The megafauna have arrived.
So far most of the animals we've seen have been pretty small, with only hints of larger ones. Now that the river has swollen to nearly two hundred metres wide and everything is blooming, the big stuff is migrating back from wherever the hell it's been all dry season. Everything came to drink at once and I barely know where to begin.
The most eyecatching ones are another goat-looking thing, which we have named the Spandauer because the red and white stripes look like the filling of a cherry-cheese pastry. They move in herds of one male and six to ten females - the males are easy to identify because they have long horns with what looks like some kind of fungus growing on them. Each group also has its own pair of watchdogs. Several of these little herds would meet at the river and the males would bleat at each other and swing their heads around, but they never actually fought like the hookhorns did. The dogs do their best to keep the groups separate.
Moving up the scale there are these huge shaggy brown beasts that Kelleher named the Triceracow because there's no other way to describe them. The males have huge horns, like longhorn cattle, and are very aggressive. Any thought of making burgers out of them evaporated quickly when they started bellowing at each other. They don't have dogs, and the dogs that accompanied the hookhorns and spandauers made sure their charges kept their distance.
I feel like this is important. The dogs are a goat-only phenomenon, so far as we know. Do the triceracows just not need them because they're big enough to defend themselves?
Finally and biggest of all, there's this... fucking thing.
We don't know what this is. It resembles nothing we know of. We cannot think what it evolved from. It's ten feet tall with no hair, buck teeth, big claws, and the eyes of a creature that has gazed into the abyss and saw the abyss gazing back. It seems to be an herbivore and might actually be the origin of the giant pile of poo we found in the woods, but it is clearly something that could kill you without even noticing and we will be doing our utmost to avoid that situation.
It needs a suitably terrifying name. Unfortunately, I jokingly referred to it as the Giant Bingus and that's what we're calling it now. If I get killed by one of these I will know why.
