On a very busy day, six or seven cars might drive by in one hour, most of them locals but some of them strangers taking the shortcut to Maine. “We have to get this road taken off GPS,” we griped, half-joking. “This is too much traffic.” And then, suddenly, one early summer day, there it was, headed down the dirt road, straight toward us—my first moose. “Look at that tall, fat horse with spindly legs,” I murmured to Brendan, not wanting to scare it away. “It looks like Don Quixote’s spavined nag and Sancho Panza rolled into one.” “That’s not a horse,” he whispered back with a laugh. I had lived in California, Arizona, France, Upstate New York, Oregon, Iowa, and New York City, and I’d traveled all over the world, but moose were in some ways more foreign to me than polar bears, penguins, or sloths—I’d seen the first two in zoos and the third in the Costa Rican jungle, at least. Yes, I’d seen photographs of moose, but it took me a minute to recognize this as such.
