It Ran On Two Legs For Eleven Strides And Then It Did Not

I drive a gritter in winter and a road-repair truck the rest of the year, and I have seen more roadside wildlife than any human being needs to.

This was a Tuesday in October, about five in the morning, on the long straight past the quarry.

Something came out of the ditch on the left and ran ahead of my truck in the beam. It was on two legs. It was tall — my headlights are set low, and the top of it was above them, and I was doing about thirty-five.

I counted eleven strides. I counted because counting was the only thing my brain was still willing to do; everything else had gone very quiet and very white.

The strides were wrong. Not human wrong — animal wrong. The knee joint was too far up and the ankle was too far down, so it ran the way a dog runs on its back legs when it is begging, except it was doing it at thirty-five miles an hour without any effort at all.

On the eleventh stride, it dropped to four legs. It did not stumble. It changed. And when it changed, it doubled its speed and went into the hedge on the right, and the hedge did not shake much, which for something that size is the detail that still gets me at three in the morning.

I stopped. I sat there with the engine running for a long time.

Then I drove to the depot and made tea and did not tell anybody for four years.

I am going to give you the doubts, because you deserve them. Five in the morning. A shift worker. Cold headlights on a wet road. A deer can look wrong. A deer can look very wrong.

But a deer cannot run upright for eleven strides.

I have driven that road maybe four hundred times since. I have never seen it again. What I have done is stop taking the shortcut past the quarry when I'm on my own, and I have told exactly one colleague, and he went pale and said, "Was it near the quarry?"

He did not say anything else. He is not a man who talks. But he changed his shift pattern two months later, and I have never asked him why.