I work as a park ranger in the deep South. My assistant was a member of a cult, the lone survivor of a mass suicide orchestrated to get their souls free passage onto the nearest UFO. His name is Jay Hardwick, and mine is Jay Salem. To avoid confusion, everyone just calls him Wickie and me Little Jay, even though I despise that nickname and always have. The Little Jay thing is an old, and rather worn-out, joke, as I stand about seven feet tall. My parents were also monstrously tall, and their parents before them too, and so on and so forth, probably all the way back to the time of the Denisovans. Just like Great Danes are inbred for their gargantuan size, apparently my family followed a similar policy of foolhardy eugenics. Regardless, I prefer people to just call me Jay. The “Little” thing gets old. “Hey Jay,” Hardwick said to me, “does that look normal to you?” He pointed across the field where a two-headed black bear stared at us, blinking in bewilderment. “It doesn’t not look normal to me. Just ignore it. Rule number one of this job is to always ignore everything that doesn’t immediately…
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Stories from a Goreham Park Ranger, part 1