The Chronicles of Stinky Cove · Book 3

Bog

The Moose Who Was Too Much

Every animal in this story is exactly the right shape. Nobody tells the moose.

He comes down out of the hills in mud season, a yearling all knees and elbows and apology, driven off by his mother in the way of moose and certain, now, that his legs are too long and his voice is too loud and his whole self is too much. The voice telling him so lives inside his own head and sounds, to him, exactly like the truth.

Tucker is seven, the smallest member of the Stinky Cove Wildlife Club, and he has just been handed the listening post: one porch, one dog, one notebook, every night at dusk. When he reports crying in the hills, the club laughs. Tucker keeps listening anyway.

This town has learned twice how to show up for a wild thing. Over eleven weeks of a Maine spring it learns a third way, harder and quieter, that nobody gets a photograph of.