Journal 1a

The wanderer sighed as his foot broke through the brittle leather of his boots for the third time that day. The steady cobbled roads haphazardly formed a century ago by the American Empire had fallen into disrepair… is what a wanderer would have said about these roads twenty years ago. They had only gotten worse since that time. Nature had been overtaking them so as the tree roots beneath looked like the veins in the hands of an old woman. Such road hazards were hell on the wanderers gear, which was more used to soft earth as opposed to indifferent stone. The wanderer looked up to the sky, its wooly mud brown clouds the same color as his once gray clothes. Scanning the skies and nearby roads for danger, the wanderer took his finger to his cracked bloody lips and loosed a shrill canary-like whistle. Old Jereimah, on his last wobbly legs came to a halt with an annoyed winny. The whole wagon coming to a screeching halt. The wanderer ignored this, and let out three more whistles, red, blue and yellow flashes darted from the wagon onto the nearby trees. Three beautiful hawks, each a primary color squawked and squabbled until the wanderer spoke to them. “Marron, Azur, yout two fly ahead, keep an eye out on the road ahead, Ochur, you keep an eye on the wagon, I’ll be gone for a moment.” The hawks squawked in salute and set about to their tasks as the wanderer pushed into the wagon.

The wanderer was met with a mountain of treasure, what you, another man would call trash. Boxes of clothes, tools, rations, broken dolls, awls, twisted umbrellas, dirty mud covered stones, unraveled leathers and a whole further genealogy of stuff crammed into the wagon. The wanderer thumbed the small penknife drawing of a dog on the wooden post in the wall, a memento his grandfather left on the wagon when he was smaller than a pumpkin. The wanderer began his excavation, digging through books, candles, cups, broken knives and dirty cloths. A few moments later he found his Tutankhamun, a small red tomato made of cloth with needles sticking out of it. With expert hands the wanderer sewed the same hole he sewed more times that week than he ate in the past year. He sighed.

“Well Ol, Jeremiah, gotta get some new boots, let’s hurry to town.”

Ol Jeremiah whined in protest.

“Oh don’t worry, i’ll pick you up a carrot as soon as we get there.”

Ol Jeremiah accepted the bargain and began to march on. The wanderer hopped out of the wagon, whistled four times. His birds returned.