why do jackals suddenly appear?

The sky was overcast, and yet the morning seemed to radiate with optimism:

Maybe it was because of my pink thingies that I had bought. Speaking of pink thingies, when I saw this little party store I went in and bought some additional thingies:

Walked past a park with a statue of the late President (who was the father of the current President who in turn was the husband of the current Vice President):

And then – as you can see on the map – I backtracked a little, then left the highway to turn onto a winding country road where geese were wandering about the fields:

People had been telling me about the new highway that was not open to traffic, yet. And they had said that I could walk on it. I tried to confirm this with these dudes, but they had different opinions about it:

So I kept walking east on the country road, hoping that I would eventually hit the new highway:

And hit it I did – the only problem was that there was a fence around it:

It took a while to figure out a way onto the highway. First I tried pulling the Caboose alongside the fence for a certain distance, hoping that there would be an opening. There wasn’t. Then I dismantled the Caboose and moved her to the other side of the fence from a small opening below (check the daily video if you want to see how I did it).

The new highway turned out to be absolutely gorgeous:

Or rather, being absolutely alone on the highway was a gorgeous feeling:

There were only two minor problems: 1) I had enough water for two days, not more. And 2) people had been telling me about jackals. Remember how scared I was of jackals near the border of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan one and a half years earlier?

I looked at this poor son of a bitch for a long time:

Was he a jackal? Was he a she? How could she/he have been so unlucky as to get hit by a car on this road whose main quality was the fact that it was empty?

I walked well into the evening:

And past the sunset:

Then I came to a place where someone had made a primitive barrier in the middle of the road:

I crossed the barrier, and then, realizing that there was a thunderstorm brewing in the distance, I decided to camp right there under the bridge:

I could not get enough, or so I thought. Only later that night, the jackals appeared. I saw only one, and even that was just a shadow. But I could hear all of them.

Their call sounded like laughter.

Daily video:

360 degree video: