Masked Prowler: The Story of a Raccoon

by Jean Craighead George

  That was late February, but already it was spring. Corvus the crow had come back to the forest and together with his band shouted across the treetops. The bluebirds had returned from their rest in the south, and the forest trees were speckled with a noisy fraternity of male red-wing blackbirds. All day they bubbled and creaked like old pumps while they bided their time until the arrival of their females. Bubo’s mate was incubating her two big eggs. High in her stick nest she sat unnoticed by the crows.

  The vivacious Lotor, whose quick, graceful movements, made the big Procyon appear lumbering and awkward turned against her mate and drove him from her territory. Nor would she permit any other male to trespass. She had chosen the gruff but handsome raccoon from the many that had passed through her basswood grove to be the father of her second litter. When he was no longer wanted she turned her quick movements into a weapon, and despite Procyon’s great size and strength, drove him off through the marsh.

  He galloped aimlessly toward the west. As he crossed the marsh, he sucked nervously at the rotten leaves of the marsh bottom and gnawed water-logged sticks and reed stems. Thin panes of ice still formed on the pools during the night. These he ate with loud crunching noises. He wandered several miles each night, circling the woods to the west, north and cast crossing roads and fields.

  In Walt’s woods, he met the old female raccoon of the elm stump. She had but three feet, one having been torn off in a trap, and her teeth were worn. She was much graver than either Procyon or Lotor, though this was not from age. She had always been light in color, her mask and rings being the only dark markings on her. She had come to Walt’s woods six years ago, and had sent the young pup, Mr. Black, back to his kennel one night with bleeding lips and torn chest. She feared neither dog nor man.

  Procyon entered her woods at dusk, hunted mice and acorns, swam in her woodland lake and probed in the leaf-clogged overflow. Before dawn the old female knew of his presence and followed him to Walt’s barn.

  She tracked him to the corn bin where he had feasted on corn, pulling the ears onto the ground through a break in the wide spaced slats. She followed him across the lane and into the hay barn which he had entered by one of her own trails. Under a rotting beam and up into the barn she went. She disappeared down one of her runways through the bales of hay. She found Procyon curled in a sheltered pocket beneath ten tons of alfalfa and clover. He awoke with a start and snarled at the old female who sidled toward him. She returned his growls maliciously, then purred and whistled. Cornered in one of her own dens in the hay barn she had found a mate.

  The next night Procyon moved on. He retramped Walt’s forest, moved west across unplowed fields and slipped under the fence of the Luke brother’s farm.

  Smoky Woods was tied to his kennel. Procyon walked past him ignoring his howling bellows and choking pulls on his chain. He investigated the barn, the house and the tool shed, caught several mice and trotted off toward Berry Road. At the edge of the road he poked around in the dried ragweed stems before climbing onto the gravelly surface of Berry Road.

  A brilliant light suddenly blinded him. Procyon drew back, pulling his head into his chest. He wanted to run, but he cringed motionless, staring into the light that sped closer and closer. Spurred by fear, he finally bounded across the road. A terrifying grinding came with the light. There was a sucking swish as an automobile slid past him with its brakes digging the tires into the gravel. Procyon was in the ditch when the red tail light streaked by and disappeared over the hill.

  The raccoon lay still an instant, gathered his wits, and then dashed into the cover of the young stand of timber. With the familiar dark trails of the woodland under his feet, he regained his composure and galloped lightly toward his home—Gib’s forest.

  In Gib’s forest, sugar mapling was well under way. Buckets clanged in the wind, and a light showed through the windows of the sugar house, where Gib was firing the big arch. The trees were gushing sap this year, and Gib had to boil all night long to keep ahead of the flow of sap.

  At eight o’clock the next morning, the neighbors who were helping in the syruping came down the lane. Joe joined them somewhat later with the team, for he had to milk alone. There were five men including Joe and Gib. The helpers this year were Earl, Russ and Ray. Russ helped Joe empty the buckets from the trees into the boat and from there into the storage vats in the house. Ray worked up the wood and helped Gib tap off the syrup, while Earl filled in where help was needed.

  Earl was anxiously awaiting lunch and time to chat. The noon following Procyon’s return to the great forest, the men were seated around the vats, dipping their sandwiches into cups of hot syrup. The conversation had dwindled down to a few comments between bites. Earl studied the other men a minute and then began to tell of Indian days.

  “I don’t remember those days myself,” he said, “but my great-grandfather, he had to deal with Indians every day. Why it was hardly safe to tap sugar around here in those days. There were Indians behind every tree, and it took a real man to handle them.

  “But my great-grandfather knew their ways. Back around 1812 he was a real Indian hunter. ‘Old Knaggs’ they called him. Why one day he was out in the forest chopping oak for firewood when five Indians sneaked up on him. He looked at their raised tomahawks and knew that he was in a bad way. He thought quick and said to them in Indian language ‘Ugh’, or something like that. I don’t speak the language. But what it meant was ‘before you kill me why don’t you come over here and help me split this log. Then you will not only have my scalp but you can go back to your chief and say that you helped Old Knaggs split wood with your fingers.’

  “They all agreed that would be quite a thing to tell the chief, and so they knelt down on either side of the oak log, stuck their fingers in the split and pulled. Then Old Knaggs knocked out the wedges and wham!—all five Indians were trapped as the log snapped shut.”

  Joe, sitting on the pile of cut wood in the corner, burst out with a roar of laughter, and Gib chuckled into his sandwich.

  “What happened to the Indians, Earl?” Joe asked in his laughter-muffled voice. Earl looked from the serious face of Russ to the crunched up red one of Joe and replied:

  “Well, great-grandfather said, ‘They just went to sleep!’ That’s all he would ever say.” Now all the men chuckled, but Earl had another story and he went on.

  “He was so good,” the teller continued, “that every Indian was scared of him. There was one in particular who never threw a tomahawk. His Indian friends asked why and he would say:

  “‘One day Black Feather and I saw Old Knaggs in the woods and I thought that we had been chosen by the Gods to bring back his scalp. I slipped quietly up on him. He didn’t see me because he was busy looking for Indians in front of him. Standing alongside a big maple I threw my tomahawk. As it came plunging down toward his head. Old Knaggs turned like a mink and grabbed it in the air. Don’t try to sneak up behind me. I’ve got eyes in the back of my head, he said. Before Black Feather could throw his tomahawk Old Knaggs had kilied him with mine. Since that day I have never thrown a tomahawk.’”

  “What happened to Old Knaggs?” asked Joe.

  “Why when they saw they couldn’t kill him the Chippewas made him an honorary Indian Chief,” Earl went on. “In fact, they got to like him and he lived with the tribe. When he would go out hunting for a couple of days for bear meat or deer he would shout to the tribe:

  ‘I’m leavin’; and I’m leavin’ my wife here alone. If so much as a hair of her head is harmed I’ll kill the whole tribe of you when I get back.’

  “Well, they were so scared—they knew he would do it—that all the while he was gone, the big Indian Chief kept a sentry at the door of his wigwam to guard Old Knaggs’ wife.”

  Earl was ready to tell another tale, but lunch was over and Gib and Joe were anxious to empty the rapidly filling buckets. They closed the door behind them and stepped out into the muddy woods. Joe was still chuckling, picturing the colorful life of Old Knaggs
as related by Earl. His stories would be repeated time and again by Gib who was really the greatest story teller of all. But Gib had a knack of making it seem that each story he told was really somebody else’s and many who had listened to Gib by the hour never realized how great was his gift as a teller of tales. In truth, Earl’s great-grandfather was a true pioneer and who knows better what his experiences were than Earl?

  CHAPTER NINE

  IN MID-APRIL came the pageant of spring wild flowers. Shoving and prying from the earth, the bulbs of the spring beauties burst and sent their white roots into the black loam. Urged on by the sun and long spring rains, they lifted their green leaves into the light. Some pierced the dry membranes of old fallen leaves, others twisted around black sticks and came up into the woodland with crooks in their delicate stems. A few days in the sunlight and they unwrapped the sepals from their turgid buds and flowered the forest.

  Beyond the woods the fields were cut open by the blade of the plow. Already the winter wheat, long checked by the frigid months, was growing upward in brilliant green slashes of color.

  The spring beauties passed and the yellow adder’s tongue came. In the woodland meadow, frogs sang amid the showy gold clumps of cowslips. They latched their misty clusters of eggs on the stems of these flowers, just below the heart-shaped leaves.

  Like violet smoke the fragile blossoms of the wild geraniums hung above the white trillium. They vanished as the strong blue of the wild phlox dominated the forest floor.

  When the trilliums were full-petaled, and the floor of the forest polka-dotted with their whiteness, Lotor gave birth to Procyon’s four cubs. They were born in the darkness of the basswood tree. It was midnight and the stars of spring were descending, giving way to late rising constellations of summer.

  Lotor purred to the little wet coons that she had given to the woodland. She licked them gently with her tongue, stirring the blood in their veins and stimulating the function of their lungs and hearts. Their awkward feebleness awoke an instinctive passion within her, and she caressed them to sleep. They were tired from the exertion of birth. As they rested, she licked the den until it was sweet and clean. When dawn came she, too, was asleep with her new family tucked under the warm fur of her body.

  At the hour when Lotor delivered her young, Procyon was down in the Rook’s Creek chasing young shiners into the shallows. He cornered one in the water-filled footstep of a cow. He scooped it up in his dexterous paws and chewed it. Over Procyon’s head in the high limbs of a beech tree Corvus’s mate shifted nervously on her four sleeping young. The fishing raccoon had awakened her, and now booming to the west was Bubo, the great horned owl.

  Bubo’s mate had nested beyond the great forest this year. She had laid her two eggs in last year’s red-tailed hawk nest at the edge of the swamp. Men seldom crossed through this land and she was able to incubate her eggs without disturbance, quietly sitting all day on her nest, hunting with her mate at night. Corvus and his friends in Gib’s woods were able to nest more successfully this year. With the owls far off at the swamp, these crows carried on a normal incubation. By the time the coons were born the crowds were brooding, blue-eyed nestlings.

  Procyon finished his fish dinner, and scouted the stream bed for pot luck. Caught behind a small stone he found a boot buckle lost from some hunter’s arctics. The water and sand had worn the paint from it, and it shone like silver in the night. For many minutes the big coon played with it, turning it over and over, running his fingers into the holes and dipping it in the stream. He carried it up the bank and dropped it in a young clump of jewelweed. Stretching out beside a log, he scooped it up again with one paw and bit it. From time to time he juggled it in his big grasping hind feet, then stowed it among the crushed leaves of the touch-me-nots. He lumbered off to the west. Galloping and trotting he moved as if with a goal in mind, diverted from his travels only occasionally by a buzzing moth or clicking beetle.

  Procyon came to the base of the old red oak where he was born. He looked up into the darkness. The young leaves, shaped like raccoon’s feet, were so small as to be invisible from the ground. The coon was not seeing with his eyes, however, he was seeing with his nose. The woody odor of the red oak brought back a feeling of familiar comfort. He jumped against the tree, looked around the forest and dug his claws deep into the fluted bark. He loped up the trunk. About twenty feet above the ground he tasted the air. Circling to the north side he came upon the trail of a yearling male. He followed it past the splintered scar on up to the entrance of the den. Balancing on the rim of the opening, he growled and whirred. The yearling awoke and lifted his pointed nose. He buckled up against the cavity as the scent of the mighty Procyon drifted down to him. However from his vantage point in the tree, he snapped a snarl.

  This gesture of warning was of no interest to Procyon. He filled his chest with rumbling growls and slowly descended into the deep cavity. The star glow blotted out as Procyon’s twenty pounds of might filled the hollow. The yearling could hear him moving down and down, past the ledge into the bigger opening of the den nest. Once he was in the roomy part of the den, the night light seeped in behind him. Procyon saw the clean unworn teeth of the yearling, crouched against the wall, his ears pressed against his head.

  Procyon’s chest still rumbled with threatening growls. He never bit or attacked the younger raccoon, simply moved in on him, and by his size and steady advance forced him up the inside of the hollow. Slowly the reluctant yearling retreated, Procyon paced after him, up the rough interior walls, up to the ledge, up, up to the entrance, snorting and snuffing.

  The yearling hurried out of the doorway, slipped and skidded as he hastily took a footing and turned head down to leave. When he reached the old scar Procyon crackled like ripping paper and the yearling sped faster toward the ground.

  The giant raccoon swung back into the den. He touched the familiar walls, smelt and scratched them as he let himself down in the snugness of the old cavity. The harlequin had returned to his birth place. Lying on his back in the red oak, he reached up now and then to knock at a small piece of wood that was twirling around on the end of a spider’s web.

  A bluebird flew to a fence post just beyond the grove of basswoods. His ruddy throat feathers rippled as he repeated his soft “churl, churl.” He stopped abruptly and focused one eye on the next fence post. Simultaneous with his movement a powdery blue mate slipped out of a knot hole in the post and flew into the basswood grove. She was carrying a small white fecal sac which she dropped in a patch of chickweed a safe distance from her home. The bright male, aroused by her housecleaning, dropped to the ground and picked up a soft measuring worm. He flew to the knot hole, thrust his head into the tidy hollow and fed the first gaping mouth.

  Not forty feet from the bluebird nest grew the wrinkled old basswood where Lotor played with her cubs. She had forgotten all her loves—the wet swamp with its singing redwing blackbirds and swift footed soral rails, the rocking tree-tops, the glittering stream bottoms, the burly Procyon. She knew only the possessive love she held for her cubs. When she ventured out into the grove it was only for food. As soon as she had fed she returned to the fat youngsters that whistled and purred in the den. There she would play with them rubbing and licking them while they nursed. Three of them were males; the fourth, a female, was redder and richer in color than the rest. The little red coon was quicker and more daring than her brothers, but she was not as strong. She was the first to lead them from chink to chink up toward the mouth of the den, but was also the first to skid back to the sawdust-covered floor to rest and sleep. Lotor loved each with impartial devotion.

  On the hillside beyond the grove, the fox pups appeared at the mouth of their earthen den. It was June and the young of the forest were venturing beyond the security of their dark homes. In Rook’s Creek, the young mink were spiraling down to the bottom of the pools and bringing up bright pebbles in their teeth. In single file along the edge of the swamp came Mephitis the skunk and her distinctly marked offsp
ring. They rooted the forest loam for insects and worms.

  During the day the young crows flew over the tree tops with their parents, cawing at Gib and Joe as they mowed the hay in the fields below. They came down into the washed gullies of the cornfield and gobbled the newly drilled kernels.

  About ten-thirty on the night of July fourteenth, the old basswood shell stirred with life. A few drifting fireflies lit up the scene from time to time, but it was largely the delicate light from the waning moon that made visible the secret of the tree. Otus, the screech owl, sitting in a hollow nearby with only his ears and eyes showing, watched the entire performance. His young were already fledged and he did not attack the four coon cubs moving feebly about the round branches of the tree. Sitting half asleep and full of mice he kept one eye on the soft round lumps.

  There were noises and whistles in the dark, for Lotor was coaxing her young onto the branches of the tree. Otus watched them for many hours, dozing now and then as the food he had eaten made him warm and sleepy. He opened his eyes again and bobbed his head at the slipping scratch of nails. Struggling against their weight and awkwardness, the little coons were fumbling down the big twisted bole of the tree. Lotor was urging them on, gently but insistently. Otus saw them reach the ground, and for several minutes watched the snakeroot dance and quiver where they walked. For a moment he forgot that the coons were in the plants and tensed himself for a dive at the quivering weeds. Then a snub-nosed, black-eyed coon thrust its head into view and he remembered Lotor and her cubs. He fluffed up his feathers and dozed back to sleep.

  The anxious Lotor did not let her babies play long in the forest litter. An airplane zoomed out of the night, coming low over the trees for a landing at the Willow Run airport. Quickly she picked up a cub and started it up the basswood. The others followed hastily, obedient to the decision of their mother. Often their lives depended on this instant obedience to their experienced mother.