Gnome Preserved

To provide cautionary tale for those with ears to hear and an open mind to listen.  Legend says dead men tell no tales.  This cliche doesn't apply to his kind.  Place your ear up against the glass. Be still.  Be very still.  Enhance your calm and you may hear what he says. To improve your odds, discover him. 

Was the summer of 2016.  Several crazy rogue FTF-hounds found themselves going for a 5/5 multi-stage at Loch Raven reservoir.  This would be no ordinary 5/5.  Does an ordinary 5/5 exist?   Some of the cachers were boastful, proud.  They foolishly thought they could bag a couple stages one day.  No doubt in their minds they'd get the rest of the stages and final on the second time out.  They'd be dead wrong.  The CO of '1 Way to Skin a Cat' is mild mannered sadistic cache hiding fellow. In his bold mocking contempt of the spirt of geocaching, the mind bruising CO brazenly asserted he was hiding a cache he didn't want anyone to be able to find.  That's crazy, right?   Well, he was likely to succeed as Stage 1 proved to be deceptively daunting.  Challenge Accepted!  

The CO's hyperbole quickly was backed up by reality. The man hides a cache exceedingly well. The spirit of caching came over our spirited bunch of caching hounds.  The drive to get that elusive 5/5 FTF compelled them to form a team. So, that's precisely what they did.  The team soldiered on from tough stage to tough stage. With each staging victory came the need to find yet another. How many stages are there?  Speculation abounds that it had something to do with cats. Cats have "9 Lives" so the story goes. Were there 9 stages?  Our struggle was real.  That's when something magical happened. 

Somewhere adjacent to the area preceding the puzzle stage by two, very high in the treetops, we happened upon a Gnome.  He was a colorful fellow.  Befitting all gnomes, he was loud, brash, bumbling and gregarious to a fault.  He revealed to our curious team that he had been watching us since stage 1.  For a sip of our whiskey he'd tell us the coords to the final stage. I handed him my flask. He handed me a leaf with gnome scribbling passing for what I hoped were coords. That was the last time I saw the Gnome alive.  He disappeared in to the woods from which he came taking my flask with him. 

Rumor mill gossip suggests the CO was very, very, salty when he discovered his precious 5/5's final location may have been compromised. Was he mad enough to take out the Gnome?   Oh, the horror, the horror...  

On a sweltering summer day, temps hovering just shy of 100-degrees, we made a gruesome discovery.  The gentle gnome we'd met before was at the "Puzzle" stage of the multi.  The very life was drained from him by means we do not know.  Dead is dead.  We lowered him from the tree with deliberate ceremonius care.  In the tradition of Gnomes, we preserved him as you see before you.  

Farewell dear gnome, gentle woodland creature.