Her body was positioned on the mound as if by ritual or the results of some terrible violence which ended in ceremony. She was waiting for eternity alone. Around her, speckled wood butterflies snapped soundlessly in a wind which pushed through ash and thorn on the hill. Yellow buttercups and blue speedwells in the grass, leaves eager with fresh rain in trees above; chiffchaff and blackcap singing; she was not dead yet. Her hornet's gold and black body lay hooked in a C; her wings folded back and her antennae awkwardly stiff. Only the lower segments of her rear left leg twitched with life – not a twitch but a shaking like a witch-doctor's snake rattle – and those eyes, locked behind dark glasses: could she still see? Whatever moved her leg had not finished with this world yet, so I left her on the ant mound. I went back the next day to see if the hornet was still there. She was, and dead.
This day had been prophesied as the end of the world – it certainly was for a grey squirrel I would run over at the appointed hour of six o'clock on the A5 west of Shrewsbury. In the meantime, as the sky looked ominous and the wind blew stronger, only ravens flew overhead, in wait for souls of the righteous. I poked the hornet with a grass stem and picked her up with some nervousness at first, just in case. With a hand lens I could see her sting was broken off; some dark abdominal bands with glyph-like marks over yellow segments covered with a stiff down of russet hairs were split. Her furry thorax carried two pairs of narrow wing blades with an amber glow like Victorian stained glass; one bent. Her gold face, with black-edged jaws, coral-like antennae and those deep black eyes, was cracked. The hornet had died after a violent struggle, strangely laid out on the ant mound like a sacrifice, as if something to do with other, more mysterious prophecies.