The sun goes down and comes up a few miles from the Canadian border, where they’ve cleared a swath 100 yards wide to mark the divide. No wall, but they’ve probably got sensors, Sam says, you know, for the draft runners. I mean, the covid dodgers. The runaways. Rule of thumb, don’t send your citizens scrambling for a better place.
Anyway, they let the bears go through. We’ve seen bear gouges on trees, bear poop on the trail, but no bears, yet. We did see a man, though; he appeared in our camp early in the morning. He wore flip flops duct-taped to his feet and didn’t carry any water. He was doing the whole trail in a few hours. He was there and gone. We packed up camp and brought the food down from the tree and got a move on; I sort of hoped we’d hit the valley stream before the real heat of the day, but we weren’t in a rush. Out here, how could we be?