Masked Prowler: The Story of a Raccoon

by Jean Craighead George

  Each night from that time on, however, the coon family left the den and moved off into the forest, going farther and farther as the strength of the cubs increased and their hunting skills became perfected.

  In August Lotor took them hunting up the hill, snail by snail, stick by stick, to the tumbled ruins of the deserted sugar house. There they caught field mice and toyed with rusty nails and old spiles. The little red coon came bouncing around the corner of the house dragging a rusted trap in her teeth. It clinked and rattled with a strange charm, its teeth long ago closed by a fallen branch. Suddenly to the west the bellow of a hound rang out. Lotor whistled to her clan and the males galloped silently to a small maple. At each cry from the roving hound, the youngsters climbed higher.

  On the ground the little red coon still stood over her iron toy. Lotor called her. The cub took the ring of the chain in her teeth and dragged it toward the nearest tree. Then she stopped. She had picked up a new scent.

  “Hoo-hoo,” she cried.

  “Hoo-hoo,” Lotor replied quickly. Lotor started back down toward her little red coon, then she, too, halted. She lifted her nose into the wind. On the wisp of a down current was the scent of Procyon, the father. Lotor stared long from the rococo foliage of the sugar maple. She could not see her mate, but his scent was unmistakable. Vaguely she remembered beyond the cloistered life of the basswood with her young, to the icy days of February when this great creature had been her interest. She snorted and came down the tree, absorbed once more in the needs of her family. She called them to follow her back toward the basswood.

  Procyon had been gleaning the buds of the maple. A musty draft had blown up to him from the ruins of the sugar house, bringing to his senses the presence of Lotor and her coons. Running his hands lightly along the small twigs, he had watched the five of them moving around the fallen beams and over the violet leaves. When the howl of the hound had sent them up into the trees, he had leaned forward to watch them climb. His hands kept working swiftly over the buds. He bit off a folded green leaf, never taking his eyes from the family.

  He saw the little red coon with her iron toy. He listened to it rattle, then turned casually back to his work.

  Lotor led her pups away, and reluctantly, the little red coon deserted the clanking object. Procyon came down the tree and stood on the brow of the hill, sniffing rhythmically toward the vanishing group. He followed them for several paces, then turned and grabbed the trunk of a maple. The violet leaves were bobbing vigorously before his eyes. He stared, abashed, as they parted and the little red coon came prancing into the opening. She scurried toward her iron toy and snapped the chain in her teeth. Stumbling and pulling against roots and leaves she hauled the old trap three or four yards. She stopped below the giant raccoon still staring at her from the side of his sapling.

  Procyon looked from her to her jangling toy, backed down the few paces he had climbed and swaggered toward her. The little red coon drew back at the approach of Procyon, leaving her rusty trap. The enormous raccoon moved closer, sniffed the youngster, and then his restless front paws shuffled out and picked up the iron toy. It rattled and clanged attractively. Now the little red coon swung her paw at the dragging chain, flipped clumsily from side to side and circled before her father excitedly. Far down the trail she heard her mother call and terror seized her. She was far from the little family. She gave the treasured chain a final tug and scooted off through the woods, crying for her mother.

  Procyon watched her disappear, then turned away from the ironware and lumbered to the thorn-apple hill.

  At the foot of a twisted hawthorn tree, he lifted a mouse from its burrow, before it could scamper away. He ate it hurriedly and went west through the prickly ash thicket where the cuckoo nested. He prowled into a tangle of Queen Anne’s lace and blue chicory, slapped down a grasshopper, ate it, and wedged his way through a barrier of raspberry bushes into a young stand of elm trees.

  In the elm grove he listened. The voice of the hound that had alarmed Lotor and her family earlier, sounded again. He paused a moment and shoved on. When he reached the swamp border, the hound bellowed again. This time he was close. The raccoon galloped high into the branches of an elm. He climbed swiftly. Near the stub top he paused to thrust his paw in a flicker hole. It was deep, and although he could feel the warm air heated by the bodies of the young, he could not reach them. As he flopped his paw around in the flicker hole, he peered off through the woods where the hound steps rustled the leaves. He climbed to the top of the stub.

  The hound did not follow Procyon. He picked the trail of the family. He headed for the abandoned sugar house, circled it and went banging toward the basswood grove, bellowing as the raccoon scent grew stronger.

  Lotor had her family well along toward the basswood. Two of them followed her up the tree. They heard the hound’s yelp far above them on the hill. The little red coon and a burly male climbed a young willow sapling until the voice of the dog diminished in the hills. The danger seemed past and they crawled back to the ground. There they sparred and fought for one another’s tails.

  Lotor whistled to them again, they stood at attention peering into the crooked limbs of the den tree. The male ran forward.

  A blinding light flashed in the thicket and the two small raccoons halted in shock and stared into a dazzling lamp. The trees and bushes vanished beyond the brilliant circle. They squatted with their ears pressed against their lowered heads. A crashing voice spoke:

  “Look, two young coons! Corner ’em!” There was a frenzied rustle in the basswood grove, as the thicket was shaken by the stomping of the men’s feet. The little red coon backed up against her brother and spat chuttering growls at the men. A man moved into the beam, slipping toward them with open hands.

  “Watch it, they’re big enough to give a mean bite!”

  “Give me that burlap bag,” the man in the light said.

  Heart thumping, sweat pouring from her tongue, the little red coon dashed in fear for the dark wall beyond the light and blindly crashed into a willow sapling. She clutched it and climbed swiftly as the hound came racing in. He gave voice at the tree where Lotor and the other two cubs were hiding.

  “Heah, Smoky, heah, heah,” called the man with the light. The dog threw himself against the basswood, voiced again, pushed away, twisted in the air, and leapt toward the voice. He saw the man with the burlap bag struggling with a small coon and plunged down upon it.

  The little male fought madly, biting soft hands and bony ankles and tearing red streaks in the man’s arms with his claws. He broke loose only to find the hound closing in on him. He stood high on his toes, his back arched, one forepaw was raised ready to slash the dog. Spitting, snarling and grunting, he lunged at the dog. He tore open the dog’s lip and then backed before the heavy hound’s teeth could catch him. He backed into the apparent security of the dark bag.

  Now the two men and the dog attacked the little red coon. She had climbed into the slender limbs above their heads. One man took the willow in both hands and shook it vigorously. The little red coon clung tenaciously to her limb but she could not maintain her grip on the vibrating tree, and finally let go. She hit the ground with a thud, quickly regained her wits and leaped into the darkness.

  The man with the light, however, tore off his coat and with a diving plunge, clapped it over her. She fought in vain. The men had learned how ferocious the young coons were. This time they took no chances and stuffed coat and coon into the sack.

  The party left the basswood grove, surlily complaining about their wounds. With the beam of the flash light they speared their way through the bushes and marsh grasses. In the burlap bag that the smaller man dragged behind him, struggled Lotor’s two cubs hopelessly tearing at their woven cage.

  As the men left, Lotor ran back and forth along the big bent limb below the den entrance.

  “Hoo-hoo,” she cried, “hoo-hoo.” Her plaintive whistle sounded like a bird call in the night. She ran back into the den, licked the two rem
aining cubs and dashed once more along the limbs of the old basswood. She could not count, but she was disturbed. The den was roomier. There were two who pawed her nervously but something was still wrong. She sensed that she had left some in the woods.

  All night she called and cried but her cries were in vain. The two missing cubs were penned in a cage in the Luke brothers’ yard.

  When the sky to the east lightened and the crows awoke and cawed, Lotor still was crying from the basswood. Then far down below her she heard a call. She swung toward the sound and whistled anxiously. Again she was answered. Now she could hear something along the edge of the swamp coming toward the basswood. A moment later the scratch of claws began at the base of the den tree. Tensely the mother moved toward the sound, slowly at first, then as a gust of wind brought a scent to her, she raced down to meet the little red coon and her brother. As she nudged them happily, she smelt the scents of the men and dog about them. These scents reawakened her maternal anxiety and she swung below them prodding the tired cubs to move more swiftly toward the den.

  The poachers had taken the two cubs to their farm at the other end of the swamp. Here by flashlight they had dumped raccoons, bag and coat into a crate covered with chicken wire. Over the door they placed a plank, and wired it securely to the cage. Sim looked at their work and said proudly:

  “No raccoon will ever get out of that.”

  And his brother answered. “We’ll keep them ’til the huntin’ season and sell them to some club.”

  They walked away from the cage, tied Smoky Woods to his kennel and disappeared into their dark house.

  After they had gone, the little red coon and her brother worked themselves out of the bag and found themselves penned in the cage. When all was quiet, they circled the enclosure several times thrusting their noses through the chicken wire and erraking madly at their prison. The brother chewed and tore at a corner of the cage, while the little red coon pried at the door. She pulled and scratched and bit until she could get her nose out. She strained until her paws bled, but could get no further. The brother hearing the wire give under his sister’s strength came over to the door. He slipped his fingers in the small opening she had made and pressed his head against the plank. He pulled viciously at the wire. Working in unison the two coons gradually pried the wire from the door until the brother could get his head out. Then he slowly squeezed the rest of his body through the opening.

  The little red coon heard him chutter outside of the cage. She deserted the exit and ran over to the corner nearest him. Seeing him free worried her, for she could not get to him. She ran back to the door where they had been fighting the cage and found she could get her head through the small opening. She, too, wedged herself free of the prison.

  The little red coon picked up her brother’s trail in the lane and raced swiftly toward the road. Smoky Woods scented the escaped raccoons and bellowed. But he was tied and the Luke brothers were sleeping.

  It was not until morning that the Luke brothers saw the empty cage. They stared in disbelief, for they were sure the raccoons could not have got out of the crate, and furthermore no opening seemed large enough for the raccoons’ escape. They looked at each other in fear. Their guilt made them believe that someone had seen them take the coons. Someone had come during the night to set them free.

  A thunder storm broke over the farm the next night. The rain slapped the fields in heavy pelts, and rattled the leaves of the ancient beech. Jagged bars of lightning tore across the heavens and thunder rolled and groaned in the clouds. Procyon was abroad, puttering toward his stream in the warm downpour. He did not fear the loud exclamations of the storm, for he had learned they were harmless. His guard hairs glistened with water, but he never really became wet. Up and down the stream bank he fished, swimming out into the pools from time to time to investigate the leaping white blobs of water that jumped from the stream’s surface in the rain. Shaking himself, he walked directly to the clump of jewel weed and picked up his shiny buckle. He carried it up into the branches of a leaning elm and played with it in the rain. Its metallic jangle reminded him of another experience with the same noisy material. With that dim memory pattern came sense of pleasure. It was the iron trap and the frisking haunches of the little red coon.

  Procyon ran down the leaning tree, buckle in his teeth fully intending to go to the abandoned sugar house. But at the base of the elm he was diverted by the underground activities of a short-tailed shrew. He dropped the buckle, and dug into the moist earth.

  Back at the sugar house, Lotor was crossing the hill with her four cubs. She had left the basswood and was moving her family toward a new den. She swung north and followed Rook’s Creek to a gnarled twisted willow at the edge of a pasture.

  CHAPTER TEN

  WHEN PROCYON climbed to his den in the red oak at the beginning of December, he weighed nearly thirty pounds. Many raccoons twice as old weighed half as much. He was so fat he wobbled when he walked and he no longer frisked on the thin limbs. Indeed, many times he did not even care to pull his pounds up the trees and he denned in culverts, fallen logs, beneath stumps and in ground burrows. When he stretched himself in the winter sun on the limb below the den, his body folded in a fat roll on either side. This was not the lean, agile acrobat of spring. This was a retired athlete who had not watched his weight.

  Unlike the previous winter, he was ready for the snows that would send him to his December-January fast. Bushels of acorns and beechnuts had been converted into his winter blanket of fat.

  For two months there were no tracks of Procyon, the raccoon on the sheet of snow that lay over the forest floor. Then one night in early February Vulpes, the red fox, stopped as he crossed the hill by the deserted sugar house. He smelt the bare ground on the south side of the shack and knew that Procyon had just passed.

  The raccoon, now weighing little more than twenty pounds, was loping gracefully past the elm stand to the marsh where the basswood stood. He rolled through a thicket of gooseberries, impervious to the thorns, and sprinted to the base of the familiar old tree. He looked up into the limbs, but did not ascend. He knew by the feeble odors of the grove that Lotor was not here. In the fork above the den a fox squirrel nested, mice stole along their small corridors in the broken grass, a towhee slept in the low limbs of a hawthorn.

  He fingered the basswood, running his paw into a mouse hole beneath their roots and looked around the glade.

  His back was arched generously permitting each lustrous hair to stand free, his mask was as black as the deepest pocket of the night. Only the ribbon of white above his eyes and the edging of his ears were at all visible. Even these blended into the patchwork shadows of the woodland night so that it was his scent that announced to the grove that he had returned.

  Still hopeful of finding Lotor, the big raccoon circled out from the land mark, probing pools of melting water, biting slivers of ice from their edges, tasting the air for scents of her. Then he crossed the arc of a fallen tree on the side of the hill, and turned fiercely into its rotten passage. He was tracing that scent for which he had left his den—the female raccoon. Growling and snarling in the dry hollow he met once more the old female of the barn. He knew her by the absence of one foot, and the gray almost nameless color of her fur.

  Only a week ago the old female had left her barn when the farmer had emptied the mow. She had come upon the basswood grove, found this dry den and remained.

  It was almost dawn when the raccoon retraced his steps to the basswood. A cottontail burst from the foot of a stump as he probed it, and ran frantically into the marsh. Procyon did not pursue the rabbit, he walked straight to the hollow basswood, leaped to the trunk and climbed to the den entrance. He felt the edge of the den that had been chewed smooth by Lotor and her cubs. There was no scent of raccoon. He slipped into the hollow and felt his way down the steep wall. At the bottom were a few dry leaves; they were still crisp and springy for they had not been slept upon all winter. The last visitor to the den had apparently bee
n a fox squirrel that had cut a few twigs with their leaves last autumn and carried them to the hollow.

  Before he had completed his shelter he, too, had disappeared.

  The next evening Procyon was off through the woods early. He frightened a cardinal from its roost in a grapevine thicket. He continued on south across Cherry Hill Road and sought the company of a young female who lived in the stump of a dead hickory. Before morning Procyon returned from his spring travels to his den in the red oak. Otus, the screech owl, greeted his arrival with several attacks, his bill snapping indignantly at the raccoon. Procyon stopped once or twice on his way up the tree to stare at the stooping owl, but he neither ducked nor flinched.

  His travels across the fields and woods, his meeting with females were important duties of his life. The reproduction of their kind was the only manner in which the animals of the wild could overcome the constant toll exacted upon them. The span of life they were granted in the wilderness was short. Most of them never lived long enough to become parents. Each animal tried to maintain or increase its numbers. The mice, constantly preyed upon by hawks, owls, foxes, mink and raccoons, gave birth to litter after litter. No sooner did one appear than another litter was on its way. The cottontails, also vulnerable, reproduced rapidly to keep apace of their deaths. The raccoons, mink and foxes needed only to produce one litter of five or six each year to hold their numbers. The deer need give birth to one fawn a year. Man, long-lived and most secure of all increased his numbers with only a few children in a life-time. During the course of life on earth animals have always been faced with the problem of maintaining their numbers or vanishing when no longer able to do so.

  Procyon remained at the red oak through the spring. One dark April night he left his den. The night was black as a cave for the moon was still down. He fingered the broad surface of a bracket fungus that spread like a shelf at the scar on the oak. He wove around it and climbed down to the foot of the tree. He moved quickly to the creek and with gliding hands searched the water for food. When Procyon dipped his hands into the waterways he saw a different world. Above the water was a world he tasted with his nose, heard with his ears, saw with his eyes, and felt with his feet. Below the water was a world known to him through his feet alone. His feet told him what the under side of a stone looked like, what the bottom of a current did, where the underwater eddies were hidden. He knew things by their texture, the fibers of the muck, the water-smoothed boulders, the softness of the silt. He knew where to find the caddice flies, the crayfish, the mussels, the minnows and tadpoles. Whatever moved, Procyon grasped. His sensitive palms slid over a leaf and under a stone. A swirl of water erupted against his paw. This was not the current of the stream. This flurry was created by a crayfish. Both hands moved down to pin the crustacean against the sand. The crayfish strained to free itself from what was not a grip of death but a light touch that was no more than a leaf washing over him. But each effort to dart away was checked and the paws coaxed him from under the stone, over the roots of an elm and from the water. In the air the crayfish struggled to get free, but the paws were always around its body, as all-encompassing as the stream.