.

All at once, the dozen unblinking obsidian eyes above the head of the auroch are pushed outwards, and you can see outlines of animal heads forming underneath the flesh of the beast, straining like restless infants kicking inside of a vast womb. With each push, the skin seems to tighten around the mewling heads until you can clearly decipher what they are. Elk.

An elk head explodes through the tumorous membrane of the auroch’s flesh, its trumpet call distorted and furious. Two more break through, then two more, and again and again until the great animal’s body is alive with a howling herd of elk, screeching like a wall of possessed taxidermy.

You find it in yourself to raise the shotgun, pouring all your leaking faith into its chamber. The creature’s biology is something of science fiction, of silver screens. It can’t be real is all your baffled mind can conjure. There can’t be any historical record of something like this.

But there is, in a way. It’s every historical record, every fossil and every beast that ever waned slowly out of existence, reborn as twisted collage in the ancient womb of the earth to do what must be done. An avenging god of the soil never written into scripture, one whose kind came before you, before your saw-toothed traps, your nets and your birdshot.

With every blink, you spy a new creature pushing through the uterine flesh of the auroch’s body; a pack of wolves with blazing eyes, the snarling muzzle of a brown bear, the expectant mouths of two dozen ravening white stork chicks. None of these animals have existed on this little island for over six-hundred years, some for thousands, but that’s hardly a fact you have a moment to consider as the titanic beast rushes, no, glides towards you at a speed that defies its size.

You fire one shot. You only know because the weapon kicks back against your shoulder. There’s no ceremonious thundercrack into the silent night like you’re used to; the sound of the weapon is impotent, consumed by the clamour of an avenging angel and its litter. The water surges as though splitting in the wake of a freighter, and you throw yourself to the side to avoid the creature, expecting another amble through the briny darkness of the marsh, because a mouthful of marsh water is better than being gored. But that collision never comes. The screaming and grunting is a great pile of noise now, and you can feel blistering, reeking exhalations on your skin. You look down with idiotic surprise. The left-most horn of the auroch has speared you through the chest, and the air’s bristled tongue laps hungrily at your back; an agonising tell-all that the horn has punched all the way through your delicate form.

Gored.

The creature holds you aloft, its half-formed brood baying in victorious glee at the discharging of your blood. You turn your head to the right, and your flashlight, still shining bright, arcs over the trees. Hundreds of birds line each branch like a throng of churchgoers crammed into pews, eagerly awaiting the word of their Lord. Starlings, nightingales, red kites, sparrows, blackbirds, robins. We’re all here.

I watch from the snug branch of an alder as the flashlight wheels around and around, and then cuts out as the creature descends beneath the surface with its human trophy in tow, ready to assimilate again with the silt below, returning to the fertile spring where it took its genesis.

The reserve is quiet again, and it will be quiet for some time. Come morning, a worker might notice the crudely broken handrail where you first descended into the marsh, and maybe a visitor will spy a beaten-up headlamp clinging to a felled branch, but there will be no trace of you, no shred of bloody clothing or severed limb to spook the authorities into dragging the coastal waters and initiating a manhunt. There will be no stories or legends or cautionary tales of a man walking into the marshes after dark and turning up weeks later a bloated and milky-eyed carcass. You are simply erased.