The centerpiece of this chapter is a forgotten fourth-century poem on cattle plague. Re-edited and republished through the nineteenth century, Beginning of the Song of St. Severus Endeleichus, the Orator on Deaths of Cattle, or De Mortibus Boum offers an important version of what I call “the bovine elegy,” a rural lament for and by farmers grieving their dying oxen, stallions, and cows. Among its several purposes is to theorize, in an age before germ theory, how contagious diseases could spread from region to region, even from country to country, and how disease outbreaks could be resolved. This chapter considers one of the many possibilities of contagion—insects. I examine connections between De Mortibus Boum and John Pory’s English translation of Leo Africanus’s A geographical Historie of Africa (1600), with its historical accounts of locust infestation. Pory’s translation shares with De Mortibus Boum a tendency to divide the world into “Christian” and “Pagan,” the latter represented by swarming insects, divine scourges for sinful peoples and nations.