The Grazing Field

Hello, yes, thank you. I'm calling from Edinburgh. Well, I live in Edinburgh now. This happened up in the Highlands, near Inverness. Summer of 2019. My husband Colin and I, we'd been married about eight months at that point, and we decided to take a long weekend away. Just the two of us. No distractions. We'd both been working ourselves ragged, him at the hospital, me at the firm, and we needed to just be together somewhere quiet. We found this little bed and breakfast outside a village called Drumnadrochit. Lovely place. Run by an older couple, the Frasers. Mrs Fraser made these scones that I still think about. Anyway, the whole point of the trip was to disconnect. Properly disconnect. So we left our phones back at the B&B that evening. No cameras, no emails, nothing. Just us and the landscape. It was our second night there. We'd had dinner in the village, walked back to the B&B, and Colin suggested we take a walk before it got too dark. There was this path that ran behind the property, up along a ridge overlooking some grazing fields. The light was gorgeous. That golden hour light, you know. Everything soft and warm. I remember thinking this was exactly what we needed. Just silence and each other.

We'd been walking maybe twenty minutes when the cattle started acting strange. There was a herd of Highland cows in the field below us, maybe thirty or forty of them. Beautiful animals. Big shaggy ginger things. They'd been grazing peacefully when we first passed, but now they were bunching together. Clustering up tight, the way animals do when there's a predator nearby. Colin noticed it first. He stopped walking and said something like, 'What's got into them?' And I looked, and I'll tell you, I've never seen cattle move like that. They were pressing against each other, making these low sounds. Not mooing exactly. More like groaning. Deep, frightened sounds. Then I saw movement at the far end of the field. Near the tree line. At first I thought it was dogs. Sheepdogs, maybe, though there shouldn't have been any working that field. But the shapes were wrong. The movement was wrong. They weren't running the way dogs run. They were scuttling. Fast. Low to the ground. Six legs each. Maybe more. I couldn't tell from that distance.

There were five of them. Five that I could count. They came out of the trees in a line, spread out, like they were herding the cattle toward the center of the field. Coordinated. Working together. And the cattle, God, the cattle knew. They were trying to run but they had nowhere to go. We got closer to the edge of the ridge to see better. I'll tell you, I wish we hadn't. Because once we were closer, I could see what they actually looked like. They were the size of large dogs, maybe a bit bigger. But they weren't dogs. They looked like beetles. Massive beetles. Black and shiny, with these curved shells on their backs. And their heads, their heads had these mandibles, these pincers, but also something else. Something that looked almost like a mouth. A proper mouth with what might have been teeth. Colin grabbed my arm. He was squeezing so hard it hurt. Neither of us said anything. We just watched. The creatures were circling the herd now, tightening the circle, and the cattle were bellowing, stamping, absolutely terrified. Then one of them, one of the beetle things, it stopped. Rose up on its back legs. And it made this sound.