How to Cook a Moose Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    â€œLook 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.”
    â€œThat’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 theCosta Rican jungle, at least. Yes, I’d seen photographs of moose, but it took me a minute to recognize this as such. First of all, I was startled by its size. I hadn’t realized they were so tall, so enormous, but in fact, they’re the tallest mammals in North America. Males can weigh as much as 1,800 pounds, and their antlers can span as much as six feet.
    This one was female, but she was still huge. Fortunately, I didn’t know yet that moose, when startled or threatened, can be aggressive; she seemed peaceable enough. Also luckily, Dingo hadn’t noticed her yet. He was behind us on the road, sniffing at a clump of weeds, as usual, oblivious to everything but the thousand and one smells his quivering black wet nostrils were inhaling and parsing out.
    The moose looked back at us. We’d evidently interrupted her meditative constitutional. We stood quietly, very still, to show her that we weren’t going to bother her any further.
    She had a long, narrow face with a big upper lip like a camel’s and a big dewlap under her chin, ears like a jackalope’s, and a big, slightly bulbous nose. Her eyes were far apart, a liquid, reflective brown. There was a hump high up on her shoulder blades. Her fur was dark brown and looked almost fluffy. Her gentle, intelligent expression, rather than being supercilious like a camel’s or adorable like a deer’s, was mournful and introspective.
    After a moment, this tragicomic, lovely, improbable creature lumbered off on her spindly legs down toward the lake and disappeared into the woods. I watched her go, feeling as if we’d been visited by an otherworldly being.

    As much as we loved our idyllic life in the White Mountains, we had to find a permanent place to live. The farmhouse wasn’t ours. Itbelonged to Brendan’s family, and on the occasions when they were living there, we felt acutely that we needed a place of our own.
    In the spring of 2011, we began house-hunting in earnest. I’d moved out of the very cheap shared apartment in New York I’d been using for occasional brief visits back. At first, we thought of buying a tiny pied-à-terre in Brooklyn. Then, when I decided that I no longer wanted to live in the city and couldn’t afford a decent apartment there anyway, we looked at a few houses an hour’s drive up the Hudson River from the City. But the Hudson Valley is a dark place, even on the brightest days, and that close to the City, it’s basically an extended suburb.
    Finally, we realized we didn’t want to leave New England. At first we fantasized about renovating the old barn by the farmhouse, but that proved to be too complicated in terms of Brendan’s family. Then we looked at a few houses in small towns nearby, Sandwich and Tamworth, New Hampshire. But it seemed crazy to buy another house in the rural White Mountains when we already had one standing empty most of the year, and we didn’t necessarily want to be buried in the deep countryside for the rest of our lives. We wanted to live in a town.
    In retrospect, the perfect solution was there all along; we just had to tumble to it in our own slow way. But as time went by, as we traveled in and out of its easygoing