Moose, Bear and the Roadside — a stop on Vermont Route 100.
Let me introduce the neighbours, because two of them are genuine hazards on this road at dawn and dusk.
Moose first. Vermont has them, they are concentrated in exactly this kind of high wet forest, and a bull can stand well over six feet at the shoulder and weigh a thousand pounds. The danger is specific and worth understanding: a moose is very dark, its eyes sit ABOVE your headlight beam so they do not reflect back at you, and its legs are so long that in a collision the body comes through the windscreen rather than over the bonnet. That is why moose crashes are so much worse than deer crashes. Slow down through the marshy stretches after dark, and if you see one, stop and let it decide.
Black bears are here in good numbers — several thousand statewide — and they are shy, and they are also extremely interested in birdseed, rubbish and anything left in a cooler. If you camp, hang your food.
White-tailed deer are everywhere and will cross without looking. Wild turkeys travel in flocks and are much larger and more dinosaur-like than people expect.
And in the beaver ponds — those flooded patches of dead standing trees you will pass — look for the lodge, a dome of sticks in the water, and at dusk for the V of a swimming beaver. They were trapped out of Vermont entirely by the eighteen hundreds and are now back in such numbers that they routinely flood people's driveways, which is a nice problem for a state to have.