Everybody was talking about the massive pod of Pilot Whales that had stranded themselves on Tresness Beach on Sanday Island in Scotland, but I couldn’t find them.

I had been told which beach and walked along for an hour and realized that I must have got the directions wrong and decided it must be on the other side of the peninsula and crossed the bay. I was lucky because it was low tide, and almost all of it was a sandy flat. Only at the very far side did I have to take my boots off and walk through the water, only calf deep and almost warm. There was a gap in the cow fence, and it didn’t look like a far walk up the grassy hill to see where the dead whales might be. It was easy going at first, just bumpy and grassy, but got steadily worse, until the undulations became severe and the grass as high as my chest.

And then it was all but impossible. I looked back to the bay and thought of going back, but soldiered on, as it got thicker and steeper until I felt almost trapped. I looked to the top and thought there was no way I was getting out of this. The way back seemed even worse. I thought of Joe Simpson’s epic survival tale, Touching the Void, dragging himself with a shattered leg down from the Chilean mountain through impossible terrain and only making it because he focused on what was right in front of him. Just this bit, these few feet, and got through that. And so, that’s what I did, one undulation at a time, glancing up occasionally, avoiding the gullies and thick patches of thorns, until I was at the ridge, and it was only an awkward slide down through the remaining grass and thorns to the beachside.

But there were no whales there. Nothing to either headland. The walking was easier, rocks and seaweed and sand, as I made my way back along the coast, hoping that the dead whale might be just around the corner, knowing they wouldn’t, when the Arctic Terns descended. As small and seemingly cute as these birds are, they are ferocious in defense of their rookeries, squawking and dive-bombing in choregraphed Luftwaffe-like attack. One was particularly aggressive, shrieking its squawks, coming inches from my head. “Back the fuck off!” I waved my hat manically and then my coat, but nothing could stop her – obviously her – until I had rounded the bend.

Exhausted and humiliated, I trudged back up the bay, my boots off again, through the shallow waters, until I was finally back at my car, wiping the wet sand from my feet. Other cars had arrived and a van driven by a young man with all sorts of video and sound equipment. I was in the right place after all. I went to the store for some juice and ibuprofens and headed off again, mounting the dunes, looking down to the end of the beach where there was something now, a truck or a tractor, and tiny dots around that, people, and then the splotches of black past that, what I had thought to be rocks which were the dead whales. I walked along the waterline, glancing up now and again, seeing it all come slowly into view.

The tractor dominated, its flashing yellow light a warning, and the groups of people behind it, huddled together over a body it appeared. The dead whales lay in an ominous long scattered row, some as big as yachts, others as small as dogs, all of them dead, most with their mouths their tongues lolling out, blood around them in some place where the biologists had cut in their numbers – there were 77 in all – or begun the biopsies.

It looked like a Jonestown Massacre, if anything, these creatures having drunk the Kool Aid, swimming with their leader to die nonsensically on the beach.

Looking out into the waters now, knowing that these 77 had been out there and knowing now that there were none was a cause for ennui. Indeed, what is the point in the end? Even the whales understand that. Their penises were most striking, snaking long to a twisting point, looking more like extracted intestine than their business, another bit of flesh to be buried. I watched the biologist saw off one of their heads, and I knew it was time. I had done 22,000 steps and seen what I had come out to see. And it had been bad.