I am pressed against the rough skin of a white pine, watching a moose wander through the long grass of this island. I am quieting my breath in case she doesn’t like the sound of me, or the smell.

          Her coat is more grey than brown. It’s shorter in parts, like worn tracks across old carpeting. I know that moose have the same gestation as humans, but that she gives birth every year. And that before she does, she scares off her yearling, barely twelve months old, abandoning it to be on her own.

          Before I left my children, I taped a map to the refrigerator. I glued a length of red yarn across it so they could trace the path I would take to get here. Still, they cried when I left. They cried as if I would never return.

          She stops and dips her nose towards a frond of balsam. Pulls, then lets go. I shift from one boot to the other and think of my children, curled in sleep. I think of half-eaten bowls of cereal. Of why-nots and how-comes and one-more-story-pleases. Of the tiny crumbs they trail behind them, as if they’d ever forget how to find me.

          She abandons her yearling because she must be the only large moving object when her new calf is born. Her body must become a moving imprint, a single life to follow. I lean my pack against the tree, and she twists her ears to the sound of me.

          I told my husband that three days was all that I would need, but now that I’m here, I imagine crisscrossing this island for weeks, months. A year, maybe more. I imagine snow gathering, melting, then gathering again beneath the car I left at the landing. My hair growing into a long plait I’d untie at night just to work my fingers through. I imagine caring for no one but me.

          A stick snaps. Her body, then mine, tenses. I watch as she leaps to the right, runs a few strides, stops and turns. Then, like a racehorse pedaling the air, she charges straight for me.

          I don’t blame her; I know her animal instinct. The time I placed both palms on the wall, light flickering in and out of my closed eyelids, and forced my children, one after the other, into this world. The time I nursed them until I cracked and bled, until their cries were all that I heard, the landscape of their bodies all that I knew. Until I left them — I left them — red yarn trailing long behind me.

          I tuck myself behind the pine, turning my body to mirror its shape. It’s a silly attempt; we both know I don’t belong here. But by the time I peek out again, she’s gone, leaving nothing but the long grass and my beating heart waving in her wake.