Jeremiah Joseph was born in a cave of limestone. No way in, no way out.

His mother did the birth there, all by her self, had a birthing pool with her. She didn’t bring it, of course, and it wasn’t brought there. It was a natural pool in the cave. Very cold. You’d think that was a bad thing, but….

Anyway, no one seems to know how they got there, but that’s where they were. She birthed him, standing in the pool, in a crouch, basically with her arms on her knees, butt pushed out behind her, and as he crowned, she reached back and pulled him from her birth canal. She screamed a primal scream, having pushed extremely hard to get him out. The effort took a massive toll on her. As she pulled him out of herself, she slumped down, stumbling just outside of the pool. She had some bedding she had made next to the pool, from flax. She made the linen herself. The majority of the birthing fluids stayed in the pool. Later ecologists would be dismayed to find it contaminated the pristine ecological conditions of the pool, but at the same time, it spawned a whole new species and created an entirely new ecosystem.

The sages say may things. Sometimes people wonder if the sages make things up to see if we’ll believe them or if we’ll push back. They never say. But they say that Jeremiah Joseph was a strong man, not tall, and really, they say, if you saw him, you’d probably not ever know it. While his feats are recorded as legend, they say he himself look unremarkable. A sort of social camouflage. He is a man of humbleness of personality, despite the stories of his birth.

One day, Jeremiah Joseph was talking from his town to the next one over. It was a hot day, but it was morning, so it wasn’t too hot yet. It was, however, quite dusty. It hadn’t rained here in a few weeks. It was late spring, so that was a little odd. Even for the mountains, it was already hot, but at least it wasn’t that humid.

Jeremiah had brought a small amount of food with him and a small goat skin he used as a water flask. Jeremiah was wearing his usual linen tunic and rough work pants. They were beige and a bit scratchy, but they were his. As the sages and scholars say, Jeremiah Joseph wasn’t a particularly notable man. His hair was a sandy brown, his eyes a forgettable shade of eye color. He looked you in the eye when you talked, but he wasn’t one of those people who looked into your soul or had fidgety eyes, darting around. He just regarded you. He was of a medium build and medium height; his laugh could be infectious, but often it wasn’t his appearance that people remembered. His feats were what they remembered, you’d just never know by looking at him.

There are rumors out there that say that Jeremiah Joseph can walk on water. At least that is what people say around the village on the lake.

The people around the lake are already a superstitious folk. Weird things are said to happen around the lake, especially at night, and so, much like sailors, they have their own superstitions. Unlike sailors, the people of the village by the lake refuse to go out onto the lake to fish. They believe that there are creatures in its depths or something. Odd things are said to wash ashore on the occasion, and storms can be particularly devastating.

When Jeremiah Joseph was a about 7 or 8 years old, he came to live in a village by a river. It was known that he was without a family, having no mother or father to speak of. He had been found wandering in the wilderness, surprisingly adept at taking care of himself. He had learned, apparently all on his own, how to make a sling and find the right rocks to hunt small game like rabbits and small rodents. Some suspected he had been abandoned or orphaned in a village raid or minor war. When asked about this by the village elders he said this was not what happened. When asked why he was alone and why he was wandering the wilderness alone, all he said was that that was how it always had been.

One day Jeremiah Joseph was fishing in the local stream. This was a somewhat lively stream with many rocks and boulders making for narrow channels and small places for the fish to hide, the currents odd and the eddies seemingly random. But no, the longer Jeremiah looked at it, the more it did make sense.

As he peered at the water, the ripples and waves, created by the flow of the water over, around, and under the rocks, he saw that the fish would take refuge in the shallow places, others in shade, some in the deeper sections.

Jeremiah Joseph was sitting with some of the village mothers, helping them weave baskets. Jeremiah had large hands with surprising dexterity. He learned to weave whole roaming the wilds before being taken in. He taught himself to weave reads and braid vines to make baskets and ropes. They were very crude but his talent was noticed right away.

Joseph enjoyed weaving baskets. One of the types of baskets he was taught to make was tall, about waist high, tall and narrow. They had many uses: to protect large wine and oil vases, holding various objects like brooms, carrying kindling sticks, holding dirty clothes, and many more things. Some had kids, others not.