Spruce Moose Quotes

I thought of my mother late that night, after leaving Dorothy, as I followed the moon's path back home across the Moose River. My mother, maybe she was in that moon's light. I didn't know any more, but when I was younger, Iuse to imagine that she was. I'd talk to the moon some nights, and I knew my mother listened. I haven't done that in a long time, me." -Through Black Spruce, Joseph Boyden, ch 13, pg 119

They both leaned in then, lips meeting in the middle. Their arms wrapped around each other’s bodies. But this time, the kiss was sweeter somehow. Less hungry. It was a kiss that felt like something shared between two people who had been together for years. Yet, those two people never tired of the feeling of a simple kiss.

The spruce is sculpted by the elements, bottlebrush scrawny, topiaryed by the weather. This boreal forest stretches over eight thousand miles in an unbroken line around the circumference of the globe: 30 percent of the world’s tree cover, four million square miles, the planet’s single largest biome. A broad, evergreen brushstroke that encircles the north, running through North America, Scandinavia, Siberia, marking the band of the subarctic. Forests of moose, of lynx, of bear. Forests of thimbleberry, strawberry, nagoonberry, lowbush cranberry, highbush cranberry, watermelon berry, bunchberry, crowberry, huckleberry, blueberry, cloudberry, bearberry, salmonberry. Forests home to many of the world’s remaining hunter-gatherer societies, summers of wildfires and perpetual light, and winters of fifty below.

Leaving the Connecticut River March 8, 1704 Temperature 40 degrees Eben realized that he need not worry about being burned or tortured. He was going to starve to death. Eben had thought that up here, where nobody lived or ever had, the deer would be standing in rows in the woods awaiting a bullet. He had expected rabbits and grouse, moose and beaver. But there was no game. They built shelters from woven branches, piling spruce and hemlock on top to keep out the snow. Each day some of the Indians left to hunt and each day they came back with nothing. It had never occurred to Eben that an Indian could go hunting and find nothing. He was not sure how far they still had to go to reach Canada. He had seen a map once that showed the Connecticut River, how it split the colony of Connecticut in half, then cut up through Massachusetts, headed north through unknown lands and bumped into Canada. The northern part of the map was guesswork. Eben needed a French map, which would show the city of Montreal, where the French kept their government, and the St. Lawrence River, down which fortunes in fur were shipped. He could not ask his master. An Indian kept his map in his head.

Time had slowed down to a dreamlike pace. “I can see ten miles below me, the lakes, the islands, the beaches, the rivers, the forests, the rocks, the town named Kisoos, the geese, the foxes, the wolves, the bears, the moose, the beaver, the mink, the trout, the town named Kitoon, the whitefish, the pike, the pickerel, the robins, the terns, the hawks, the owls, the spiders, the ants, the grass, the town named Poosees, the ferns, the spruce, the violets, the wild pink roses, the wild cranberries, the whole wide world in all its splendour. It’s amazing.” He started weeping and weeping and weeping, not with sadness but with a joy he had known only in dreams.

And she knew that there was no coming back from this. Now, she would forever be known to Jonah as the girl wrestling a pig in the porta-potty.

They kissed to the symphony of frogs making a jailbreak, and it was a thing of beauty.

Did you even check if it’s a load-bearing wall?” Clara asked, eyes wide, still in shock. “A what?” “You’re kidding. He’s kidding. You have got to be kidding!” Clara realized she might be losing it. Which was not the best thing to do when facing a man holding a sledgehammer, but come on.

Kent smiled, and then took a huge bite, causing graham cracker crumbs to sprinkle all over his bare chest and to the ground... Melted chocolate dripped down his wrist, and he ran his tongue over the trail it had left behind. Dana turned away quickly, finding the motion entirely too captivating and trying not to blush...