Ansel Weston | 📷 a u endangered or just danger?

The Amazon jungle was humid, hot and full of things that wanted to bite him. Ansel had been crouched behind the same tangle of roots for nearly four hours, sweat running down his back, ants crawling over his boots, and mosquito turning him into an all-you-can-eat buffet. He'd come all this way hoping to photograph a margay, a small, elusive wild cat with enormous eyes, rounded ears, and a long tail that helped it balance as it moved through the treetops. Shy and notoriously difficult to spot, margays could rotate their ankles enough to climb down tree trunks headfirst. He'd found fresh tracks and scratch marks near a hollow tree, along with signs that a female might be raising kittens nearby. So far it was nothing but a waste of time though, and with every mosquito bite his patience was getting closer and closer to breaking point.

Once more, Ansel adjusted the long telephoto lens, keeping his eye to the viewfinder, free hand absentmindedly scratching his neck. The clearing ahead was quiet, broken only by the chirring of insects and the occasional rustle in the undergrowth. He was almost ready to call quits when something moved at the edge of the frame.

Ansel reacted on pure instinct, pressing the shutter before he could get a proper look. Something slithered in the gap between the trees - there one moment and gone the next - the resulting photograph was blurred, smeared by movement and dim light. He lowered the camera with a muttered curse, ready to dismiss it as another useless shot. Then he looked at the image on the screen and froze, frowning.

It wasn't a margay.

The shape was like nothing he recognised, with a torso that looked disturbingly human and a long, serpentine body disappearing into the vegetation. Even through the photo was blurry, there was no mistaking it for a trick of the light or an ordinary creature caught at a bad angle. Ansel zoomed in until the pixels began to break apart.

"What the fuck was that?"

He lifted his head and peered through the foliage, searching the spot where he'd seen the figure. Nothing moved. He checked the photograph again, jaw tightening as professional curiosity began to elbow aside his disbelief.

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Alaska in winter was a special kind of miserable. Ansel had spent most of the morning wedged between a ridge of snow-covered rocks and a pressure crack in the sea ice, bundled in enough layers to make bending his knees a challenge. His fingers were going numb despite the insulated gloves, and the battery in his camera was losing its fight against the cold.

Still, he wasn't leaving until he got the shot.

A pod of orcas had been hunting seals in the area for the past two days. He'd already photographed them surfacing between the floes, their black-and-white backs cutting through the steel-grey water. What he wanted was the moment of the hunt: the sudden breach, the coordinated rush, the seal scrambling across the ice with a killer whale close behind. Nature wasn't always pretty, but it was honest. Ansel preferred that to most things people paid him to photograph.

He waited with his eye to the viewfinder. The world had narrowed to a strip of dark water between plates of ice. There was no traffic, no voices, no wind strong enough to drown out the small, unsettling sounds around him: ice shifting against ice, deep cracks travelling beneath the snow, water lapping at the edges of the floes. Somewhere out beyond his view, an orca exhaled with a sharp, distant puff.

Suddenly the water erupted.

Something jumped out between the ice sheets, close enough to send ripples slapping against the frozen edges. Ansel caught a glimpse of a shape that was neither the familiar black curve of an orca nor the sleek body of a seal. There was something human about its upper half, though he couldn't make out much more than that before it slipped sideways through the spray.

His finger pressed the shutter before his brain caught up.

The camera clicked. The figure vanished beneath the surface, ripples spreading across the dark surface until they met the frozen edges of the floes. A few moments later, the disturbance faded, leaving nothing but gently rocking water and the slow groan of shifting ice.

"Shit."

Ansel slowly lowered the camera and checked the display, his breath clouding in front of his face. The photograph was a mess of motion blur, a spray of droplets reflecting the glare, and pale winter light. But the shape was visible. A suggestion of a torso tapering off into something like a tail and looking like no animal he knew.

He enlarged the image, then enlarged it again, as if a closer look might make the whole thing less absurd.

It didn't.

Ansel stared at the photograph, then at the empty stretch of ocean.

"Right," he muttered sarcastically, voice rough with cold. "Because orcas weren't enough."

He pulled his gloves tighter around the camera and waited for the surface to break again.

The Mongolian steppe stretched to the horizon in every direction, a vast expanse of sun-bleached grass under an unforgiving sky. Ansel had been lying flat on his stomach for the better part of three hours, trying not to disturb the dry stalks around him. The wind kept catching the grass in long, rippling waves, occasionally rattling his equipment or blowing dust into his face. He'd swallowed enough grit to last him a lifetime.

He was here for the saiga antelope, a peculiar-looking animal with a bulbous, downward-hanging nose that filtered dust from the air. Their numbers had plummeted over the decades, and finding a herd this far out on the steppe was a rare opportunity. He'd spotted a few in the distance that morning, but they'd vanished before he could get a decent shot. Now he was watching a shallow dip in the terrain where he'd noticed fresh tracks, hoping they'd return.

A sudden gust swept across the plain, flattening the grass in a broad swathe. Ansel adjusted his lens, squinting through the viewfinder against the glare.

Movement.

He caught a glimpse of something crossing the open ground and his finger pressed the shutter automatically. By the time he lowered the camera, the figure had passed beyond his immediate field of view, leaving the grass swaying in its wake.

"Fuck's sake."

He checked the screen. The photograph was blurred, the subject caught mid-stride and smeared by motion, but there was enough detail to make his stomach tighten.

A humanoid torso. The unmistakable outline of a head and shoulders. Below that, a powerful, four-legged form, hooves kicking up dust and dry grass. It wasn't a saiga, a horse, or anything else he'd ever photographed. It looked almost like a person fused with an animal, a shape that belonged in a myth rather than the middle of an empty steppe.

Ansel zoomed in, then out again, hoping the distortion might explain what he was seeing. It didn't.

He lifted his head and scanned the open plain. There was nowhere for something that size to hide, not with the grass this short and the horizon so clear. Yet the figure was gone. The wind tugged at his jacket, carrying the dry rustle of grass across the endless plain. Ansel sat back on his heels, camera still in hand, and stared at the empty stretch of land.

"Well," he muttered. "That's new."

Summer in Washington's North Cascades meant mosquitoes, sweat, and an endless supply of dirt finding its way into places dirt had no business being. Ansel had spent most of the morning tucked away on a forested slope in the Mount Baker wilderness, hoping to photograph a northern goshawk. The elusive bird-of-prey was notoriously difficult to catch on camera, darting between trunks with barely a sound, and he'd spent days following reports of one hunting in the area. So far, he'd come away with a few blurry shots of its tail and a growing hatred of mosquitoes.

He adjusted his tripod, keeping his eye to the viewfinder. The old-growth conifers rose around him, their branches layered thick with summer foliage. Birds called intermittently from the canopy, and somewhere farther down the slope, water rushed over stones. Ansel watched a narrow gap between the trees, waiting for the goshawk to make another pass.

A sudden crash tore through the woods.

He jerked his head up. Something had struck the upper branches of a nearby pine hard enough to send a shower of needles and broken twigs raining down. For one brief second, he caught sight of a shape tangled among the boughs: a body, a flash of something broad and feathered, and a frantic movement that sent the whole tree shuddering. His camera was already in his hands. He swung the lens towards the impact and pressed the shutter. By the time he looked up again, the figure had disappeared into the canopy.

"What the hell?"

He checked the photograph. Blurry, naturally. The subject was caught at an awkward angle, half-obscured by branches and motion, but the image was clear enough to leave him staring at the screen. It wasn't a bird. It wasn't any animal he knew. The shape suggested a humanoid body, with something enormous extending from its back, though the blur made it impossible to tell exactly what. He zoomed in, trying to separate the subject from the tangle of leaves and bark.

Then he noticed the blood. A few crimson drops marked the pale bark where the figure had struck the tree. More speckled the leaves below, and another drop had landed on a flat stone near the base of the trunk.

Ansel put the camera strap over his shoulder and approached the tree, eyes moving between the bloodstains and the branches above. Whatever had crashed into the pine had been hurt. Badly enough to leave a trail.

He crouched beside the first drop, his expression hardening as he studied the marks leading deeper into the woods.

"You're either the strangest thing I've ever seen," he muttered, reaching for his backpack, "or Oliver is right and I'm finally going bananas."

He followed the trail into the trees.

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