“Shit,” I mutter. Now we’re between a mother moose and her baby, and even I know that’s very, very bad.
“Do we stay still?” I ask, trying not to sound as scared shitless as I feel. “Or maybe we should make ourselves look bigger? Wave and yell?”
I start to raise my arms, but Sloane grabs my wrist and pushes it down.
“No, that’s bears.” Her voice is calm in a way that makes me feel like an idiot. “With moose, you don’t want to seem threatening. We need to give them space and look non-confrontational.”
“I want no conflict.” I incline my head toward mama moose, who is moving in our direction. “How do we convince her of that?”
“There’s a boulder cluster to our left.” Sloane’s three steps ahead while I’m standing here with my pulse hammering in my ears like a kick drum. “If we head toward it slowly—don’t run—we can put space between us and the calf. Let mama get to her baby without feeling cut off.”
“You sure?”
She nods. “We have moose in Colorado, and I read up on this before the trip.”
Of course she did. Sloane knowing what to do, while I’m as useful as the guy who plays cowbell in the band, has been the pattern of our entire journey. She had the tent, the first-aid kit, the moleskin and the antiseptic, not to mention the plan, while I showed up uninvited with brand new shoes and an inflated sense of my own competence.
She took care of me anyway, and now she’s saving my ass again.
“Follow me,” she says, and…duh.
I’d follow her off a cliff at this point, which is thekind of observation that confirms I’m so royally screwed, even without the moose.
As we inch toward the rocks, the mother tracks us with her ears pinned forward, but she doesn’t charge. The calf keeps wandering, oblivious to the tension crackling through the meadow.
“Don’t make eye contact.” Sloane squeezes my hand. “She could take that as a challenge.”
“I’m about to be trampled. There’s no challenge in that.”
“You’re not going to be trampled.” I’d enjoy the thread of amusement in her voice if my knees weren’t knocking. A real value-add in the moment. “Keep moving. You’re doing fine.”
We make it to the boulders and position ourselves so there’s solid rock between the moose and us. The mother snorts once, loud in the evening quiet, then ambles toward her calf. A few seconds later, they both disappear into the trees like they were never there at all.
As the adrenaline hits, my legs go rubbery, my hands shake, and there’s a buzzing in my ears like I just walked offstage after a three-hour set. Sloane leans against the boulder, the tension leaving her body in one long exhale.
“Well,” she says, nudging my arm, “that was exciting. We did good.”
I bark out a laugh that’s ninety-five percent relief. “I did nothing.”
“You stayed calm.”
“I stayed behind you.”
She flashes an ear-to-ear grin, then shrugs like it’s not a big deal. “We should get back before our next encounter is a grizzly.”
“Agreed.”
By the time we reach the cabin, dusk has settled into something closer to dark. I hold the door for her, then flip on the lantern and let the warm glow fill the small space.
She moves around the cabin like she belongshere, and the fact that this is temporary and in a few days—or maybe tomorrow—she’ll walk out of my life again causes the pressure that’s set up camp in my chest to expand until it’s hard to breathe around it.
Don’t do this right now.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She looks up from unlacing her boots. “For what?”
“For being useless back there, and honestly, for being dead weight this entire trip.” I run a hand through my hair, frustrated in ways I can’t fully articulate. “You’ve been handling all the important stuff while I’ve contributed nothing.”
