By six in the morning the sky was getting light, joggers were out, and Starbucks cafés were beginning to open their doors. She killed another hour in one of those and then hiked back to the bus station, where she caught an 8:06 bus headed for Sandpoint and Bourne’s Ford. This was much like the first one, except with a certain hard-to-pin-down air of Wild West mountain-man craziness about it. The Wenatchee-Spokane run had been a simple matter of getting across a sparse desert, irrigated in some places, therefore with a generally farmlike vibe. She had noticed, as they’d drawn closer to Spokane, that trees were beginning to survive, just isolated specimens at first, then clumps, then small forests. But northward from Spokane the forest cover became continuous, the highway began to bound up and down considerable slopes, and the businesses and dwellings along it stopped feeling like farms and began feeling like outposts. Decidedly eccentric signage began to show up: billboards inveighing against the United Nations, and hand-lettered jeremiads about the existential threat posed by the federal budget deficit. But of course she just noticed those things because she was looking for them; it was mostly fast-food joints and convenience stores like anywhere else in America, interspersed with clusters of vacation homes (wherever there was a lake or a nice stretch of river), ranches (where the land was open and flat), or outbreaks of Appalachian-style rural poverty. Sometimes they’d jump over a ridge and pass through what she thought was out-and-out wilderness, until she saw the zigzagging tracks of the logging roads.