Blanco 2/3
Jared always listened to his instincts. That was one of the things that made him so good at his job. He trusted himself and he had great judgment. He knew when he was pushing too hard and when he had to let an animal take some time off from healing, he knew when he had to motivate the animals in his care to start seeing greater gains and better results after some disastrous traumas. He could read animals incredibly well. Sometimes he wished he could do the same with humans, that way he wouldn’t have been blindsided when his girlfriend of a year and a half left him for another smaller, more compressed man.
‘He just gets me in a way you don’t’ was the excuse while he watched his 5’5 girlfriend move her belongs out of his apartment. Apparently ‘you just don’t get me is code for you don’t read the same books I do’.
Jared always listened to his instincts, which is why during the mid-morning shift at work his stomach started twisting in on itself and he suddenly felt very apprehensive. He didn’t know why but it stuck with him like it was melded into his skin and he couldn’t ignore it. It got so bad that he decided to take a rare early lunch and go back home to check on his dogs.
It turned out Jared had a sixth sense because when he got home Jensen was gone. And it took barely a nano-second for him to panic.
It looked like Jensen had burred underground and found his way out of his backyard.
Jared broke into a cold sweat and called the relief center asking them to look out for reports and call him if they received anything about a white wolf-dog wandering around town. It went without saying that he wouldn’t be in for the rest of the day.
He prayed that Jensen wasn’t injured. He didn’t understand why Jensen left. Everything seemed fine. Maybe he was still trying to find his old family and his old owners. Jared picked up a shovel from his shed and quickly closed the burrow that Jensen dug in swift motions. He haphazardly threw some food into Harley and Sadie’s bowls and sequestered them in the house before making a quick call to Steve asking if he could check on them in a couple of hours after he got out of work. The call barely lasted a minute.
Jared went back to the relief center and printed out a hundred or so copies of Jensen updating the detailed contact information to his own. The picture of Jensen stayed the same under the new flyer.
He went door to door to every store in the rather small town which took hours but he didn’t think Jensen would go far. He didn’t know the area too well and the only places he knew around here were the clinic and Jared’s home which wasn’t that much farther from the local stores in town. So far he had no luck as no one had seen any canine that fit Jared’s descriptions.
It was getting dark as the day went on and it was around 6 o’clock when Jared decided to look around the back roads where he originally found Jensen. The woods were deeply frosted and ice crunched underneath his boots as he went inside the forest. He manned a flash light and called out for Jensen until his voice was hoarse and his throat ached. He walked around the deeply wooded area until his feet were sore then walked some more. Then he walked until he felt blisters and walked more. It was only when Jared started making large ellipse like circles around the area and his eyes started to burn that he decided to call it a night and hope that when he came to in the morning that someone would have some information on where his beloved dog had gone.
He drove back home defeated, he had taken his time driving back because he was looking to see if he could find Jensen wandering somewhere down the road but alas no dice there either. He simply couldn’t catch a break today.
Jared walked into his house exhausted and when he took a look at the time he saw that the clock read 11:35 in lime green light in his kitchen. It looked like Steve had done him his favor and looked after Harley and Sadie for a while, since he was fast asleep on his couch the light blue color of the tv bathing him gently in the dark, one foot off the couch and another one perched on the arm of it.
Jared’s stomach rebelled mutinously because he hadn’t eaten in thirteen hours and he felt like something that was used to clean tar off of precious glass. Jared didn’t want to eat though. He just wanted to sleep and hope for a miracle in the morning.
Unfortunately there was no miracle in the morning.
He was no closer to finding Jensen then he was yesterday and that made a part of him deep inside freeze in terror. If they couldn’t find Jensen in 48 hours that usually meant they would never find him and that possibility for Jared wasn’t an option.
The only thing that kept him sane last night was knowing that Jensen had his collar around his neck earlier that morning, yesterday. In his panic he had forgotten that Jensen had gotten used to wearing the collar around the house and loved to wear it even when he was inside. Jared got him a new one on the first of March a few weeks ago declaring it his birthday present because he had no clue when Jensen was born. Jensen yipped happily and jumped, judging from his reaction he loved it.
The collar was made of a soft leather, with the inside made of silk. The collar had large silver letters that spelled Jensen and underneath held a metal shaped feather with Jared’s name, phone number and address. On the back side of it in cursive lettering was inscribed ‘if I am ever lost please help me find my way back home. I am loved.’
Jared teared up a bit at the memory but he was thankful that he had gotten Jensen that present. It couldn’t have happened at a better time period as ten days later Jensen had gone missing and he was now in a position where he would need as many things in his favor as he could get.
Jared was even more desperate today then he was yesterday. He sent out a message in the early am, around 7 o’clock asking for help from his friends to help him cover more ground.
Chris helped him look over the woods again around the back roads this time going deeper into the forest. Tom went to the local radio station taking some home movies of Jensen and Jared playing in the yard. As well as one of his flyers. Tom worked at the local news station and got Jared some brief airtime to air a notice on Jensen. It was a genius idea and Jared could have kissed him when Tom offered it to him.
Instead of getting a few tens of people looking for his dog he would now have the whole town looking for Jensen. Jared also enlisted Chad to write up an ad in the local Sunday newspaper which offered a $350+ reward for anyone who found Jensen. Chad was also pressing his editor to rush out the paper sooner to get an extra days’ worth of notice.
Jared truly loved his friends and he knew that sometime in the near future he was going to have to take them all out for a night of drinks down at the local bar ‘Beavers’.
Jared finally called it a night around midnight again and thanked Chris extensively for searching for Jensen around the entire city area twice. He was discouraged but unwilling to give up. He was going to find him, they just had to. As he gently walked into his house through the kitchen he found some left over found on the kitchen counter. The food was covered in foil with a note attached to it in Steve’s scrawl telling him he had to eat.
Jared smiled, he really did have great friends. He heat the food up in the microwave and played the messages left for him one message was from Jeff telling him to keep his spirits up and that the center was working on the search as well he even had Sandy and Sam spreading the word to other centers around the area. Jeff also said that they informed many pet owners today that a dog went missing.
This soothed Jared a bit because he knew the pet owners in this area and they were ridiculously loyal and protective of their animals and they looked out for their own. It made Jared proud to be a pet owner in this community. It felt like he was a part of something. Jared was good to them and their pets and they in turn would be good to him for all of his service throughout his three years here.
There was another message from Chad saying that they got the issue out a full two days earlier then usual and that the paper would likely be out in time for the weekend to get a nice set of eyes looking for his pooch. His voice got tender as the message ended telling him to ‘keep his head up kiddo’.
The last message was Steve scolding him to eat the food he made for him or he would kick his ass in the morning.
Like Jared said.
Best. Friends. Ever.
But that did not change the fact that he was still missing his best friend. A certain four legged dog which name started with a J.
Just then he heard a suspicious sounded crash come from his living room right inside his house. The noise was followed by the sound of clumsy footsteps and another loud clang.
Jared ran into his living room and was rather surprised to see what was in front of him.
*
Jensen lived with a tribe of skin walkers.
He had known that ever since he was the tender age of five. Their clan often stuck together hiding in the shady forest areas and never wandering too far off course. There were many a time when he wanted to go out searching for those lights within the town, and just get a taste of something different. Nevertheless, his people did not live like that.
The lived within the woods and made the trees and grassy lands their home. Creating large dug outs underneath the trees and staying in the portion of the woods that was lost to all but the most experienced of travelers. No one bothered them usually because their village of sorts was so far from the off beaten track. There was a legend that was said that the elders of past skin walkers protected them and their land often leading misguided hunters, hikers and campers away from their territory.
All but skin walkers and animals knew where the spot was, perhaps some odd evolutionary imperative that always steered those from this selected skin walker clan back home.
His clan worked no different from many other clans who were housed in the wild although the number of those clans seemed to shrink smaller and smaller with each passing generation. Some clans migrated and assimilated into the typical human life style while the other more proud people of their kind clung to the natural order. Jensen’s clan was of proud people, and it was never forgotten.
That didn’t stop Jensen’s natural curiosity though. The more his people clung to the old natural ways the more feverish Jensen became to know what civilization in the local towns were like and when he reached his rebellious teenage years he would often run miles and miles nearest to the most local town to sneak around the small towns at night. The small towns were always the easiest to navigate and weren’t as scary as the city areas. The city areas were always made a bigger deal of seeing wild animals and made it much harder to blend in to their surroundings, the elders always warned of being caught. Which is why they always asked their youth to stay far away from human civilization.
Jensen loved towns though, they always seemed to be so quaint and weirdly special. They were a novelty of sorts, not quite that industrialized but still had a loyal center of people who milled about and conducted business not unlike that of the city. But the pace was much slower and he could slink in and out of the towns fairly easily without worrying about getting hit by several high speed cars or having to deal with all the noise pollution.
Jensen’s parents always scolded him for traveling into civilian areas.
His father punished him requiting him for hunting duty in a bid to keep him in the safe forest areas most nights and also volunteered him for food gathering services during the early morning to keep him exhausted. He also mandated he train the pups in evading from local hunters who may have strayed too close to their outside grounds. His father’s answer to keep him in the reservation was simply to exhaust him with chores and community work.
His mother on the other hand guilted him. She went on and on about stories where local skins were attacked by humans and some of which wondered too close to the city areas and wound up lost forever. It was every parent’s worst nightmare in the clan. And Jensen’s mother was even more worried then most because Jensen’s older brother Josh, when he was young had a bullet graze him when he was eleven. Jensen’s mother didn’t stop begging him to not go out there and sometimes even made him swear to her that he wouldn’t go to the cities or towns anymore. It made him feel that much more of a heel for lying to her.
When Jensen came of age his mother was beside herself with grief when he didn’t mate with any of the local village girls. Those who didn’t mate within their clan usually had to search outside of their clan to find their destined mate. Often those who left the clan never returned as most of the skin walker mates lived within the same human civilizations that the elders harbored the young clan members from. Jensen’s mother still had hope that other clans from the surrounding area could be Jensen’s mate and that he could still stay within the local pack life style.
As the seasons changed and some members from other clans came to visit them from far off places Jensen still did not find his mate. His mother grew worse in her depression. Jensen felt like a failure and like there was no good choice to make. He had already wasted a year and a half trying to stay and appease his family but his mate was out there and he needed to find them. He did not want to be one of those older skins who were driven mad by loneliness or who shriveled up in one of their dugs outs and died because they could not find their mate. Jensen just wanted to be happy. It was not his fault he did not mate with anyone within his clan.
Jensen sat down with his parents and talked with them about leaving the night before he did it. Saying that he needed to find his own way now and needed to find his mate and make a life with them. It was unfair to ask him not to.
‘I know baby, I just wish you could have settled down with a nice girl, like Danneel’
Jensen sighed, his mother was devastated when she found out that Danneel had mated with the Lafferty boy who lived adjacently from their dug out. She held on to that belief until after James 18th birthday, prior to that she believed that Jensen was just a late bloomer. When that was proven false her hopes were dashed and her dreams of Jensen staying with the pack went down in flames with it.
‘I just wish that it could have been like Josh’s mating’
Jensen felt a lash of pain strike threw him at that comment not unlike that of a whip.
‘I’m not Josh mom. I shouldn’t have to be.’
‘Oh honey. I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘Look I’ll come back when I find my mate okay, that way you won’t worry.’
Jensen leveled her with a look.
His mother wiped her tears and hugged him and then made her way back into their home.
Jensen was then left with his father and they both looked at each other.
‘Stay safe alright son?’
Before patting him on the back and leaving to follow his mother.
As he left he felt like he had shamed his parents. As much as he was the one to leave his home he couldn’t help feeling like he was being exiled. He wiped the tears from his face as he transformed into his wolf form. Everyone always complimented Jensen on his coat. It was a beautiful white collar that aided him particularly well in the winter months as it looked so much like snow. But on the counter side it was quite conspicuous in the summer months.
As he bounded down to the nearest town he was blind sighted by a trap, one of his hind legs got caught in what he perceived to be a bear trap, likely left over from a hunter. The pain was intense and Jensen used all of his energy to transform back into his human form. His change only jostled the metal teeth deeper within him and made him scream in agony. He immediately tried to pry the metal teeth from his flesh, with all of his strength managed to finally open and release it, and gingerly brought his foot out. The wound was gushing blood and as he lost consciousness, he slipped in to his wolf form. He tried to get as close as he could to the local town but it felt like he was miles away and still shrouded within the forests depths.
With a burst of adrenaline, he got as far as he could with his injury and could feel more blood loss happening with each limp of his legs. Jensen tried to push himself as far as he could but he could not see for the pain. He lost consciousness and lied down on what felt like asphalt but Jensen’s could not be certain he was far too out of it. He saw a pair of bright yellow lights before he blacked out. Blanco 3
‘He just gets me in a way you don’t’ was the excuse while he watched his 5’5 girlfriend move her belongs out of his apartment. Apparently ‘you just don’t get me is code for you don’t read the same books I do’.
Jared always listened to his instincts, which is why during the mid-morning shift at work his stomach started twisting in on itself and he suddenly felt very apprehensive. He didn’t know why but it stuck with him like it was melded into his skin and he couldn’t ignore it. It got so bad that he decided to take a rare early lunch and go back home to check on his dogs.
It turned out Jared had a sixth sense because when he got home Jensen was gone. And it took barely a nano-second for him to panic.
It looked like Jensen had burred underground and found his way out of his backyard.
Jared broke into a cold sweat and called the relief center asking them to look out for reports and call him if they received anything about a white wolf-dog wandering around town. It went without saying that he wouldn’t be in for the rest of the day.
He prayed that Jensen wasn’t injured. He didn’t understand why Jensen left. Everything seemed fine. Maybe he was still trying to find his old family and his old owners. Jared picked up a shovel from his shed and quickly closed the burrow that Jensen dug in swift motions. He haphazardly threw some food into Harley and Sadie’s bowls and sequestered them in the house before making a quick call to Steve asking if he could check on them in a couple of hours after he got out of work. The call barely lasted a minute.
Jared went back to the relief center and printed out a hundred or so copies of Jensen updating the detailed contact information to his own. The picture of Jensen stayed the same under the new flyer.
He went door to door to every store in the rather small town which took hours but he didn’t think Jensen would go far. He didn’t know the area too well and the only places he knew around here were the clinic and Jared’s home which wasn’t that much farther from the local stores in town. So far he had no luck as no one had seen any canine that fit Jared’s descriptions.
It was getting dark as the day went on and it was around 6 o’clock when Jared decided to look around the back roads where he originally found Jensen. The woods were deeply frosted and ice crunched underneath his boots as he went inside the forest. He manned a flash light and called out for Jensen until his voice was hoarse and his throat ached. He walked around the deeply wooded area until his feet were sore then walked some more. Then he walked until he felt blisters and walked more. It was only when Jared started making large ellipse like circles around the area and his eyes started to burn that he decided to call it a night and hope that when he came to in the morning that someone would have some information on where his beloved dog had gone.
He drove back home defeated, he had taken his time driving back because he was looking to see if he could find Jensen wandering somewhere down the road but alas no dice there either. He simply couldn’t catch a break today.
Jared walked into his house exhausted and when he took a look at the time he saw that the clock read 11:35 in lime green light in his kitchen. It looked like Steve had done him his favor and looked after Harley and Sadie for a while, since he was fast asleep on his couch the light blue color of the tv bathing him gently in the dark, one foot off the couch and another one perched on the arm of it.
Jared’s stomach rebelled mutinously because he hadn’t eaten in thirteen hours and he felt like something that was used to clean tar off of precious glass. Jared didn’t want to eat though. He just wanted to sleep and hope for a miracle in the morning.
Unfortunately there was no miracle in the morning.
He was no closer to finding Jensen then he was yesterday and that made a part of him deep inside freeze in terror. If they couldn’t find Jensen in 48 hours that usually meant they would never find him and that possibility for Jared wasn’t an option.
The only thing that kept him sane last night was knowing that Jensen had his collar around his neck earlier that morning, yesterday. In his panic he had forgotten that Jensen had gotten used to wearing the collar around the house and loved to wear it even when he was inside. Jared got him a new one on the first of March a few weeks ago declaring it his birthday present because he had no clue when Jensen was born. Jensen yipped happily and jumped, judging from his reaction he loved it.
The collar was made of a soft leather, with the inside made of silk. The collar had large silver letters that spelled Jensen and underneath held a metal shaped feather with Jared’s name, phone number and address. On the back side of it in cursive lettering was inscribed ‘if I am ever lost please help me find my way back home. I am loved.’
Jared teared up a bit at the memory but he was thankful that he had gotten Jensen that present. It couldn’t have happened at a better time period as ten days later Jensen had gone missing and he was now in a position where he would need as many things in his favor as he could get.
Jared was even more desperate today then he was yesterday. He sent out a message in the early am, around 7 o’clock asking for help from his friends to help him cover more ground.
Chris helped him look over the woods again around the back roads this time going deeper into the forest. Tom went to the local radio station taking some home movies of Jensen and Jared playing in the yard. As well as one of his flyers. Tom worked at the local news station and got Jared some brief airtime to air a notice on Jensen. It was a genius idea and Jared could have kissed him when Tom offered it to him.
Instead of getting a few tens of people looking for his dog he would now have the whole town looking for Jensen. Jared also enlisted Chad to write up an ad in the local Sunday newspaper which offered a $350+ reward for anyone who found Jensen. Chad was also pressing his editor to rush out the paper sooner to get an extra days’ worth of notice.
Jared truly loved his friends and he knew that sometime in the near future he was going to have to take them all out for a night of drinks down at the local bar ‘Beavers’.
Jared finally called it a night around midnight again and thanked Chris extensively for searching for Jensen around the entire city area twice. He was discouraged but unwilling to give up. He was going to find him, they just had to. As he gently walked into his house through the kitchen he found some left over found on the kitchen counter. The food was covered in foil with a note attached to it in Steve’s scrawl telling him he had to eat.
Jared smiled, he really did have great friends. He heat the food up in the microwave and played the messages left for him one message was from Jeff telling him to keep his spirits up and that the center was working on the search as well he even had Sandy and Sam spreading the word to other centers around the area. Jeff also said that they informed many pet owners today that a dog went missing.
This soothed Jared a bit because he knew the pet owners in this area and they were ridiculously loyal and protective of their animals and they looked out for their own. It made Jared proud to be a pet owner in this community. It felt like he was a part of something. Jared was good to them and their pets and they in turn would be good to him for all of his service throughout his three years here.
There was another message from Chad saying that they got the issue out a full two days earlier then usual and that the paper would likely be out in time for the weekend to get a nice set of eyes looking for his pooch. His voice got tender as the message ended telling him to ‘keep his head up kiddo’.
The last message was Steve scolding him to eat the food he made for him or he would kick his ass in the morning.
Like Jared said.
Best. Friends. Ever.
But that did not change the fact that he was still missing his best friend. A certain four legged dog which name started with a J.
Just then he heard a suspicious sounded crash come from his living room right inside his house. The noise was followed by the sound of clumsy footsteps and another loud clang.
Jared ran into his living room and was rather surprised to see what was in front of him.
*
Jensen lived with a tribe of skin walkers.
He had known that ever since he was the tender age of five. Their clan often stuck together hiding in the shady forest areas and never wandering too far off course. There were many a time when he wanted to go out searching for those lights within the town, and just get a taste of something different. Nevertheless, his people did not live like that.
The lived within the woods and made the trees and grassy lands their home. Creating large dug outs underneath the trees and staying in the portion of the woods that was lost to all but the most experienced of travelers. No one bothered them usually because their village of sorts was so far from the off beaten track. There was a legend that was said that the elders of past skin walkers protected them and their land often leading misguided hunters, hikers and campers away from their territory.
All but skin walkers and animals knew where the spot was, perhaps some odd evolutionary imperative that always steered those from this selected skin walker clan back home.
His clan worked no different from many other clans who were housed in the wild although the number of those clans seemed to shrink smaller and smaller with each passing generation. Some clans migrated and assimilated into the typical human life style while the other more proud people of their kind clung to the natural order. Jensen’s clan was of proud people, and it was never forgotten.
That didn’t stop Jensen’s natural curiosity though. The more his people clung to the old natural ways the more feverish Jensen became to know what civilization in the local towns were like and when he reached his rebellious teenage years he would often run miles and miles nearest to the most local town to sneak around the small towns at night. The small towns were always the easiest to navigate and weren’t as scary as the city areas. The city areas were always made a bigger deal of seeing wild animals and made it much harder to blend in to their surroundings, the elders always warned of being caught. Which is why they always asked their youth to stay far away from human civilization.
Jensen loved towns though, they always seemed to be so quaint and weirdly special. They were a novelty of sorts, not quite that industrialized but still had a loyal center of people who milled about and conducted business not unlike that of the city. But the pace was much slower and he could slink in and out of the towns fairly easily without worrying about getting hit by several high speed cars or having to deal with all the noise pollution.
Jensen’s parents always scolded him for traveling into civilian areas.
His father punished him requiting him for hunting duty in a bid to keep him in the safe forest areas most nights and also volunteered him for food gathering services during the early morning to keep him exhausted. He also mandated he train the pups in evading from local hunters who may have strayed too close to their outside grounds. His father’s answer to keep him in the reservation was simply to exhaust him with chores and community work.
His mother on the other hand guilted him. She went on and on about stories where local skins were attacked by humans and some of which wondered too close to the city areas and wound up lost forever. It was every parent’s worst nightmare in the clan. And Jensen’s mother was even more worried then most because Jensen’s older brother Josh, when he was young had a bullet graze him when he was eleven. Jensen’s mother didn’t stop begging him to not go out there and sometimes even made him swear to her that he wouldn’t go to the cities or towns anymore. It made him feel that much more of a heel for lying to her.
When Jensen came of age his mother was beside herself with grief when he didn’t mate with any of the local village girls. Those who didn’t mate within their clan usually had to search outside of their clan to find their destined mate. Often those who left the clan never returned as most of the skin walker mates lived within the same human civilizations that the elders harbored the young clan members from. Jensen’s mother still had hope that other clans from the surrounding area could be Jensen’s mate and that he could still stay within the local pack life style.
As the seasons changed and some members from other clans came to visit them from far off places Jensen still did not find his mate. His mother grew worse in her depression. Jensen felt like a failure and like there was no good choice to make. He had already wasted a year and a half trying to stay and appease his family but his mate was out there and he needed to find them. He did not want to be one of those older skins who were driven mad by loneliness or who shriveled up in one of their dugs outs and died because they could not find their mate. Jensen just wanted to be happy. It was not his fault he did not mate with anyone within his clan.
Jensen sat down with his parents and talked with them about leaving the night before he did it. Saying that he needed to find his own way now and needed to find his mate and make a life with them. It was unfair to ask him not to.
‘I know baby, I just wish you could have settled down with a nice girl, like Danneel’
Jensen sighed, his mother was devastated when she found out that Danneel had mated with the Lafferty boy who lived adjacently from their dug out. She held on to that belief until after James 18th birthday, prior to that she believed that Jensen was just a late bloomer. When that was proven false her hopes were dashed and her dreams of Jensen staying with the pack went down in flames with it.
‘I just wish that it could have been like Josh’s mating’
Jensen felt a lash of pain strike threw him at that comment not unlike that of a whip.
‘I’m not Josh mom. I shouldn’t have to be.’
‘Oh honey. I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘Look I’ll come back when I find my mate okay, that way you won’t worry.’
Jensen leveled her with a look.
His mother wiped her tears and hugged him and then made her way back into their home.
Jensen was then left with his father and they both looked at each other.
‘Stay safe alright son?’
Before patting him on the back and leaving to follow his mother.
As he left he felt like he had shamed his parents. As much as he was the one to leave his home he couldn’t help feeling like he was being exiled. He wiped the tears from his face as he transformed into his wolf form. Everyone always complimented Jensen on his coat. It was a beautiful white collar that aided him particularly well in the winter months as it looked so much like snow. But on the counter side it was quite conspicuous in the summer months.
As he bounded down to the nearest town he was blind sighted by a trap, one of his hind legs got caught in what he perceived to be a bear trap, likely left over from a hunter. The pain was intense and Jensen used all of his energy to transform back into his human form. His change only jostled the metal teeth deeper within him and made him scream in agony. He immediately tried to pry the metal teeth from his flesh, with all of his strength managed to finally open and release it, and gingerly brought his foot out. The wound was gushing blood and as he lost consciousness, he slipped in to his wolf form. He tried to get as close as he could to the local town but it felt like he was miles away and still shrouded within the forests depths.
With a burst of adrenaline, he got as far as he could with his injury and could feel more blood loss happening with each limp of his legs. Jensen tried to push himself as far as he could but he could not see for the pain. He lost consciousness and lied down on what felt like asphalt but Jensen’s could not be certain he was far too out of it. He saw a pair of bright yellow lights before he blacked out. Blanco 3