To escape the light pollution, Ivana and I drove to these huge wide-open farm fields on a foothill outside the outskrits of town a couple nights ago. it was super cloudy and windy when we parked on this dirt road, but then 2 things happened in quick succession.

first, a plane heading for the tiny airport behind us on the other side of the hill came LOOMING out of the clouds, lighting them up in a craggy fluffy cave-tunnel around it and cutting this perfectly sharp-edge swathe of narrow high-beams through the fog in front of it. second, as we turned to watch it, we saw, upon the far-off ridge of the field, silhouetted against the freakily illuminated dark grey storm-cloud night sky beneath the plane-glow, a long line of Creatures meandering casually theough the field. they seemed like coyotes but were too big and not shaped like coyotes, and they looked like deer but did not move like deer. it was too dark to see details, but every time we squinted at them harder to try to decipher them, they looked slightly more wrong and eluded identification. they were silent and could have been either grazing OR tracking a scent, and also given that the grass near us was very high and thick, it’s possible that their leg movements and lengths were hampered by the grass and therefore did not reflect the movement of whatever animals they actually were.

after standing out there like dumbasses watching them and deciding they Had to be deer and discussing how cryptids got invented and how keenly our caveman-brains could suss out even the most subtle Wrongnesses in an animal’s shape and movement, we realized we should PROBABLY get back in the car amd gtfo, but then ivana mentioned that at this time of year, the male deer ought to have antlers. there were a good 9 to 15 individual animals there and none of them had antlers. i wasnt sure, because it was very dark, far, and foggy, but as we drove away i stg that i saw one of the animals possessing an un-carnivore-like slender and pointed neck and head moving across the ridge in an extremely un-ungulate-like loping gait. so uh.