Meet the Beast

I work in the outdoor education department of a school, and we recently purchased a wildlife camera to record the wild animals of our ancient woodland. I had been in the process of setting it up with batteries and SD card for a few weeks, and it was now ready to use. After a solid day’s graft, a lightbulb moment hit; I now had a perfect opportunity to test it. I had the perfect piece of equipment to find out what I was dealing with, rats, mice, wombats, who knows?

I told my mother and grandmother in my Whatsapp group about all of this and was being bombarded with messages by the hour, asking me if I’d contacted pest control (I hadn’t), if I’d had any more encounters with it, and when I was going to set up the camera.

Fortunately it was an easy piece of kit to come to grips with, and I set it up that very night.

Now, let me fill you in on the relevant locations. The tragic hedgehog event took place in the bathroom, and of course, the dark rye incident in the kitchen. There had been strange sounds which a previous visitor to the flat had commented on in the not too distant past, from the lounge/ bedroom area, which I dismissed at the time. In the hallway is a large storage cupboard full of crevices, wires, loose bricks, old pieces of wood and pervading dust, which I’ve only ever looked at since starting this diary.

Now, being a human like you, I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. I wanted to set up the camera in a place that I wouldn’t trigger it, and having been a site that the mystery guest had visited before, I decided to place the camera in the kitchen, facing the cupboard by the bin, away from the kitchen entrance.

In order to guarantee a visit and because I am a courteous sort, I decided to place a morsel of cheese in front of the camera. I also decided to bring the limbless hedgehog corpse into the scene to add extra appeal, overlooking the cheese and the camera.

The next morning I lay in late, not wanting to see the results, but when I walked into the kitchen there wasn’t a molecule of cheese left on the floor. And then I checked the camera.