I can still remember the first time I saw them. I was a bit of an aimless kid, I lived at home with my parents and mostly just fucked around after high school. I didn’t have any ambitions to follow my dad, who was the fire chief of our town, or my mom who was a nurse at the hospital. Eventually as I started towards my mid-twenties the passive aggression built up to the point that I started looking for some sort of job, and I found a spot as a park warden for the big provincial park that the town clung to. It was only a summer thing but it kept me outdoors and I had a lot of fun ripping around some of the trails out there. I don’t remember what I did over the winter, probably just weed and Titanfall 2, but I signed another contract the next June and I was actually really happy to be back. That was when I saw them, my second year.
I was on a lunch break sometime early in the season, I had parked across from this little grassy clearing that technically wasn’t a campsite even though it was super close to one. We had to tell people to move out of there all the time, but there wasn’t anyone there that day. I don’t know what I was eating or thinking but I was kinda lost staring at the grass for a bit when I noticed these two eggs, just sitting on the ground. It was weird for a few reasons, one because we don’t have any ground nesting birds in our park, two because they weren’t even in a nest, just on the ground, and three because they weren’t small like any wild bird’s egg I’d ever seen, they were bigger, like the size of duck eggs maybe, except the shells looked really thick. At first I thought they were just some kind of fungus, but I kept staring at them and eventually I wandered over to take a closer look.
They honestly looked really normal. Like I said, the shell looked a little thick but that’s supposed to be an indication of a healthy bird. I gave one a light kick, I figured it would probably split open but it just rolled away. It had a black mark on it from my boot but it didn’t look broken at all. I never touched them with my hands, thank god I didn’t touch them. I remember thinking that some camper had probably just dropped them out of the back of their car or something and I left, probably would have forgotten the whole thing if it wasn’t for what happened.
It was maybe a week or two later that we got a couple of reports of an injured deer. A couple of people camping and hiking had called in and said that they’d seen a doe limping around looking like she was in a lot of pain. My boss got in touch with a couple of people from a wildlife rescue service and he asked me to go out with them to find the thing. I’m not really much of a hunter, my dad is way more into that than I am, so I mostly just hung back and listened to the guys talk and drove the truck around where they wanted me to. We were driving around the area that the deer was reported in for maybe ten, fifteen minutes before we came up over a hill and saw her lying in the middle of the road.
I have to warn you that this next part gets really gross but I pulled the truck over and we all got out to go look at her. She was breathing heavy and having these little spasms, but it didn’t look like she’d been hit by a car or anything. The guys get gloves on and start doing an examination of her. She kicked a bit but not a whole lot and she seemed to kinda give up pretty fast. Her legs and the whole area around her hindquarters was all swollen up, even under fur it looked red and nasty, like there was a big infection inside. It was hard to tell if she was pregnant or if it was just her torso swelling up. The guys rolled her over and she made this groaning noise and, well, as gross as it is to say it, there, stuck in her genitals, was one of these eggs.
I remember I didn’t have too much time to look at it but I knew what it was right away. The egg was clearly up… inside there, but poking out just a bit. The shell looked exactly like the ones I’d seen in the field, sort of a mottled white - grey colour, except now it looked almost like it had these… vein kinda things running under the surface. I’m not sure how an eggshell could have veins but this one did, and it also seemed like… wet, but not for the reasons you’d imagine. It almost seemed like it was sweating from the inside somehow. I caught a glimpse of it and I remember I almost threw up. The wildlife rescue guys were saying something about a placenta or a breech birth but there was no way that that thing was anything that deer would give birth to. I had to help the guys load her into the truck and the whole drive back I was super uncomfortable, I didn’t want to have the thing even in the truck bed. I remember at some point one of the guys told me that he was worried about the thing too but that we wouldn’t be able to help if we all died in a car crash. I didn’t care though, I knew the roads really well by that point and I got out of there as fast as we could go.
After the wildlife rescue guys left with the deer I took a shower for probably an hour or more. My boss was hammering on the door but I couldn’t stop seeing this egg thing poking out of the deer. I had to wash my hands like five or six times before I could bring myself to clean anything below my waist.
I think I asked for the rest of the day off at that point. I don’t remember if my boss even said yes but I went home anyway and just curled up in my bed in the basement. I think that those next few days were probably the most I’ve ever washed my hands, even since covid.
My boss was like a thirty or forty year veteran of the warden program and he liked to fuck with the new guys. I remember vividly the next Monday, at the start of the shift, he pulled me aside and was grinning the whole time he told me about the report that the wildlife guys had sent. Apparently there was some foreign object inside this deer’s reproductive tract, and it had died during the surgery to try and get it out. During the autopsy when they cut its womb open, this weird gooey slurry had come out, not quite like the amniotic fluid that goes around a baby, but something more like pus mixed with jello. Inside this goo they found four tiny hooves.
I remember that day for another reason. Someone mentioned that one of the rangers they were in a group chat with, from the town on the other side of the park from ours probably 250, 300 kilometres away, had found a dead wolf on the side of the highway. Apparently the thing was a mess of blood from the stomach down, it looked like its hindquarters had been blown open with a shotgun. The weird thing, according to my coworker, was that they hadn’t found any evidence of gunshots, and if the thing had been hit by a car, why weren’t its back legs broken?
By this point I had started to hate my job. I remember I went back to check the field that I’d seen the eggs in but they were gone. I walked around the place - very timidly I might add - but they weren’t anywhere to be found. I realized I was too late to start applying for colleges for that fall semester but I started looking at programs that started in January. I didn’t really care about what I’d be taking but I figured I’d go do a program somewhere very far away from my hometown, maybe like Toronto. Downtown Toronto, somewhere with a lot of buildings and no trees. I was getting sick of the woods.
The rest of the summer was a bit of a blur. I think my coworkers started picking up on my anxiety because everyone seemed to be keeping track of every report we’d get, injured or dead animal, hindquarters blown to bits. It must have happened at least half a dozen times the rest of the season, and what was worse was that mission pet posters started to go up in town too, a dog and two cats just gone missing. All of them female.
On my last day that summer I had settled on welding at George Brown college in Toronto. My boss wanted me to stay past Labour Day but my contract ended that weekend and I was done. As I was clearing my locker out one of my coworkers told me that someone hiking deep in the park had spotted something unusual. A wolf cub, all alone and way too small for that late in the summer. Apparently the person had described it as all a dark grey colour, but not like wolf grey, a really deep grey that looked almost blue. Apparently it’s eyes were milky white, and it followed this person for almost eight or nine kilometres. At first the guy was scared that a parent would show up, but after a while he said the thing gave him the creeps so he started trying to scare it away, but no matter how much he yelled and charged it the thing just stood there, staring up at him. My coworker wanted me to stay for a few more weeks but I left early that afternoon.
On Labour Day my family had our traditional barbeque, which was kind of a combination surprise-going-away party for me. I’m pretty sure nobody in my family thought I had any ambition or that I was going to amount to anything, but they all pretended that they didn’t think I’d drop out and be back before the January semester even started. My mother said I could stay at home over the winter but I told her I wanted to find a place in Toronto as soon as I could and find a part-time job there. I had a friend from school who’d moved out there and I was planning to stay with him for a while.
My aunt arrived late to the party as usual, and as she came in she gave me a one-armed hug. I looked over her shoulder at what was in her other arm and couldn’t stop what happened. As soon as I saw the big, full tray of devilled eggs I puked all down the front of my aunt’s clothes.
Later on in the evening my mother came to find me in my room and asked me what was going on. I’m not normally the type to talk about feelings or anything but told her everything about the deer and the missing and dead animals, and the whole time I was telling the story I was almost crying and her face was pale.
There’s one thing about my mother, she’s a bit of a gossip, and she tends to share stories from her job that she probably shouldn’t. She swore me to secrecy but I haven’t been using any names so I feel like I’m ok to pass it on here.
There was this girl a year behind me all through elementary school, I remember having one of those pre-pubescent crushes on her that later turned into a proper crush. Our town only has one elementary school but she went on to the Catholic high school and I went to the public one. I never actually ended up talking to her, we ran in different circles even in a small town, and I had mostly forgotten all about her by the time all this happened.
Apparently right after high school she went to teacher’s college, came back and started teaching at the elementary school. At some point that year she had gone on a family camping trip in the park. Well, it turns out her family is super religious, and she didn’t get much of an education on reproductive biology or anything. According to my mother she knew how to put in a tampon and that was about it. At some point after this camping trip she started to feel a burning sensation from… inside. She ignored it for… a really long time apparently, because my mother said when she showed up to the hospital she was deeply in pain, swollen so much that she had gone up two pant sizes, and red and inflamed from her belly button down her thighs. My mother had this look on her face as she described the girl talking about how it felt like something was moving around inside her, and how every so often she’d get a pinch that felt like the start of a menstrual cramp but that would sort of… taper off.
I knew exactly what the surgeons had found as my mother described it. This egg-thing had split open along one side and released these tendrils all out through this woman’s insides. My mother said there were more tendrils than it looked like should have been able to fit in an egg that size, and the surgeons spent hours going back in and just finding more and more… material.
The worst part was that apparently some of these tendrils had travelled up her Fallopian tubes, and apparently her ovaries looked almost shrivelled, like something had been hollowing them out from the inside. This had been in August and she was apparently still in the hospital recovering.
Not much happened after that. I moved in with my roommate, who turned out to be a complete slob. I might have lived in my parent’s basement since I was twenty five but at least I know how to vacuum or wash a plate. I started talking to a girl who works as a barista at a coffee place near the apartment. Welding class has been tricky but at least we can finally do it in the lab again instead of having to do everything virtually. I hadn’t forgotten about what happened last summer, but barista girl and I started dating and I was at least able to push it out of my mind.
In fact, the only reason I’m writing this right now is because I just got a call from my dad. See, like a lot of small towns our town had a big opiate problem. A couple of people from my class have OD’d the past few years, although nobody I was close with thank god. The main thing was that a few years back this couple suddenly vanished out of town, and a few days later someone found a newborn dead in a trash bag in a dumpster behind the grocery store. They never found the couple, but the province agreed to help a bunch of the volunteer guys at the fire department fund this thing to stop anything like that from happening again. It’s this box built into the side of the fire hall that has a mat and that’s all climate controlled. The idea is that if you have a baby you don’t want, you leave it in the box and a silent alarm goes off to tell the firefighters something’s in there. Well, my dad just texted me that for the first time since the box was installed the alarm has gone off, and he’s running down there to go see if someone actually put a baby in there. I’m sure the egg thing that came out of that woman would have been destroyed, but all this was happening nine or ten months ago. I’m sure it just has to be a coincidence but I’m just typing this out to calm myself down right now because… what if it’s not?