Log 2 — (The Timid Tracker)

What roots in darkness flowers dementedly in ways one shouldn’t casually talk about. For two-hundred-proof indeed is the soil of what hides in shadow. Some people who fear the dark are those with deeds deserving of creative and merciless punishment. But others fear it because they themselves are powerfully of the light. Jericho Jiles had never followed anyone through a forest before, and he was a creature quite grounded in unfiltered light. But he was also by nature a skittish soul. Whenever he acted bravely, it was merely from duty and love, and never from trying to impress a watching world. He was the sort of man who holds a sword to a villain with hands ashaking, not with bravado or malice.

If he had ever tracked a fellow even near a wooded area it was certainly not at night. As Jericho navigated the murky foliage, the dark itself met him with sounds both quick and unhappy, each of them harder and harder to attach to familiar material objects. In truth, normal forest noises were beyond the comfort level for our tracker, how much more those that were disharmonious and fractaled. He’d often abandon a trout scouting expedition, for example, merely because he was too far into the interior and the sounds of the wood were becoming too uncautious. There was no doubt that this particular evening foray was one of those which fit in the category of “higher purposes”.

Having temporarily lost sight of our protagonist, Jiles was now just pushing in the direction of his best guess and instinct for where the man was moving towards. The reason he had taken up Werble’s scent in the first place is not easy to explain. Sufficient for now let us say that our tracker was also a curious man, and his compassions were easily ignited, and some how the image of the lonely and determined ogre had lit his friendly fuse. His work for this leg of the night was mainly to steel his nerves whenever something skittered or pattered the eco-hood around him, that and to put himself at the mercy of good things greater than himself.

Before all of this, Jericho had been minding his own business, studying tidal pools from his eagle’s vantage point, a favorite meditation roost where he often went to contemplate his ongoing celibate status. He wasn’t as stymied by his inability to get married as most of his family and friends were, but a certain girl would yearly come back into his life and turn his otherwise easily occupied mind to almost nothing but the confusion and hardship of entering into wedding vows. His particular mermaid was the sort of siren other guys really went for, and while Jericho shared their excitement for her life, his was for significantly different motivations. Kenya, as she had been named, had a shape and beauty which made other boys mad with sensual tension. But Jiles rather knew her heart, because he was that delightful bloke who peered at people’s immaterial parts, and different than her other suitors, he was most excited about what he found of her there. This was hugely how she’d come to flirt with someone as complex and simple-hearted as he. His other advantage was that she did not intimidate him; girls like that sort of thing, though they’d protest it.

Kenya would tell her friends, when they’d protest at Jericho’s jack of all trades yet master of none status, that they were quite mistaken. For though he’d moved on from many a hobby and trade and pastime, his affinity for souls was ever-growing. The downside for Jiles was that Kenya attracted those alpha male lions of whom girls are hard to let go of, and there was too much svelte and tender about his persona to put up the sort of battle that many of these women want waged for them.

In short, they were best of friends, they could just never figure what sort of friendly they ultimately would be. These connundrums were what had led Jericho to his favorite Pizza joint and a bottle of wind overlooking the little cove where whales would sometimes loiter. And consequently this crossed his path with our brainish Quasi Modo.

Jericho was just a little tipsy as he’d walked the short distance from the restaurant to his perch above the greatly shifting tides. He’d drunk the dregs of the orchard he’d ordered and waited for a blue moon whale. As one didn’t come, he’d set himself to sketching his beloved and listing the reasons they might yet work out. Whenever the argument looked poor, he’d study the currents below to see if a large aquatic might be lurking. After a spell, he’d gone back to the pizzeria, and in the parking lot there had discovered a land mammal who was its own sort of spectacle. This friend, the one we’ve already been shadowing, was surveyed by Jiles as he scooped and scraped his enormous frame out of an old pontiac which was far too small. It was the artistic way which the agitated Werble had introduced those parts to the foulest of scientific language, along with a particularly forlorn face, which had triggered that famous part of the gentle mystic’s soul. But different than the rifles which earth normally offers, this child of God’s was the sort of human weapon which only fires kind thoughts, dried flowers and more sincere listening than a common person has ears for.

At that collision of personalities, Jericho had instantly reopened his sketch pads and instinctively began jotting down the colorful phrases and descriptors thrown out by the hostile mouth of our mission-minded colossus. All this while the behemoth ransacked his own trunk, looking for enough loose change to buy his coming meal.

Frost was of course oblivious to the tractor beam of goodness he’d aroused merely by being the slovenly fool and genius that he was.

Jiles knew the subject was a scientist of sorts long before the beast even proclaiming the same would have convinced you. It was the way he cared for the instruments in his vehicle, even as he impatiently scoured their contents. It was the words he did and didn’t use. It was the lack of regard for his personal upkeep. It was the wonderfully tragic look to his watery and intelligent eyes.

The one physical feature which Frost had going for him was his full head of healthy, if not wild, hair. Back inside the eating establishment, Jericho watched the beast and its mane devour food like a lonely wolf. After seven cups of carbonated sugar-water, the roar in its soul seemed to simmer. You could almost imagine the food was making him happy, perhaps something like the light-headed state which the wine had brought to Jiles earlier. The beast’s lofty education did nothing for its manners, as once his feasting had concluded, the belches and burps flowed as steadily as had the soda.

All this had given the tracker of men a little more time to consider the ways that Kenya would always alight once more to interrupt and tease his half-steady heart . . .

{unfinished chapter — had to run to dinner with a friend}

{okay, back again. Starbucks writing chair acquired, Peach White Shaken tea on the make}

. . .her last “away”” had been for a stint in the “healing arts” of dance. It made sense in so many ways. She was musical, lightfooted, heart made for romance. Plus her constant side-steps always signified the something missing in him (or her) which was needed to ever seal the deal betwixt them. As with much of life’s events, every new thing provided an excuse to not “tree down”.

She was back this time because a broken ankle now joyrode her leg instead of a broken jaw stowing ride on the man she’d last “danced with”. He was just another lustful mouse she’d pie-pipered. In short, her last tryst away had involved a “rugged”, and “intriguing” journalist, who’d finally uncovered his own story about an already established family — a slight blockade to the “yet uncreated” one He and Kenya had recently begun to choreograph. This daggerish newsflash had taken the soft-hearted dancer back into her studio where she always pugilistically took matters into and onto her own resilient body; the slow-healing ankle was proof though that she was nearing a season of important decisions; for nobody gets any younger — not even the youth.

And Jericho was always there to be her elegant and stately fool again, her gentle pillow. He easily found a way to sweep her wander-lust heart back into the quiet rhythm that was forever his way. She knew he loved her. He just didn’t know how to sexually express it. She knew she loved him. But she had not yet fished for the courage to consign herself fully to such mellow course as his. Science may never reveal to us this hole in humanity which often yearns for heart ache over tranquility.

For her, Jiles would have turned himself inside out, and become whatever actor she needed him to be. And yet, perhaps not. When it was all said and done, he could muster no different animal from out of his guts than that which his Maker had put inside of him.

When bluff-ledge eating was done, Jericho was pulled back from his daydreams as the giant had now begun unwabbing little folds and wads of paper from its pockets. He arranged them methodically on the table amidst the crumbs. Nobody else would have made heads or tails of the etchings on those faded sheets, but to Frost, they were the fine formulaic details of long-awaited revenge against certain souls with whom he’d once shared test-tubes and microsopes. Frost was not normally a creative soul, but oh how he could dream up fantastic endings for those he came to hate.

When the thoughtful oaf left that diner it was with a more calculated gate than how he’d approached it. Although he wasn’t aware of all the whys, Jericho knew in that instant he was meant to give follow. Before following Frost out, Jiles went over to the table where the beast had been eating, and bowed down to retrieve one of the napkins on which the giant had scribbled. It might as well have been a map to treasure of old. He studied the note for a second, placed it into his metro-sexual jeans, then headed out to the parking lot to sample his skills at being a blood hound.

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