Concealed Intentions: Day 12

Word Count: 72,007

Summary of Events:

Nadia asked her father what types of jobs he would like her to have, and was dismayed to learn he wanted her to be in politics or finance; texting Vitaly, she hoped he'd have suggestions of what to do to avoid an office job but not be alone, but he had no suggestions. Borden woke stiff and sore, but after eating a granola bar, set off westward, thinking about how, in some respects, he was like the explorers who'd opened Canada up to the rest of the world hundreds of years before . . .

Excerpt of the Day:

A sound interrupted Borden’s thoughts. He froze. The sound had been enough to get his attention, but not enough to break through his thoughts and thoroughly identify itself.

Listening intently, Borden didn’t move. He waited for the sound to repeat itself.

His muscles tensed when he heard it again. It was a human sound, a whoop.

He’d just crossed a road and had seen a sign to the south advertising the entrance to the Finger Lake Wilderness Resort, but he’d seen the facility before he’d stopped last night, so he was beyond that too much for the whoop to have come from there.

Another sound then reached his ears; a motor.

Not just any motor either, but a boat motor. He was close to water deep enough for a motorboat?

Quickly he fetched his map from his backpack’s side pocket and looked. There was nothing west of Finger Lake until Knewstubb Lake, which was a good thirty kilometres away if he was eyeballing the gauge right.

Borden stowed the map and cautiously made his way north, which was the way the sounds seemed to be coming from.

Soon the trees thinned and Borden found himself standing at the edge of a lake, on which a motorboat was speeding.

Fetching his cellphone, Borden checked the time. It was quarter after five in the morning and already people were tearing around lakes on their motorboats? Apparently sleeping in on Sundays wasn’t a thing anymore.

Borden stepped back into the trees and resumed his westward track. He was grateful to know that the people weren’t likely going to find him, but still, it had been a little alarming to hear human sounds at this point in his journey.

He’d been away from people for almost three days — counting the day he’d spent prepping in Prince George — and although there was the potential for human encounters the whole length of his trek, Borden had thought that in his efforts to avoid people he wouldn’t hear them, but he had just had it proved to him that such wouldn’t be the case.

And it was probably a good thing too, as how was he going to avoid people if he didn’t hear them coming? 

Sure he could see buildings and whatnot and skirt wide of them or keep his view of them as obscured as possible in an effort to go unseen, but if he was trying to make himself difficult to be seen by others then he would find those others difficult to see, meaning that hearing them would keep him from being seen by them.