Physical Characteristics

 

Starting from the Top

The first thing one notices when their path is beset by a Jacob is the height of the beast; at nigh on six and a half feet head-to-toe, it is truly a force to be reckoned with. It should be noted, however, that as a Jacob ages, the weight of its enormous head forces a stooping of the neck and slouching of the shoulders. Though mother Scotts do their best to rectify this posture in their youth, Jacobs are a stubborn breed.

 

More on the Jacob’s enormous head - it is said that, smitten in-utero with an ostrich, the Jacob willed its own head into the shape of the flightless bird’s egg, a decision mother Scott was none-too-happy with. The weight of such a gigantic cranium often proves too much for Jacobs, sending them careening down even the steadiest of declines with the slightest gust of wind. Many an evening I’ve sat on the leeward face of a mountain, watching a Jacob climb tirelessly over crack and crevasse, only to go toppling head-over-heels back down when it reaches the winds on the peak.

 

Atop the Jacob’s monstrous head sits a thick flop of especially brown hair. It appears undecided what it wants to be and just hopes to figure it all out before going grey.

 

The Core, or Loose Center

The torso of a Jacob is best described as “there,” or perhaps more accurately, “very nearly there.” Long and lean, with modest shoulders and strictly non-birthing hips, Jacobs are adept at many things, chief among them very long walks (see Jacob and Aimless Wandering) and floating.

 

A word of caution - do not, under any circumstance, allow a Jacob to turn sideways on you. Nearly invisible in profile, a Jacob can quickly slip away in even a modestly-wooded glen and you will spend the better part of a day tracking it down again. Wooden objects and baked goods are an excellent way to keep its attention, and body, pointed at you.

 

Miscellaneous

When it comes to appendages, the Jacob is never in short supply. While studying Jacob from his private reserve in the Swiss Alps, the famed French naturalist and Jacob-enthusiast Louis d’Rafie said, “if a man starts at a river’s mouth, where the lifeblood seeps up from Mother Earth, and follows it, winding, he will one day reach its end. This is not the case with a Jacob’s legs.” I myself am no poet, so I will say simply this - a Jacob’s legs are quite long. So too its arms.

 

Interestingly enough though, a Jacob’s feet can only be described as impish. Outlandishly small in comparison to the rest of its body, it would seem many, many years of ritual foot-binding in pursuit of kicking a ball into a net stunted their growth. I suspect this has more than a bit to do with the aforementioned toppling situation.

 

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Behavior

 

To say that a Jacob often exhibits odd behaviors would be about as useless as stating butterflies are not made of butter. The two are quite obvious and require much deeper investigation.

 

Daily Routine, or The Things a Jacob Finds Itself Doing

If I were to venture a guess as to what a Jacob might say their ideal day would be if a Jacob was capable of speech and not just incoherent babble and physical displays of dominance and bowel discomfort, I suppose I would say it would probably be something it did not have to plan but had complete control over. A Jacob enjoys being busy, to a point, and especially enjoys new experience. The powerful brain inside its ungodly large head races with a new challenge. When the gears start to slow, however, interest wanes. A Jacob is not a natural follow-througher, one could say. A seeker of new and exciting stimuli, perhaps to a fault. That said, there seems no better motivation to complete the task at hand, be it berry harvesting, shelter building, or the occasional alpine yodeling, than the prospect of not finishing a new one.

 

Every morning for a Jacob begins the same - a generous portion of mostly-healthy cereal and an even more generous portion of mostly-good coffee. There are a few exceptions to this, and they seem to occur almost exclusively when a Jacob has a day full of nothing planned for himself. They involve entirely too much breakfast meats and baby chickens, scrambled.

 

With breakfast settled, a Jacob and its canine step outside for a bit of yard pacing and pooping, then return inside. This is the first and last time a Jacob’s canine will move for the day.

 

Though the Jacob is capable of truly horrendous odors and a level of filth many would deem physically unobtainable, it is, paradoxically, clean by nature. So a quick wash is in order before it can slank out into public

 

On the paradoxical nature of Jacobs - personal hygiene is not the only area a Jacob seems to contradict itself. In fact, the more I study it, the more I’m convinced it is simply some sentient physical form of the idea of ‘contradiction.’ Over the many years I have studied Jacobs, I have observed them to be both meticulous and impossibly perceptive of tiny details while maintaining total disinterest, voraciously hungry while avoiding food entirely, awake and asleep, hot and cold, fearless and feeble. It seems that for every thing one could say a Jacob is, they could just as accurately say it isn’t.

 

When a Jacob is confronted with the prospect of dinner, it will, in my experience, do one of two things - make swift a plan for attack, conquer and devour; or debate with itself for hours over what exactly it is that it wants, ultimately deciding on another generous portion of mostly-healthy cereal. I have wondered aloud to myself while watching this nightly ritual take place what a Jacob would do were its cereal supply to run dry. I’m ashamed for the beast to admit it would almost certainly stare blankly into an open refrigerator until it died.

 

Sleep seems to come more naturally, and more unnaturally, than anything I have ever witnessed a Jacob to do. Standing, sitting, hanging upside-down - it makes no matter. A Jacob will find a way to sleep. And remain asleep it most certainly will. That said, for every day a Jacob may sleep through, it spends another completely without. Riddled with such ghastly ailments as insomnia, restless legs, tireless elbows, quaking shins, and wheezing spleen, a Jacob often lies sleepless in its bed, probably thinking about that thing it wants to do but knows it will probably never get around to, but still wants to do it so much.