The GPS—which has been growing increasingly uncertain for the last forty-five minutes, recalculating like it’s having a personal crisis—announces that I’ve arrived at my destination.
I stop the car.
There’s a cabin. It’s dark. It’s small. It sits at the end of a dirt road surrounded by trees that look like they’ve been here since before Alaska was a state.
And there’s something on the porch.
Something large.
I squint through the windshield, and the something shifts, and clarity hits me—the kind that only comes in the middle of the night in the Alaskan wilderness. A moose stands on my porch chewing the railing.
Not near the porch. Not beside the porch. On the porch, like he owns real estate there and is making home improvements with his teeth.
He’s enormous. Every nature documentary I’ve ever watched did not adequately prepare me for this. His antlers—do moose have antlers in the summer? I don’t know. I don’t know anything about moose, or is it meese. I don’t know anythingabout anything right now—are wider than the porch railing he’s systematically destroying.
I grip the rolling pin in my lap because it is the only weapon I have, and I am a five-foot-four pastry chef from Austin, Texas, in a sundress and heels, and I’m going to die on my first night in Alaska, killed by a porch moose while holding French bakeware.
“Okay,” I say to the empty car. “Okay. This is—this is happening. This is a moose. On my porch. At one in the morning. And I’m talking to myself because there is literally no one else to talk to.”
I’m going to have to get out of the car.
I’m going to have to walk past the moose.
I’m going to have to go inside the dark cabin that belongs to a dead woman I never met and sleep there alone in the wilderness with a moose outside my door and no luggage and no working phone and absolutely no idea what I’m doing with my life.
I open the car door, then stop. Gerald said to lay on the horn.
I close the car door and hit the horn.
The moose pauses, jaw mid-chew. He turns his massive head and looks at the car with the profound indifference of an animal that has never once been inconvenienced by anything.
He resumes chewing.
“Great,” I say. “Very helpful, Gerald.”
I open the car door again. The gravel crunches under my heels like it’s announcing me to every predator in a three-mile radius. The moose and I make eye contact.
“Hi,” I say, because what else do you say to a moose? “I’m Gabby. I’m going to live here for sixty days, apparently. Please don’t kill me.”
The moose chews the railing and does not respond, which is the most productive conversation I’ve had with a male in about six months.
“I have a rolling pin,” I tell him, and my voice comes out thin and high and absolutely not threatening. “It’s French. It’s very expensive. I will use it.”
The moose blinks and resumes chewing totally unimpressed with me.
And that’s when a voice comes from the tree line—low, quiet, and completely unbothered.
“That’s Morris.”
I spin so fast I nearly twist my ankle in the heels—the heels, God, why am I wearing heels in Alaska—and a man is standing at the edge of the clearing. He’s tall. Very tall. Broad like someone who carries heavy things for fun. Flannel shirt. Work boots. Dark hair under the shadow of the trees. He looks like the forest made him.
“Morris,” I repeat, because my brain has apparently decided to work exclusively in echoes tonight.
“The moose.” He takes a step closer, and into the porch light, catching the angles of his face. Strong jaw. Dark eyes. An expression that lands somewhere between mildly inconvenienced and exists in permanent stoicism.
He looks at Morris. Morris looks at him.
Some kind of negotiation happens between them that I’m not a party to—a long beat of silent eye contact, one man to one moose—and then the man makes a low sound. Not a whistle, exactly. Not a word. Just a sound, deep in his chest, like a rumble of disapproval from the earth itself.