Something in the Headlights

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Field Journal No. 001 | Oklahoma

I was driving one night when something appeared in my headlights.

It happened quickly. One moment, the road was empty. The next, there was this little creature moving across it.

I'd never seen anything quite like it.

At first, I thought it might be an armadillo. It had that same low, peculiar body, but something was wrong. There was no shell. Its skin looked grayish pink, almost bare, and its front legs seemed too short.

I only had a few seconds to look before it disappeared into the darkness.

Later, I tried explaining it to my husband.

"You saw an armadillo," he said.

Maybe. Oklahoma certainly has plenty of them.

But I've seen armadillos before.

This wasn't one.

At least, it didn't look like any armadillo I'd ever encountered.

I kept thinking about the shape of its body, the way it moved, and especially that strange, exposed skin.

Then came the anthill.

While walking one day, I noticed an unusually large mound of earth. It was clearly an anthill, but much larger than the ones I was accustomed to seeing. I intended to give it plenty of room. Oklahoma ants aren't something I care to disturb.

But something about the mound caught my attention.

It wasn't just the size. The mound had an odd, uneven shape, with a few places where the loose earth looked as though something had pushed through it. There were openings near the bottom, and the soil around them appeared recently disturbed.

Then I noticed the tracks.

They looked unmistakably like armadillo tracks. Little claw marks pressed into patches of damp soil, some clearer than others.

A few led toward the mound.

I looked at the tracks, then at one of the openings.

Armadillos dig for ants, don't they? They eat them. So finding tracks around an anthill wasn't particularly unusual.

Still, I was curious.

I followed the marks around the mound. They disappeared near an opening where the clay looked freshly disturbed.

I crouched for a better look.

That's when I noticed something else.

The mound seemed alive.

Not simply crawling with ants. There was movement beneath the surface, a faint shifting of earth that seemed too substantial for the tiny insects working around it.

I started to move away.

The movement stopped.

I stood there for another minute, watching the opening.

Nothing emerged.

I looked at the tracks again. I was stumped.

Armadillos dig for ants. They eat them. But they don't live inside anthills.

At least, none that I knew of.

And that's when I thought about the creature I'd seen in my headlights.

The bare skin. Those short front legs. The strange way it moved.

Could it have been some kind of armadillo after all?

I looked back at the opening.

Maybe a snake had crawled inside. Maybe the mound was home to something entirely ordinary, and I'd simply happened upon it at the wrong moment.

Whatever was under there, I wasn't particularly eager to meet it.

I backed away, keeping an eye on the opening until I was far enough from the mound to feel comfortable turning around.

I still had no idea whether any of this had something to do with the creature I'd seen on the road.

But now I had something more than a fleeting glimpse to think about.

And one question kept bothering me.

What was moving beneath that anthill?

Field Note: Sometimes the smallest tracks lead to the largest questions.

The Uncatalogued is a work of speculative natural history. The opening encounter draws on a personal recollection; the subsequent field observations are fictional explorations of biological possibilities.