Best Campsite Ever

As they continued up the valley, the path outside of the tracks became steadily narrower as the valley walls got closer and steeper. Lower down, any plants growing on the bank of the cutting had been far enough away not to be an issue, but now the bank was much closer, so whoever was pushing on that side would occasionally get hit by the branches as they rolled by.
“Honestly, I wish they’d grown out a little more.” Said Cy.
Bug, who was pushing alongside him and who had just extricated some twigs from her hair, gave him an unimpressed look and seemed to be debating throwing the twigs at him.
“Because it’d make it easier to tell!” Cy quickly blurted out. “We could tell whether the Wanderer went this way!”
Bug’s unimpressed look intensified as she kept pushing with one hand and studied the small bundle of twigs in the other.
“I’ll swap places!” Cy offered desperately. “You can take the drop-off side for a bit!”
Bug slowly nodded, and they switched places. Up ahead, Luce was only just able to muffle her laughter.

They camped for the night, though Bug still objected to the use of the word, in the smallest station building so far, just one room on a short platform, with a simple freestanding counter in place of the usual ticket office. An elegant sign at one end of the building pointed down a short gravel path to what had probably been a nice historic-looking toilet block at some point, but was now a vine-covered wreck on an alarming lean.
“I have never in my life needed to use a toilet badly enough to risk that.” Bug declared. “I feel like it’ll fall over if I look at it too hard.”
Cy looked around.
“Lumpy must have set up something around here.” He suggested. “He did everywhere else.”
He looked closer at the vines.
“Is some of that stuff poisonous? Or really itchy?”
Luce hadn’t been as fascinated by the overgrown outhouse wreck, but had wandered down the path with the others.
“Very itchy.” She confirmed. “I trod on some of the blackish purple stuff once, years ago. Not fun at all, stay clear of it.”
“Kind of ironic for a toilet though.” Bug muttered as they headed back to the station.

The little station, they concluded, might have been Lumpy’s best camp yet. There was the by now standard fire ring on the platform, and a water collecting system, and a stack of dry firewood, but there were also little solar panels feeding strings of tiny twinkly lights, and a pile of blankets in a crate under the counter, and once they found it, and outhouse seeming placed to take advantage of a gap in the trees and look right down the valley.
“There’s even some food here!” Luce reported, opening a box from under one of the benches. “Dried fruit, and what looks like jerky of some kind? Or maybe tree-bark; It’s hard to tell with this stuff.”
Bug just stood in the middle of the room and pointed up with a grin, looking steadily at Luce and the jerky. Above them, almost invisible in shadow unless you looked hard, bags and bundles dangled from the rafters.
Cy looked up and gave a low whistle.
“Is this some sort of storehouse? Like an emergency shelter or something?”
“I think so.” Said Bug. “But … Maybe one that’s in disguise? Those bags blend in too well for it to be an accident, I think.”
Cy sat on one of the benches and put his head back, looking up at the ceiling.
“Mister Station looks scary and odd.” He said. “But I think Lumpy maybe thinks scary and odd?”
Bug and Luce considered this, and slowly nodded.
“I keep thinking about what Mister Station stopped him from saying. And about those knives he gave us.” Luce said, carefully sliding the box of jerky or bark back where she’d found it. “And about Mister Station’s odd look.”
“Me too.” Cy admitted. “I don’t think it was going to be ‘you can’t help them so don’t try’. It was something else.”
They sat for a while, trying not to think too hard about it, but failing.

Late that night, after they’d each read out a chapter from the book about Hobbits, Bug lay on her bed on a bench and asked a question of nobody in particular.
“Do you think this is the first Wanderer who’s ever come to the valley? Or was this just the first one we found out about?”