The Circles in Galloway Forest

I got off the coach at the modest bus stance in Newton Stewart with my holdall over one shoulder and my locked rifle case in my right hand. The place looked almost exactly as I remembered it from ten years earlier: a low brick building with peeling paint and a faded sign. Callum Fraser's dark green Land Rover Defender stood in the car park.

He was leaning against the driver's door with his arms folded, watching me approach. As I drew near, his face opened into a broad smile.

"Daniel Mercer," he said, coming forward to meet me. "About bloody time."

We shook hands, then pulled each other into a quick embrace, slapping one another on the back. Ten years had put some grey into Callum's beard and added a few lines around his eyes, but he still had the same easy grin I remembered.

"Good to see you, Cal," I said, stowing my holdall and rifle case securely in the back of the Defender. "Thanks for arranging all this."

"It's been too long," he replied as he climbed behind the wheel. "When you rang and said you fancied stalking the old ground again, I could hardly believe it."

I settled into the passenger seat. The familiar mixture of strong tea, gun oil and the fading woodland air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror brought back memories of our earlier trips.

"How was the coach?" Callum asked as he pulled away from the stance.

"Long and dull, but cheaper than flying," I said, lowering the window to let the cool autumn air wash over my face. "The Army pension and the security work only stretch so far."

Callum nodded as he drove through Newton Stewart.

"How long since you got out?"

"Three years," I said. "It still feels strange being a civilian sometimes."

The town soon gave way to the countryside of Dumfries and Galloway. Fields, stone walls and scattered farms lined the winding A-road, while the Galloway hills rose ahead of us, their wooded slopes showing the first changes of autumn.

"What have you been doing with yourself all these years?" Callum asked. "Last I heard, you were somewhere in Afghanistan."

"All over, really. Afghanistan, Iraq, a few other places that didn't make the news. Nothing too dramatic. Mostly training partner forces."

It was not the whole truth, but there were parts of my service I had no wish to discuss, even with an old friend.

"And now?"

"Private security consultancy, mostly. It pays the bills." I turned towards him. "What about you? Still at the builders' merchant?"

Callum nodded. "Manager now. Married Fiona. You remember her from secondary school? We've got two boys."

"No kidding. Congratulations."

"What about you? Never settled down?"

I shook my head. "Never found the right time or the right person."

The A-road began to twist through steeper country, followed by narrow single-track roads between the hills. Callum took the bends and passing places with the ease of someone who had driven the route many times.

"The woodland we're heading into is part of Galloway Forest Park, isn't it?" I asked.

"A remote section of it, yes. More or less the same ground we used years ago." He glanced at me. "I've got the land manager's written permission for the stalking and for taking the Defender along the forestry access track. Everything's above board, and I've got copies of our firearm certificates with the paperwork. You remember how good the deer were out there."

His eyes remained on the road, but I noticed his hands tighten slightly around the steering wheel.

"Dan, there's something you ought to know. There have been some odd stories about those woods in the last few years."

I raised an eyebrow. "What sort of stories?"

"You know what small places are like. People disappearing, animals behaving strangely, peculiar noises at night." He tried to laugh, but the sound was forced. "Local superstition, mostly. Folk round here like a ghost story."

"People disappearing?"

During my time in the Army, I had heard similar accounts in remote settlements across the world. There was often more truth in them than outsiders cared to admit.

"A few walkers and stalkers," Callum said. "But it's a vast forest. People lose the path and get turned round all the time."

"Most of them?"

Callum sighed. "There was one man. Ewan Kerr. Good stalker. Knew the forest as well as anyone. He came back from a trip a few years ago and said something had attacked his party. His companions never returned."

Callum paused before continuing.

"Ewan wasn't the same afterwards. He started drawing strange pictures and talking about things that made no sense. Then one day he disappeared from his own house."

I watched his face. He was trying to sound casual, but the tension in his jaw betrayed him.

"Do you believe any of it?"

This time he laughed more naturally. "Come on, Dan. You know me better than that. It's ordinary local gossip. When nothing happens for years, people invent stories to keep themselves occupied."

I nodded without answering. In my experience, stories rooted in wild places often contained scraps of fact. People who lived close to such places simply knew them in a different way.

The road narrowed further before Callum turned on to a Forestry and Land Scotland access track. The tarmac gave way to stone and packed earth. Oak, birch, Scots pine and dense ranks of commercial spruce crowded both sides, their branches occasionally scraping along the Defender.

"Nearly there," Callum said. "The access point is about ten minutes along this track."

I looked through the window as the forest thickened into a wall of trunks and branches. I had forgotten how enclosed the Galloway woodland could feel, particularly where the planted spruce stood close together.

"Have you been out here recently?"

"A couple of months ago, scouting. There was plenty of sign." Callum slowed as the track became rougher. "I followed a mature stag with a twelve-point head that would make any stalker proud. I'm hoping he's still about."

We reached a waymarked forest access point and a small gravel parking area beside a weathered Forestry and Land Scotland sign. Callum parked and switched off the engine.

"End of the drive," he said. "From here we walk."

We got out and began unloading. I took my rucksack from the back and checked its contents again: tent, sleeping bag, cooking kit, food and spare ammunition. It was an old habit from my Army days.

Callum shouldered his own rucksack and removed his rifle from its slip.

"About five kilometres to the place I've chosen for our base camp. Then perhaps another couple of kilometres to the ground where I saw most of the deer sign."

I nodded and secured my rifle slip to my pack. "Lead on."

The path was narrow at first, then broadened as we went deeper into the forest. The air beneath the canopy was cool, and our boots crunched through fallen leaves and pine needles. Sunlight broke through gaps overhead, laying bright patches across the ground.

"What's the plan?" I asked. "Same as the old days?"

Callum ducked beneath a low branch. "We'll establish camp, then have a look round before dark. Tomorrow morning we'll start early and find somewhere to wait. There's a clearing a couple of kilometres north of the campsite. Deer pass through it regularly."

As we walked, I studied the surrounding woodland. Something felt wrong, although I could not immediately identify it. Then I realised what it was.

"It's quiet."

Callum glanced back. "What do you mean?"

"The birds. There are hardly any. I remember these woods being full of birdsong."

He stopped and listened. "I suppose it is a bit quiet. Probably the time of year. Or perhaps last week's storm drove them elsewhere."

I nodded, unconvinced. "In my experience, when a forest falls silent, something is wrong."

We continued. The only sounds were our footsteps and the occasional creak of trees in the light wind.

After roughly two hours, the path began to climb. The incline was not severe, but the weight of our packs forced us to slow.

"How much farther?" I asked, adjusting the shoulder straps.

"Not far. There's a small plateau ahead, with water nearby and decent cover." Callum pointed through a gap between the trees. "You can see some fine country from it as well."

The sun was dropping, filling the late afternoon with a yellow glow. We needed to pitch the tents before darkness. As we climbed, I repeatedly found myself looking over my shoulder. A prickling at the back of my neck gave me the unmistakable sensation that someone was watching us.

I searched the trees behind us but saw only trunks, bracken and shadow.

"Are you all right?" Callum asked, noticing.

I forced a smile. "Old habits. Spend enough time in places where people are trying to kill you and you become jumpy."

"It must be difficult to switch off."

"Sometimes."

I gave the trees one final look before continuing uphill. "Let's reach this campsite of yours before we lose the light."

We pressed on, but I could not shake the feeling of eyes upon my back. I told myself my instincts were overreacting after years away from active service. Even so, I kept my senses sharp and one hand near the knife on my belt, another habit I had never managed to lose.

The forest floor levelled as we reached the top of the rise. My legs burned from the climb. Callum walked several paces ahead, breathing heavily but steadily. He had been right about the plateau. The ground formed a natural shelf on the hillside, and through the trees we could see the forest spreading below us.

"It should be just ahead," he said, slowing. "There's a good clearing that..."

He stopped so abruptly that I nearly walked into him.

"What is it?"

I moved alongside him. The trees opened on to a small clearing, but instead of the empty site Callum had described, we found a camp. Three tents stood around a stone-ringed fire pit. Camping chairs encircled the dead fire, and a folding table held plates of what appeared to be half-eaten food. There was no one in sight.

"This wasn't here when I scouted," Callum said quietly. "Someone must have arrived since then."

My training asserted itself as I examined the clearing. The equipment looked ordinary enough, but the stillness troubled me. There were no voices, no movement and no sounds of anyone nearby.

"Hello?" Callum called. "Is anybody here?"

His voice carried into the woodland. No one answered.

"Let's have a look," I said, moving forward cautiously.

The details became clearer as we entered the clearing. Food had dried on the plates and begun to grow mould. Several flies circled the remains. A pot sat on a small camping stove, its contents crusted against the sides. Four rucksacks rested against tree trunks. Playing cards lay scattered near the chairs as though the game had been abandoned halfway through.

"It looks as if they simply walked away," I said.

There were no overturned chairs and no obvious signs of panic or violence.

"In the middle of supper." Callum picked up a plate and studied the furred remains of beans and meat. "This has been here for days. Perhaps a week."

I walked the perimeter, taking stock. There were three tents for what appeared to have been four people. All their main equipment remained. A food sack had been suspended from a branch away from the tents to keep it clear of foxes and rodents.

"Perhaps they went walking and got lost," Callum suggested, although he plainly did not believe it.

"And left their equipment and food?" I shook my head. "Nobody leaves camp without water and basic supplies."

"Should we check the tents? There might be something that identifies them."

I nodded. Going through strangers' possessions felt wrong, but if four people were missing, anything we found might help explain what had happened.

The first tent contained one neatly arranged sleeping bag and a small holdall of clothes. The second was much the same, with personal items and a paperback left open and face down. The third held two sleeping bags, evidently shared by a couple.

"Perfectly ordinary camping kit," Callum said as he backed out. "Nothing to explain why they'd leave."

"No wallets or mobile phones," I said. "They must at least have taken their identification with them."

That was reasonable, even if abandoning the rest of their equipment was not.

"Look at this," Callum said.

He picked up a small notebook from beside one of the chairs and leafed through it.

"A stalking journal. It says all four of them arrived five days ago. The final entry is from three days ago."

He handed it to me. The neat handwriting described the conditions and mentioned a mature red deer stag with a strong twelve-point head. There was no mention of danger or any intention to leave.

"Cal, these four people simply vanished," I said, surveying the empty camp again. "There are no signs of an animal attack and no signs that they fled. They left everything behind."

Callum rubbed the back of his neck. "Perhaps there was an emergency. They might have had to leave in a hurry."

"Without packing any food or shelter? That's not how emergencies work. You take what you can carry."

I continued around the perimeter, looking for evidence that might make sense of the scene. About 27 metres from the camp, near the edge of the clearing, I noticed something hanging from a branch.

"Cal," I called, keeping my voice level. "Over here."

He joined me. Together we stared at a deer carcass suspended from a stout branch. It had been gralloched, but the work looked wrong. The incisions were extraordinarily precise, almost surgical. Most disturbing of all was a perfect circular cut in the abdomen, about 8 centimetres across.

"Have you ever seen a stalking knife leave a cut like that?" I asked.

Callum moved closer to examine it. "No. That's peculiar. Far too perfect."

The edges were clean, without the raggedness or hesitation marks a blade would have left.

"It looks as though some sort of tool made it," he said. "A circular cutting attachment, perhaps."

He did not sound convinced. The longer we stood there, the stronger my unease became. The abandoned camp and the precisely mutilated deer set every instinct I possessed screaming that something was badly wrong.

"We should move on," I said, turning away. "Find somewhere else to camp."

Callum nodded at once, plainly relieved. "There's another clearing about three kilometres farther along the path. We can reach it before dark."

We left the camp untouched. As we walked away, I kept glancing behind us. The sensation of being watched had returned, stronger than before.

"Do you think we should report it when we get back?" Callum asked after about twenty minutes.

"Definitely. Four people don't abandon a camp like that without a reason."

I thought of Ewan Kerr, the stalker Callum had mentioned in the Defender. I wondered whether there was a connection but chose not to say so. There was no point giving shape to our growing fear.

"Here we are," Callum said when we reached another small clearing. "This is the place I originally meant to use."

It was a good site: level ground, a small stream nearby and sufficient room for two tents, with trees providing cover. From a tactical standpoint, I approved. We had clear visibility across the approach, and a rock formation behind us prevented anything from coming directly from that direction.

We set up camp efficiently in the fading light. Two tents, a small fire pit, our food sack suspended away from the sleeping area, and the rest of our equipment organised within easy reach. Years of camping together when we were younger made the work automatic.

Once darkness had settled, we sat beside the fire eating dried venison and rehydrated beef hotpot. Neither of us mentioned the abandoned camp or the deer with the perfect circular incision, but I could see that they troubled Callum as much as they did me.

"Early start tomorrow?" I asked, breaking a long silence.

"Yes." Callum stared into the flames. "There's a good position about two kilometres north. A ridge overlooking a valley the deer often cross."

I fed more sticks into the fire and watched sparks rise into the dark. The woodland around us was completely silent. No owls called and no nocturnal animals moved in the undergrowth. There was only the crackling fire and the occasional sigh of wind through the trees.

"I'm turning in," Callum said eventually, rising and stretching. "We need to be fresh in the morning."

After he entered his tent, I remained beside the fire and thought about the abandoned camp. In all my years of stalking and military service, I had never encountered anything like it. People did not walk away from shelter, food and equipment without a compelling reason.

When I finally went to my own tent, I placed my stalking knife beside the sleeping bag where I could reach it. I had intended to leave the rifle secured in its slip, but changed my mind, removing it and placing it safely beside me, muzzle pointed away.

I slept badly. Every noise woke me: a snapping branch, the movement of leaves, water running over stones in the stream. Each time, my hand closed around the knife before I was properly conscious.

For long stretches I lay staring at the roof of the tent, unable to forget the circular wound in the deer's abdomen. Whatever had made it had not been any knife I recognised.

When sleep did come, I dreamed of empty camping chairs and half-eaten meals, left by four people who had walked into the forest and never returned.

A dreadful scream tore through the night.

My eyes flew open. I lay rigid in my sleeping bag as the sound lingered in the air, neither animal nor human, before dwindling into darkness.

For several seconds I did not move. I listened beyond the sound of my breathing. The forest was utterly silent after the cry. No insects, no night birds, nothing.

I reached first for my knife, then for the rifle. The weapon did little to reassure me against whatever had made that noise.

I opened the tent slowly, keeping the zip as quiet as I could. Outside, the fire had burnt down to embers, casting just enough orange light to reveal Callum already standing beside his tent. His face was pale and his eyes were fixed on the tree line.

"You heard it as well," I said quietly.

He nodded without looking away. "It woke me instantly."

I stepped out, holding the rifle ready but pointed at the ground. The night air felt unnaturally cold against my skin.

"A red deer stag?" I suggested, though I did not believe it. "A fox, perhaps?"

I knew the strange sounds both animals could produce, but this cry had been different: deeper and more guttural, with a mechanical distortion beneath it, like metal dragged through an electrical current.

Callum shook his head. "That was neither."

Then, in a whisper, he said, "That's what took those people from the camp."

The words hung between us. Neither of us wanted to pursue them.

I went to the fire and laid small sticks over the embers, coaxing the flames back to life. We needed light and warmth now, particularly with something beyond the clearing in the dark.

"We should keep watch," I said as I added larger pieces of wood. "Take shifts until morning."

Callum sat heavily on one of the logs we had placed beside the fire. His hands trembled as he reached for his water bottle.

"Do you want to tell me what's really happening here, Cal?" I asked, sitting opposite him. "You've been uneasy since we arrived, and now this."

He gazed into the flames for a long time. Their shifting light deepened the lines around his eyes and mouth.

"Do you remember Ewan Kerr?" he said at last.

"The stalker who returned alone and later disappeared."

"Yes." Callum drew a breath. "What I didn't tell you is that Ewan was a friend of mine. Not a close friend, but we'd stalked together several times."

I watched him carefully.

"There were four in his party," he continued. "His three companions disappeared in this same area. Ewan returned alone three days later, and he was changed. He kept talking about something in the forest that wasn't natural. He said it moved too quickly and was too tall and thin to be human."

Callum drank from the bottle. His knuckles had whitened around it.

"At first, everyone thought he was in shock. They assumed he'd witnessed his friends dying in an accident and that his mind couldn't cope. But Ewan insisted something had attacked them. Something that screamed exactly as that thing screamed tonight."

The fire cracked, throwing sparks into the air. We both flinched.

"Ewan began drawing pictures," Callum said. "He covered the walls of his house with them. Always the same figure - tall, thin and marked with strange circles. He drew it again and again, sometimes going days without sleep."

"And then he disappeared."

Callum nodded. "Vanished from a locked house one night. The doors were secured from within and the windows were shut. When Police Scotland searched the place, the officers found drawings everywhere. On the walls and ceiling, even scratched into the floorboards."

"Why didn't you tell me all this before?" I asked, trying to keep accusation from my voice.

"I thought they were stories." His shoulders sagged. "Ewan had difficulties before any of it happened. He drank too much and got into fights. It was easy to dismiss what he said as the rambling of a man who had lost his friends and couldn't cope."

He looked up. Fear had stripped away every trace of his usual humour.

"But that sound was exactly as Ewan described it. And the four people at that camp have vanished just as his companions did."

I placed another log on the fire. The flames rose higher.

The Army had taught me to assess threats without surrendering to fear. It had also taught me to trust the warning in my gut, and nothing about this place felt right.

"We should leave in the morning," I said. "Report the camp and let Police Scotland, Forestry and Land Scotland and the local wildlife officers deal with it."

Callum nodded but said nothing. For several minutes we sat scanning the darkness beyond the firelight.

"I'll take first watch," I said eventually. "Try to sleep. I'll wake you in four hours."

"I doubt I can sleep after that."

Nevertheless, he returned to his tent. I sat with my back towards the warmth of the fire, allowing my eyes to adjust to the darkness. The loaded rifle rested across my knees.

The night seemed endless. I listened for anything approaching, but nothing came. There were no more screams and no movement among the trees, only the profound silence of the forest.

When the eastern sky began to lighten, I felt some of the tension leave me. Daylight made the world appear ordinary again, as if the terrors of the night had existed only in my imagination.

Callum emerged as the sun rose. His eyes were bloodshot, with dark hollows beneath them.

"Anything?"

I shook my head. "Nothing all night. Too much nothing."

We made breakfast without speaking, brewing tea on the camping stove and eating oat bars from our packs. The ordinary tasks steadied us after the strangeness of the night.

"What's the plan?" Callum asked, sipping his tea. "Do you still want to leave?"

I considered the question. In daylight, the scream seemed less immediate, and we had travelled a long way for a properly arranged stalk.

"We came here to stalk," I said at last. "It seems a waste to turn back now."

Callum looked astonished. "After what I told you about Ewan? After what we heard?"

"We don't know what made that noise," I said, although I suspected I was trying to convince myself rather than him. "There may be an explanation. As for Ewan and the missing party, people disappear in forests. They lose their bearings, fall into gullies or suffer medical emergencies far from help."

Even while I spoke, I knew I was making excuses. Nothing ordinary explained the half-eaten meals, the precisely mutilated deer or four people abandoning their shelter.

Daylight had made me bolder, and some stubborn remnant of my training resisted retreating from a threat I could not see.

"We've come too far to turn back without doing anything," I added. "One day. Then we leave tomorrow morning."

Callum remained unconvinced, but finally nodded. "All right. But we stay together. No separating."

"Agreed."

We packed day rucksacks with water, food and spare ammunition. I inspected my rifle more thoroughly than usual, cleaned and oiled it, then counted my rounds twice and placed the extras where I could reach them easily.

These were no longer the preparations of a man concerned only with deer.

When we left camp, the forest seemed welcoming in the morning light. Birds had returned, calling as they passed between the branches, and small animals rustled in the undergrowth. It was difficult to believe this was the same silent, menacing place we had experienced during the night.

"The ridge is about two kilometres north," Callum said. "It's a good place to watch deer crossing the valley."

I nodded, though my attention was divided between our surroundings and the story of Ewan Kerr. During my Army service, I had known men and women suffering from trauma. Their experiences remained real to them even when their minds altered the details. But Ewan had disappeared from a locked house after describing something that matched what we had heard.

"Is the ridge much farther?" I asked, forcing those thoughts aside.

"Just ahead." Callum pointed through the trees. "We'll have a clear view into the valley."

We moved carefully and quietly, as we had on many stalks before, but both of us were listening for something other than deer and watching for movement that did not belong in the woodland. Whatever had screamed in the night was still somewhere nearby. Daylight helped, but I could not escape the feeling that it was watching and waiting.

The afternoon sun filtered through the canopy as we continued. I placed each boot carefully to avoid snapping twigs or crushing dry leaves. Old stalking habits blended with military training until every movement became automatic.

The woodland had come alive in daylight. Birds called overhead and small creatures moved in the bushes, but the memory of the scream remained. Callum walked slightly ahead, his gaze shifting constantly between the ground and the spaces among the trees. He had spoken little since breakfast. His earlier scepticism had become the same strained alertness I felt.

We stayed within about 3 metres of one another. Keeping close was a silent acknowledgement of the danger we both sensed. I carried my rifle ready, although a quiet voice at the back of my mind wondered whether it would be any use against the source of that inhuman cry.

I pushed the thought away and concentrated on the stalk.

"This ridge has always been productive," Callum whispered, indicating the land ahead where it descended into a shallow valley. "The deer cross that clearing on their way to the stream."

The position gave us a good field of view and enough cover to remain concealed. We settled behind a fallen oak, using its moss-covered trunk as support.

For the next hour, we waited in silence. The sun crept across the sky, changing the patterns of light and shadow on the ground. Ordinary wildlife moved around us, but I could not relax. My gaze kept drifting from the clearing to the darker forest at our backs.

"Look," Callum breathed, touching my arm.

A stag had emerged at the edge of the clearing, the largest I had seen in years. Sunlight caught its heavy antlers as it stepped cautiously into the open, head raised and nostrils testing the air.

"A strong twelve-point head," Callum whispered. "That's the one I saw."

My pulse quickened as I raised the rifle. Through the scope the stag appeared powerful and alert. I placed the crosshairs behind its near shoulder, drew a breath and held it, my finger taking up the pressure on the trigger.

A deep roar erupted from the trees behind the stag.

It was wild, metallic and utterly alien to that forest. I started, and the rifle shifted at the instant I fired.

The report cracked across the valley. The stag leapt sideways, wounded but not killed, then bounded into the trees. Drops of blood marked the dead leaves behind it.

"What the hell was that?" I whispered, searching the tree line from which the sound had come.

My hands had gone cold. A chill climbed my spine that had nothing to do with the weather.

Callum did not answer at first. His face had drained of colour and he stared at the place where the stag had vanished.

"We collect our gear and leave," he said at last, his voice taut. "Now."

He was already rising, no longer concerned with silence. I stood beside him, rifle ready, scanning the edge of the woodland for movement.

"That sound..."

"I know what it was," Callum cut in. "The same as last night, only closer."

We hurried back towards camp, moving quickly but remaining alert. Neither of us spoke. Whatever had screamed during the night was active in daylight as well, and the knowledge chilled me more than the cry itself.

Our camp appeared untouched. The tents still stood and our equipment remained where we had left it. Callum immediately began stuffing essentials into his rucksack.

"Leave the rest," he said without looking up. "Take only what we need to reach the Defender."

I set my rifle down safely and turned towards my tent, then stopped. I remembered the wounded stag, the blood on the leaves and the way it had stumbled before recovering its feet. A badly placed shot could condemn it to a slow death.

"Cal, the stag is wounded. We can't leave it suffering."

He stopped packing and stared at me as though I had lost my senses.

"Are you serious? After everything that has happened?"

"We have a legal and ethical duty to make a humane follow-up. That's how we stalk, and you know it."

Even as I said it, I heard how absurd it sounded. Something unnatural moved through the forest. Something that might have taken four stalkers and terrified Ewan Kerr before reaching into his locked house and taking him as well. Yet I was arguing about duty to wounded quarry.

Callum dragged a hand through his hair, trapped between fear and principle. At last he nodded.

"Fine. We follow the blood trail, dispatch the stag cleanly, then get out. No diversions and no delays."

I took up my knife and checked my rifle and ammunition. Callum did the same with his own weapon.

We left most of the camp standing, carrying only water, several oat bars and our stalking equipment. The blood trail was easy to follow at first: bright crimson drops on fallen leaves and smears across low branches where the injured animal had passed. The stag had gone directly into the valley, probably seeking the dense cover of the lower forest.

"The blood is still bright," Callum said as we moved. "A clean wound, but not immediately fatal."

"With luck, we'll catch it before it goes much farther."

The trail led us deeper than we had previously travelled, beyond the stalking ground we knew. The woodland thickened. Ancient oak and birch rose among stands of Scots pine and dense, dark spruce. The canopy closed above us, blocking most of the sunlight. The warm afternoon became noticeably cooler, and the air felt heavy and stale.

I checked my watch. It was nearly 16:00. Sunset remained several hours away, but darkness would gather early in the valley.

"We need a limit," I said quietly. "If we haven't found it by 17:00, we turn back."

Callum nodded without looking at me. His attention remained fixed on the blood trail, which was becoming fainter, the drops smaller and farther apart.

"It's slowing and losing less blood," he said. "Good and bad. It may survive, but it will be more difficult to follow."

Every few minutes I stopped to look behind us and memorise the return route. In that lower forest the old trunks quickly became indistinguishable, and the dense undergrowth concealed useful landmarks. I began marking selected trees with small cuts from my knife, leaving a trail we could follow back.

The silence there was different. No birds called and no squirrels moved in the branches. The forest's brief return to life had ended as soon as we entered the valley. Our breathing and the occasional snap of a twig beneath a boot were the only sounds.

"Cal," I said after nearly forty minutes of tracking, "how much farther do we go?"

He did not answer immediately. His gaze swept the ground for the next spot of blood. When he finally looked up, his face showed the same unease I felt.

"There."

Callum pointed to a small smear on a fallen log. "It's still moving, but slowly now."

We pushed on, following the blood trail as the ground became harder to cross. Oak and birch gave way to dense commercial spruce, the trees crowding around us, their branches jutting across our path. Long grey strips of moss hung from them, lending the forest an ancient, neglected air.

I kept looking over my shoulder. I could not shake the feeling that something was watching us from the dark gaps between the trunks. My boot caught on a root and I nearly went down. Callum seized my arm and steadied me.

He held on too tightly. His face was taut with strain.

"You all right, Dan?" he asked.

"Yeah."

I nodded and glanced back the way we had come. The route behind us looked different somehow. The trees seemed closer together than I remembered.

"But we need to turn back soon. We've gone farther than we planned."

Callum hesitated, then pointed ahead.

"Look at the blood. There's more of it now. I think the stag might be down. It must be bleeding out."

He was right. The sparse drops had become a steady trail again, leading towards a thicket about 27 metres ahead.

"All right," I said reluctantly. "We check that thicket, then we head back, whatever we find."

We approached slowly, rifles ready. The temperature seemed to fall with every step, until the air was cold enough for our breath to form pale clouds. It was wrong for early autumn, even in the Galloway hills. A heavy stillness pressed down on the woodland, as though the forest itself were holding its breath. The birds had vanished again.

I kept glancing behind us, unable to escape the conviction that we were making a terrible mistake. Every instinct sharpened by my years in the Army warned me of danger, but I continued beside Callum. I would not abandon him, and we had a legal and ethical duty to find the wounded stag and prevent further suffering.

The blood led directly into the thicket. Dark spatters marked a route down into a shallow depression in the forest floor, concealed within a ring of dense brush.

Callum moved ahead of me and pushed the branches aside. He stopped at once. His whole body went rigid, and the muzzle of his rifle sank towards the ground as he stared at something I could not yet see.

"Cal," I whispered, moving up beside him.

Then I saw what lay in the depression, and I understood.

The stag was there, but not as I had expected to find it. My shot had not killed it. Something else had finished the job.

Callum stepped backwards and collided with me. Neither of us spoke. The heavy-antlered stag lay opened from chest to groin, its entrails spread around the carcass in an arrangement too precise to be accidental.

What frightened me most was the perfect circular incision in its abdomen. It was identical to the wound on the deer we had found near the abandoned camp.

My mind struggled to accept the scene. This was nothing like the work of a scavenger or any predator I knew. The organs had not been eaten or scattered. They had been placed in a deliberate pattern around the body, lines and symbols formed from flesh and blood.

"We need to leave," I whispered. "Now."

I took a step backwards without looking away from the mutilated stag.

Callum nodded, his face drained of colour.

"Yeah."

The fear in his voice belonged to a man who finally believed everything he had tried to deny.

We turned and began retracing our route as quietly as we could. I looked back once more, sickened by the thought that my shot had delivered the animal into that hideous death.

A branch snapped nearby. In the unnatural silence, the sound was startlingly clear.

We both froze.

Something moved between the trees about 18 metres away. I strained to understand what I was seeing. It was not a deer, or any other animal I recognised. It was a dark shape, taller than a man, but wrong in ways I could not immediately define.

It was too thin, its body stretched into impossible proportions. It moved in quick, disjointed spasms that hurt my eyes and seemed to jar against the workings of my mind.

"Run," Callum hissed.

We bolted through the forest, abandoning all thought of silence. My boots hammered the ground as I vaulted fallen timber and forced my way through the brush. In my panic, every spruce looked the same. For several seconds I had no idea which direction we were taking. I knew only that we had to put distance between ourselves and the thing behind us.

Something crashed through the undergrowth in pursuit. The noise grew louder and closer, no matter how hard we ran. It moved through the woodland with impossible speed, gaining on us with every second.

I looked back once and wished I had not.

Its body was long and angular, its limbs bending at joints that no living anatomy should have possessed. Its outline seemed to alter as it moved, as though it were only intermittently present in our world. Looking directly at it sent pain stabbing behind my eyes.

Then it released the scream we had heard during the night and again that morning. Now it was directly behind us, and the sound seemed to vibrate inside my skull. It was a fusion of tearing metal and electrical distortion, too deep and mechanical to belong to a stag, a fox or any earthly creature.

"Keep going!" I shouted.

Callum was several metres ahead. My lungs burned as I forced myself to run harder. Training took over, stripping my thoughts down to the essentials. Years of carrying full kit through the heat of Afghanistan and Iraq had taught my body how to continue after comfort and reason had failed.

One foot in front of the other. Faster. Do not look back.

We crashed through a wall of brush. Branches whipped across my face, and warm blood trickled down my cheek from a fresh cut. I barely felt it.

"Which way?" Callum gasped.

I caught a glimpse of the sinking sun through the canopy and forced myself to recall the map and the lie of the ground.

"Camp's that way."

I pointed slightly left of our course. We turned and drove through the dense growth. Behind us, the pursuit grew louder. Whatever hunted us was not tiring. If anything, it seemed faster now, more confident, as though it had been toying with us.

"It's herding us," I said as the realisation struck.

The thought nearly made me stumble. This was no mindless chase. It was calculated.

We burst into a small clearing, exposed for a few dreadful seconds. The scream came again, this time from our right, blocking the route towards the camp. Callum skidded to a halt and stared wildly into the trees.

"We can't go that way," I gasped, grabbing his shoulder. "We head straight for the Defender. Forget the camp."

Callum nodded, sweat and dirt streaking his face.

"Next ridge," he panted. "If we get over it, it's mostly downhill to the forestry track."

We ran towards the ridge as the ground began to climb. My thighs burned, but fear drove me onwards. Behind us, the crashing continued, broken by that appalling scream, which seemed to come from several directions at once.

The ridge rose steeply ahead. We scrambled up it, clutching roots and saplings to haul ourselves higher. Loose soil slid beneath our boots. Callum reached the crest first and turned to offer me his hand.

As he pulled me up, I heard movement in the trees below. The creature was not following our route. It was circling around the ridge.

It knew the forest better than we did. It was trying to cut us off.

"It's going round," I warned between heaving breaths.

We did not wait. The instant I gained the crest, we ran down the other side. The descent was so steep that it became closer to a controlled fall. I slipped repeatedly on wet leaves and loose soil. One bad landing could break an ankle, and I refused to complete that thought.

The trees thinned slightly as we descended, allowing us to move faster. I reconstructed the map in my head, judging our position against the forestry track and the parking area. If we continued downhill, we should reach the track. From there, the route to the Defender would be clear.

"Think it's still behind us?" Callum asked as we slowed briefly to negotiate a fallen tree.

The unearthly scream tore through the forest again, somewhere to our left. This time it sounded frustrated, almost angry.

"Does that answer your question?" I said, and pushed on.

We continued our desperate flight as the afternoon faded towards evening. Shadows deepened between the trees. Every dark gap seemed to conceal a watcher.

My boot caught an exposed root. I fell face-first and struck the ground hard enough to drive the breath from my lungs. My rifle slipped from my grasp and skidded across the forest floor.

Callum was beside me at once, dragging me upright.

"Leave it," he said when I looked towards the fallen weapon.

He was right. I never saw the rifle again. All my training told me that it would be useless against what pursued us. This was not an enemy we could fight. It could only be escaped.

We pressed on as fast as our exhausted bodies allowed. The land continued to slope downwards, steepening in places, and we let gravity carry us where our muscles were beginning to fail.

Through a gap in the trees, I saw the pale strip of the Forestry and Land Scotland access track.

"There," I gasped, pointing. "The track."

Hope flashed across Callum's face.

"If we can reach the Defender..."

A violent crash directly ahead cut him off. Something was moving between us and the track, moving fast.

We stopped and veered sharply right, trying to pass around it. Branches clawed at our clothes and low growth caught at our ankles.

"It's trying to trap us," I said. The knowledge settled like ice in my stomach. "It's closing every way out."

Callum's expression hardened.

"We split up," he said. "Give one of us a chance."

"No. That's exactly what it wants."

I had no evidence, only an instinct I trusted completely. Separation meant death. We had to remain together and watch each other's backs.

We changed direction again, angling towards the track from a different approach. The sounds of pursuit shifted with us, adjusting to our new course.

The game could not continue for long. Fatigue would finish what the creature had begun. My legs felt leaden and my lungs were raw from dragging in the cold air.

The trees thinned without warning, and we burst onto the packed-earth forestry track.

"Left," Callum gasped. "The Defender's about 400 metres."

We ran along the centre of the track, finally free of roots and brush. The open ground should have felt safer, but it left me exposed. Dense, dark ranks of trees hemmed us in on either side.

Nothing followed us onto the track. There was no crashing in the undergrowth now, only our ragged breathing and the thud of our boots. The silence was worse than the pursuit. At least the noise had told us where the danger was. Now it could have been anywhere.

The small gravel parking area appeared ahead beside a weathered Forestry and Land Scotland sign. Callum's dark green Land Rover Defender stood beyond it, bright in the low afternoon light.

"We're going to make it," Callum said between breaths, a trace of hope entering his voice.

I wanted to believe him, but the silence felt alert and patient. The creature had changed its tactics. It had not abandoned the hunt.

We were about 18 metres from the Defender when the scream split the air again. It came neither from behind nor from either side, but from directly ahead, between us and the vehicle.

We stumbled to a halt.

Something stepped onto the track in front of the Defender.

In the clear light of the parking area, I saw it fully for the first time. My mind recoiled from the sight.

It stood roughly 2.4 metres tall, impossibly thin, its limbs too long and jointed in ways that defied human anatomy. Its surface shifted between solid and translucent, revealing restless structures beneath that resembled fine brass mechanisms intertwined with dark, cable-like fibres. The effect was not quite mechanical and not quite organic. It suggested something for which I possessed no useful category.

Its head bore no face at all. There was only a smooth, featureless plane marked with perfect circular patterns identical to the wounds cut into the deer.

"Oh God," Callum whispered beside me.

The creature tilted its head to an impossible angle and regarded us with what felt like cold curiosity. It did not advance. It merely stood between us and our escape.

"What do we do?" Callum asked. His voice cracked.

I had no answer. Returning to the forest meant death. Advancing towards the thing seemed equally hopeless.

I had been caught in firefights. I had known, with absolute clarity, that I might die. Nothing in Afghanistan or Iraq had prepared me for the terror I felt then.

The creature raised one long arm and pointed directly at us. The circles across its body began to glow, pulsing in a measured sequence.

It was selecting us.

As I stood frozen, another sound reached me from farther down the track: a diesel engine, the rattle of equipment and the faint murmur of voices. A Forestry and Land Scotland maintenance vehicle was approaching through the trees.

The creature turned its blank head towards the noise. It remained still for a moment, as though considering this new arrival. Then it moved with such speed that my eyes could not follow it and vanished into the forest beside the track.

I did not wait to see whether it would return.

"Now!" I shouted, seizing Callum's arm.

We ran the remaining distance. Callum fumbled the keys he had carried throughout the stalk and dropped them onto the gravel, his hands shaking too badly to hold them. As he snatched them up, I searched the tree line for movement.

The Defender's door opened with a squeak that seemed absurdly ordinary after what we had seen. We threw ourselves inside. Callum forced the key into the ignition and the engine started with a roar.

We tore away along the forestry track, gravel scattering beneath the tyres. I watched the woodland through the side window. Something moved among the trunks and kept pace with us for several seconds before falling behind.

We reached the tarmac road and Callum accelerated hard. The Defender slid briefly as it turned, then straightened. Only after the forest lay well behind us, and we had followed the narrow single-track roads back to the winding A-road among other traffic, did my breathing begin to settle.

Neither of us spoke. Callum gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles blanched, his jaw locked tight. My own hands were still trembling with spent adrenaline.

Distance did little to help. Whatever we had encountered in Galloway Forest Park had changed the way I understood the world. Some sights cannot be forgotten once witnessed. Sometimes a man enters a forest believing himself to be the hunter, only to discover that he has been the quarry all along.

Exactly one week after our escape, I sat by the window of my small flat in Newcastle upon Tyne, holding a bottle of lukewarm beer I had not touched for twenty minutes. The evening had turned cool, but I scarcely noticed.

My mind remained trapped in the Galloway woodland, replaying the encounter again and again. I no longer slept properly. Each night I lay exhausted but afraid to close my eyes. When sleep finally took me, the nightmares began at once.

I saw flashes of that distorted body and the perfect circles across its shifting surface. Sometimes I dreamt of the deer, opened with surgical precision, their entrails arranged in patterns whose meaning lay just beyond comprehension. I would wake gasping, the sheets soaked with sweat, reaching for a weapon that was not there.

My mobile phone lit up with a message from Callum. He had contacted me every day since our return. His messages were always casual, filled with ordinary details about work, the weather and his sons' Saturday football matches. He never mentioned what we had seen.

I ignored the message.

We had spoken only once since the day he drove me back to Newcastle. The journey had passed in silence until he pulled into the car park outside my block of flats.

"Let's forget it," he had said, staring through the windscreen. "A bad trip and bad weather. That's all anyone needs to know."

I had looked at him and noticed fresh grey hairs at his temples that I would have sworn had not been there a week before.

"You think that's possible, Cal? To forget?"

His hands had tightened around the steering wheel.

"I've got a family. A normal life. I can't..." His voice had broken. "I just can't."

I understood. What place could our experience occupy in the ordinary world? How could we explain it to anyone who had not stood on that track and watched it emerge from the trees?

I nodded, collected my holdall and the locked rifle case containing only Callum's rifle, and watched him drive away. My own rifle remained somewhere in the forest, a loss that would bring questions from the police when it was reported and another reason not to describe the truth behind it.

After that, I threw myself into research. My private security consultancy work went neglected while I searched the regional Dumfries and Galloway newspaper archives, local records and online discussions. Maps, photocopied reports and handwritten notes covered a corkboard in my living room, connected with lengths of black thread. Anyone who saw it would have thought I had lost my mind.

Perhaps I had.

The pattern was undeniable. People had disappeared in and around that part of Galloway Forest Park for decades. Most cases had been attributed to walkers losing their way, stalking accidents, exposure or people choosing to vanish.

There were too many, however, and the circumstances were too similar to dismiss as coincidence.

I took a long drink from the forgotten beer, grimaced at its warmth and went back into the living room. An article about Ewan Kerr lay open on the coffee table.

The headline read: "Local Stalker Missing as Strange Case Baffles Police".

The photograph showed an ordinary-looking man with a beard and checked shirt, smiling beside a stag taken in happier times.

According to the report, Ewan had gone stalking with three companions. He returned alone three days after they vanished and contacted Police Scotland, but could give no coherent account of what had happened. A police search involving mountain rescue, Forestry and Land Scotland rangers and local wildlife officers found no trace of the other three. The four missing stalkers were the same party whose abandoned camp we had found: two single tents and a third shared by a couple.

In the weeks after his return, Ewan's behaviour became increasingly erratic. He covered his walls with drawings and stopped going to work. Then, one morning, he vanished from a house locked from the inside.

The statements from his relatives and neighbours held my attention. A cousin said Ewan had become obsessed with perfect circles. He spoke constantly about the way something moved, all wrong, as though it were not entirely present. A neighbour heard him screaming in his sleep that something was hunting them.

Callum's account of the old disappearance had been exact. Ewan had returned alone after three days, and later vanished from a locked house. Nothing in the archive contradicted him.

Nor was Ewan the only survivor.

I found five comparable cases spanning about thirty years. Each involved someone who returned from those woods changed, describing impossible sights before disappearing as well. In 1992, one woman filled several notebooks with accounts of a creature that matched what Callum and I had seen. She vanished three weeks after her camping trip.

Most disturbing of all were the mutilated animals. Reports dating back to the 1970s described stalkers and walkers discovering deer and other wildlife marked by precise circular wounds. Forestry staff and local wildlife officers had suggested poaching with unusual tools or ritual activity, but the consistency of the injuries over decades pointed towards something else.

I rubbed my burning eyes. The clock on the wall showed 02:17. Another night had been spent pursuing answers that probably did not exist.

In the Army, I had learnt that understanding an enemy was essential to survival. You studied its tactics, capabilities and weaknesses. But this enemy defied study. The deeper I went, the more certain I became that whatever inhabited those woods could not be categorised or explained through human knowledge.

My military experience had taught me to confront threats. Deer stalking had taught me the patience and focus of a predator. For most of my life, I had been comfortable with the belief that humanity stood at the top of the food chain.

Now I knew better. We were not the apex predator. We simply had not encountered the thing that was.

The realisation brought not panic but a strange acceptance. Some things existed in this world, or perhaps only partly within it, that human beings were not equipped to understand or oppose. They occupied the blind spots of perception and the shadows beyond knowledge.

I went to the window and looked across the lights of Newcastle. Out there, people continued with ordinary lives, untouched by the knowledge that had altered mine. They went to work, raised families and complained about traffic and taxes, unaware that reality might be far greater and more terrifying than they imagined.

Part of me wanted to warn them. I wanted to tell everyone that something hunted in a remote permitted stalking area within Galloway Forest Park. But who would listen? Who would believe me?

I would sound like Ewan Kerr, another unstable former soldier traumatised by what he had seen and inventing threats where none existed.

I could prove nothing. I had only my memories, my nightmares and a collection of similar accounts spread across decades. It was not enough to persuade Police Scotland or any other authority to launch an investigation.

Perhaps that was for the best. What good would come from sending others into those woods? What purpose would be served by confronting something they could neither fight nor comprehend?

I returned to the corkboard and began dismantling it piece by piece. I removed the maps, archive reports, notes and lengths of black thread. I gathered everything into a document box and sealed it with tape.

I did not stop because I doubted any of it. I stopped because I had reached the end of the road. There were no more answers to find and no solution waiting to be uncovered. Some mysteries were not meant to be solved. Some predators were not meant to be hunted. Some places were better left alone.

I thought of the men with whom I had served, of facing death together and emerging on the other side. I thought of previous stalks through forests that, at first glance, resembled the woodland in Galloway. Those experiences had contained fear, but also agency. I had remained an active participant rather than helpless quarry.

What we encountered had stripped away that illusion of control. It revealed us as we truly were: another vulnerable species, insignificant before forces we could not comprehend.

The sealed document box sat on my kitchen table. I considered burning it and destroying every trace of my investigation, but something prevented me. Another survivor might one day come looking for answers. My findings, incomplete though they were, might help them avoid our fate, or at least understand what they faced.

As dawn broke over Newcastle, I placed the taped box on top of my wardrobe and made myself a promise. I would never return to that part of Galloway Forest Park. Whatever ancient or impossible thing had claimed the forest could keep its territory.

There were other places to stalk, other hills to climb and other woods to explore. The world was wide enough for one small part of it to remain forever untouched by me.

I would try to move forwards and reclaim some semblance of an ordinary life. Perhaps the nightmares would fade or at least become bearable. Perhaps the burden of knowledge would lighten with time. Years from now, I might even persuade myself that our experience had been something else: a trick of light and shadow, a shared delusion born from fear, cold and isolation.

Deep down, I would always know better.

On quiet nights, when the city grew still, I would remember those perfect circles, the impossible limbs and the metallic scream that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

I would remember, and I would stay away.

Some things were not meant to be understood. Some places were not meant to be disturbed. And some hunts were better left unfinished.