Joyce awoke in the night and looked out the window. She saw a full moon, shining on fresh snow.
I lay half-asleep. Then Joyce gasped. I bolted out of bed to see what alarmed her.
“Something’s out there,” she said.
I saw only snow. Then, behind the pond, I saw a shape, indistinct in the moon-cast shadows, but something huge.
Massive shoulders hunched, it glided across the snow.
I thought: werewolf.
“Coyote?” I said, clutching at an explanation I didn’t believe.
“Way too big,” Joyce said. “Too big even for a deer.”
We watched the huge shadow creature move across the snow.
Then it passed through a moonlit patch, and I got a glimpse.
Six-feet high. Half a ton.
Moose.
It had come out of the meadow, north of our house. Now its long legs moved it southward, toward the pinewoods behind the pond.
It strode purposively, as if it knew exactly where it meant to go in the night, and why, and understood it had a long trek ahead.
A shadow again, it melted into the dark pinewoods, and was gone. Just moonlight now, and snow.
Morning brought a gray sky, cold, impending flurries. My mind, though, still held onto what we’d seen last night, under the full moon.
A massive beast glides through the shadows. Where it’s going, who can know?
—Richard