Tuesday, May 29, 2018 – 13.5 miles
My nose was congested overnight (I was probably snoring horribly, but the others were too polite to mention it) and my cold finally hit me like a hammer today. I used up the optimistic number of tissues I had brought, then reused them as they dried in the heat. Personal hygiene? What’s that? I realized that I had plenty of toilet paper, but even what I could spare of that wasn’t enough to treat the apparent melting of the inside of my head, so I had to convert my thermal bottoms into a handkerchief. Ahhhh so much better for blowing than flimsy paper. Ahhhhhh.
More nice views, forest and heat. I camped a short distance before Deer Spring and soon a deer approached my camp.
Gandalf, Four-Eyes and River had described deer with fawns walking through their campsite at Deer Creek, and I’d thought ‘aww, that’s nice’. Then they mentioned that one of the deer had been eating feces from a dug up cathole… My deer was weirdly interested in something in my camp, but I couldn’t figure out what that thing was. It passed my Ursack with no interest. My dirty tissues? You want my dirty tissues, don’t you?? I know that some animals chew the straps of hiking poles, so that was another possibility. I shouted at the deer and even chased it to no avail. Finally it retreated for awhile but I heard it crashing around outside again after dark, and when I opened the tent and shone my headlamp into the forest, I saw its eyes glowing in the light. It reminded me of a story (one paragraph) that I wrote when I was a kid about a deer that unzipped itself to reveal a garbage bear (bear that eats human garbage) with glowing eyes. The height of literature.
