Field Notes: November 4, 2026 Location: Beech slope under Wielka Sowa, a moss-split log beside the track, Lower Silesia, Poland ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Encounter Summary: A small heap of grey kindling was walking across the leaves below a fallen log. I had come down the slope with Zdzisław Kurek, a retired forester who still cuts his own firewood, and he saw it first and pressed a dry stick into my hand without a word, which I took for an instruction. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ The creature stood on thin jointed legs with hooked tips, its back built of long weathered splinters laid lengthwise, bleached silver where the rain had reached them. As it walked, the splinters ticked against each other with a sound like someone sorting matches. I touched it once between the shoulders and it fell apart. In the same instant the ground held a loose pile of wood that any of us would have carried home for the stove. For five seconds nothing stirred. Then the pile rose, the legs came out from beneath it, and the whole animal strode off under a fern. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ In the villages along the Owl Mountains it is called rozsypka, the one that scatters. Zdzisław's neighbours gather brushwood every autumn and leave any grey heap that lies too neat on the leaves, tapping it with a boot and waiting before they bend. Krystyna Malec, who keeps the last shop in Rzeczka, has a single silver splinter taped above her till and will not sell it to anyone. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Astulipes simulans holds its splinters with fibres that go slack at a touch, so the animal collapses at no cost and rebuilds from the same pieces it dropped. Fallen wood is the commonest thing on a beech slope in November, and a hunter of animals has no reason to sort through it. A heap disturbed a second time should stand up with its legs on the side away from the stick. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ . ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ More at @olegpars7 ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ . ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Made with @dreamina_ai seedance 2.0 ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ . ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ #cryptid #aiart #natgeo #fiction #DreaminaCPP - @olegpars7