Guy
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Day#11\92 Prisoner 0928 reporting:
Time has become irrelevant. My captor has hired another ruffian to aid him in my abduction. This new fellow is whip thin, has a curiously pleasant demeanor, but sadly, with his addition, my escape becomes less and less likely During today's hike, I "Hearst-like" became afflicted with the Stockholm syndrome. I begin to follow eagerly as my brother and his henchman have maps and perhaps I might make it through today's hike alive after all....
My thoughts become fractured, telegraphic, splintered. I feel thinned, like the race of man, like the brass man, the golem, Mr.Crane, Neil Asher's creation. My vision tunnels. One speaks of beautiful views while hiking, but I have found that sadly my vision becomes limited to the one or two feet directly in front of my feet. To look up is to change the precarious delicate balance achieved by falling forwards head first and letting the feet catch up with the body. Thus, I inspect the path.
There are three sets of footprints - sheep, human, and a single bird whose tracks double back so many times I am convinced they must belong to that, long thought of as dead, strain, the dodo. Sadly, sheep are the perhaps the stupidest of herbivores, according to my gentleman farmer friends, and humans are reportedly at the top of the food chain, yet curiously I am out here in the mountains with only sheep for companions. Curious indeed.
Today I am forced to scale a veritable mountain through driving snow. Blizzard like conditions burn sleet into my left eye creating the inflammation known as keratitis, and the surrounding face is blasted as though the snow is sand. No one has ocular anesthetic drops with them, naturally, so I must suffer. I laugh to myself as I hear/see my brother's poncho develop a deafening whipping kite-like appearance in the gale force winds. If he is blown off the mountain I might have a chance to make a break for it. The downhill after the pass has snow up to the hip. I would have caught this on digital imaging had such a thought been able to develop in my hypoxic hypothermic mind. In the last throes of this state, I decide to remove all my clothes as I am suffused with a delicious warmth. They drag me on naked to the hut where I am chained in the basement and fed gruel.
