Masked Prowler: The Story of a Raccoon (American Woodland Tales)

by Jean Craighead George

  Masked Prowler

  The Story of a Raccoon

  Jean Craighead George and John George

  Illustrated by Jean Craighead George

  For their quieting calm which has lent serenity and balance to a big family and many friends we affectionately dedicate this work

  to

  MA and PA

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  A Biography of Jean Craighead George and John George

  CHAPTER ONE

  A BAND OF TITMICE flew from the dark heart of the forest to the giant beech that stood at the south border of the woods. The ice was melting in the wagon ruts beneath the tree uncovering broken grasses. The titmice dashed to these bare patches that had been buried from them by months of snow. With exuberant energy, they tossed sticks and leaves several feet into the air to find seeds, corn and beechnuts. They darted over and around a towhee sitting low on the prickly ash. His feathers were puffed to protect him from the cold wind blowing across the cornfield. In his golden umber and black plumage he looked like a folded oak leaf caught in the thorny limbs.

  By noon the titmice had scolded their way west along the woodland border. The towhee, alone and quiet, remained on his perch in the warm pocket. Beneath him the snow now was melting faster. The cold water slipped over the frozen ground to join a rivulet pouring from the fields. The rivulet tore its way into the forest, turning the snow mantle to gray mush. Deeper in the woods it sank beneath a roof of snow and ice. It reappeared in the flooded woodland bottoms where it ate through the fragile ice plates left by the freeze the night before.

  As the late February sun heated the earth, the towhee rustled his wings, dipped his bill into his breast and pulled loose a feather. He shook vigorously.

  Several chickadees and a downy woodpecker joined the band of titmice as the winter bird troop followed the sun up the fence line. Above them flapped Corvus, the crow. He came banging into the woods with his noisy crowd of followers.

  They screamed and cawed, and chased from one giant tree to the next. Earlier in the winter this crowd had been morning visitors to the great woods. By afternoon they had disappeared to the east. Now they lingered, and several males lined up on wing to pursue a female across the tops of the trees. She led them over the woodland meadow and beyond the grove of second growth to the marshes, dodging and sideslipping their attentions.

  Corvus was not hungry. He was comfortably full of corn kernels that he had picked up in a fence row where a squirrel had fed. Beating around the trees he selected the tallest red oak and perched heavily on a projecting limb. He was about to call together his crowd and be off for their roost to the east, when a movement on the limb below startled him. His grinding caw choked in his throat and he tilted his head to focus one eye on a big raccoon. Assured he was out of danger, Corvus opened his beak and emitted a series of rasping cries. Across the fields and down to the barn, his friends detected in the call of their comrade a note of harassing excitement. They rose from the fence lines, the wet hillsides and the fields and came flapping across the farm to the woods. One by one, as they hit the trees they cawed to Corvus and Corvus hearing them come closer, cawed louder. He grasped the limb of the red oak with his large feet, hunched down the better to see the raccoon, and hobbled toward her. Now all his friends had assembled around the awakening coon and they yakked and hawed like ill-bred gypsies. Their noise brought a band of crows from the next farm winging their way to the woods to join the chant. Some of them never saw the raccoon, but sat several trees away and screamed anyhow. The blue jays flew up from the lower limbs to investigate the cry.

  And now that the countryside was completely alerted to the coon on the red oak limb, Corvus was done with his performance. He pushed off from his perch, caught himself with deep flaps and flew off toward the east. By twos and threes his crowd followed, some were still veiling as they circled out over the tops of the trees and were whipped away by the steep currents of air. The crows from the next farm finally arose from their perches and quietly left the woods. As they crossed the open fields they called for their companions.

  The raccoon was lying motionless looking down to the forest floor. She was out for the first time since early January, when a severe snowstorm drove her to her den. During this winter sleep her food was the fat she had stored the previous autumn. Now she was thin and gaunt. Her big haunches hung loose beneath her dense fur. She had awakened deep in the heart of the red oak to hear the warm winds and the surging sounds of the thaw. Slowly she had lifted her nose from beneath her body and had looked at the dark walls of her den. It was afternoon before she was sufficiently interested to feel her way up the inside of the tree toward the light of the February woods. At the door of her den she had hung for a long time, blinking at the sun and yawning. Still sluggish with sleep, the raccoon pulled herself carefully out on the big limb near the hole. As she stretched into the sun, Corvus discovered her. With a long, bored glance she surveyed the crow, his flocking friends, and the red interiors of their opened beaks. Grasping the limb lightly, she looked down fifty feet to the ground. Snow still lay across the floor of the woods, but the scents of the thawing earth came to her. She watched the ground quietly until the crows flew off, and then started down the great tree.

  The clean bole of the giant red oak in which she denned, shot straight up into the sky for fifty feet. Here, in a hole left by a broken limb, was her den. Above this the tree branched out to become part of the forest crown. The ancient tree might not have been standing but for the grace of Olin Strang, son of the first pioneer who had opened this Michigan land. When Olin had sold the oaks and basswoods of the forest he had kept a few of the giants. The coon tree had been one of them. When Olin’s son, Gib was eleven a storm had torn through the forest and ripped off one of the big limbs. That had been over thirty years ago. The heart of the tree had decayed with time. As it became a cavity, raccoons and owls moved into it, and last fall this big female coon had selected it as her retreat from the ice and cold of winter. At that time her fat round body had fitted snuggly within the woody walls of the cavity. Now, however, her leanness gave her many inches to spare.

  The raccoon descended slowly, head toward the earth. Inquisitively she stopped at snags in the tree and probed the irregularities with her forepaws and nose. Through her sensitive paws she formed in her sleepy mind a memory of the old tree. The den entrance was shaggy and torn. Below it, another scar marked the tree where a second branch had ripped off a slice of the tough wood as it crashed to earth. A jagged break of shattered oak formed the bottom of the scar. The raccoon climbed down to this point and felt her way over the break. Now she was on the vertical avenue of the tree, headed straight to the forest floor. She descended deliberately.

  At the spreading base of the oak she stopped. With a touch as light and thorough as mist she felt the cold snow. Clutching a bit of it in her hand-like paws she brought it up to her mouth, nipped it several times and dropped it. Pivoting on her haunches, she turned away and galloped toward the sound of open water.

  It was darkening when the raccoon slipped silently along the water’s edge and touched the bare earth at the rim of the stream. Picking up a pebble, she turned it over and over in her hands and dropped it with a splat into the current. She shifted her weight to
her haunches and groped into the cold water. Out of the silt she drew a beechnut; this she ground with her powerful teeth and devoured. She moved quietly down the stream, finding grains of corn, beechnuts and seeds swept down by the melting snow.

  Where the stream of water dropped over the roots of a sugar maple and turned to join another rivulet there was a familiar scent. The raccoon sniffed this, touched the uncovered leaves where the odor hung and peered into the purple shadows. Here in this pocket between cakes of slushy snow was the reason for her awakening. The scent of her mate lay along this route. Changes within her body had called her from her sleep in the red oak. She had joined the activities of the woodland to satisfy her gnawing hunger and thirst if she could, but mainly because she was ready to find her mate and bear young.

  Several days earlier Gib and Joe, the hired hand, had pulled on their boots and walked down the lane toward the woods. They plowed through the rotting snow and ice to the sugar house that stood beneath the tall maples and beeches. Gib unlocked the sagging door and walked through stacks of buckets to the side of the yawning black evaporator. He picked up a wood drill and spile and came back to the door to join Joe.

  “Here, I’ll drill,” Joe said as he took the drill and picked up a hand axe. The two men walked over to the big maple that stood before the sugar house. With a quick slash Joe whacked off a thin layer of bark. He drilled into the life line of the tree. Gib pounded the spile into the hole, and the two men stood back a few minutes to watch. Presently they were rewarded. A thin stream of sap welled up from the tracheids of the tree and ran down the spout. A drop hung at the end for a moment and then dripped into the snow. It was truly spring, the maple sap was running.

  Joe replaced the tools and closed the sugar house. Tomorrow they would drill the trees and hang out the buckets. The run was on, and the woods would be a busy place for the next few weeks.

  As the two men plodded up the lane toward the barn, Gib looked more like a boy than a man. He was quick and agile as he hopped from one island of solid ground to the next. His neat, lean figure had the spring of a youth’s. Gib had a firm pointed face and the whimsical lines drawn around his eyes and cheeks curled upward from laughter and good nature. His gray eyes shone under his hat with a healthy clearness.

  Joe Armstrong was older than Gib. He had white hair and bright blue eyes. His life as a hired man working the farms from the thumb of Michigan south to Gib’s land, had kept him fit and sinewy. This constant life in the out-of-doors had weathered his face to a permanent wheat-gold with bright patches of red high on his cheek bones. His ever-present wad of chewing tobacco gave his face a lasting distortion that was pleasant and comical. The two men were dressed in heavy clothes and woolen caps for although it was the dawn of spring, it was still cold and raw.

  As Gib walked homeward, he looked across his opening fields. Gib was wedded to these one hundred and seventy-one acres of field and forest, for here he had been born and raised, the third generation of Strangs to plow the lands and reap the harvest. He liked to farm the familiar earth that had given to him its exciting secrets in his youth and a bountiful living in his manhood. He loved the land, and working it was his life.

  Since his father’s death, Gib, his mother and Joe lived and worked from the homey shelter of the big farmhouse to the most distant fence post of the woodland. They toiled, they rested, they chatted at night around the big kitchen table, and lived a rewarding and busy life on their farm.

  Now Gib would tell his mother that the maple season had begun and the activities of the house would center around the whims of the sugar trees.

  Plink, plunk, plank, plip; throughout the woodland the noise of the maple sap dropping into the hundreds of pails made the woods sound like a squatter’s hut with a leaky roof. Steam curled through the vents of the sugar house. Through the forest men were emptying the sap buckets into collecting pails. When these were full they were poured into the “boat,” a tank on a horse-drawn sled.

  Gib was tending the fire in the arch this spring, chopping and sawing wood to keep the sap in the broad pans rolling in a vigorous boil. He assigned Ray, a neighbor to the task of testing and tapping the finished syrup for Ray was not well this spring, and this chore was not as strenuous as hauling or chopping. Joe and another neighbor, Russ, worked with the team, collecting sap. Joe liked the brisk weather and the “whoas, giddaps, gees, and haws” that went with driving the horses. From valley to valley Joe’s voice sounded with the glad calls of syruping.

  The men went home about five-thirty this night. They had made twelve gallons of syrup and had put in a long day’s work and now must return to their barnyard chores. Gib was left alone to boil the sap through the night. He dropped down on the old cot and dozed off to sleep. About six o’clock when the skies were turning the deep blue-purple of a February night he was awakened by a snarling growl. It came from the front of the sugar house. For a moment Gib thought it might be Corky, his little terrier, but then again he knew this was not likely. Corky would not leave the warmth of the kitchen on a night like this. He stepped to the door and looked out. On the stump in front of the sugar house two raccoons were snarling over the sugar sand. They were fighting for the sweet food, snapping at each other as they shoved and pushed for the delicacy.

  Gib leaned against the door, grinning like a boy with his first mud turtle. He watched them for a long time. Both were clinging firmly to the stump, their claws digging into the rotted wood, their heads down as they lapped up the sticky sugar. One coon had been pawed by the other and his white cheek pouches were glued to his face.

  Suddenly he became interested in his rival’s patch of sugar sand. With a thrust of his shoulders he crowded into him, dislodging him from his hold on the stump. Like a bear, the coon rolled head over heels to the ground. Gib laughed aloud. The raccoons stopped eating and looked up. Their eyes glowed orange in the firelight. One turned swiftly and slipped behind the stump. The other followed. Gib could see him retreat hurriedly, then vanish into a shadow. The woods became still.

  The first raccoon who had run behind the stump had taken a shaded trail to the foot of a nearby maple. He climbed the tree in a quick gallop. In the cover of the branches he clung motionless until the door of the sugar house closed and Gib went back to the fires. Then, he proceeded to wash the sugar sand from his fur, running his dexterous paws over the guard hairs, licking and sucking. The raccoon scrubbed and worked at his appearance. When he was done, he walked back along the thin branch to the trunk. In a brief moment he was down, hurrying toward the cornfield.

  He never reached the field. As he crawled through the fence he picked up a scent—the scent of a female raccoon. The male turned and traced her through the snow to the open waters of the creek. He could not see her across the dark swirling rapids, for she had heard him approach and had stopped her movement.

  He crossed the stream on a log. On the other side he could see her by that vague light of night that is never completely dark. Her fur rose and fell gently as she breathed. She raised one wet glistening hand across her chest as she swung her head toward him and purred almost inaudibly. He answered her with a deep rumble. Then he called to her in a muted whistle that ended like a question. She answered.

  Her feet moved again, searching the creek for food but she watched the male as he approached. She moved slowly through the forest to her den in the old red oak. There she waited for him.

  Two months passed. The maple trees had leafed and the sap run was over. The spring beauties had flooded the floor of the woods with a wash of pink color. The yellow adders’ tongues had followed with a slash of yellow and faun-blotched green. The horned larks were feeding their fledglings in the fields and the crows their nestlings in the woods. Gib was sowing the oats—and the gentle mother gave birth to Procyon, the Raccoon.

  CHAPTER TWO

  PROCYON WAS one of a litter of four. Born high in the heart of the red oak he was a small limp creature with just a halo of fur. His head was large and too heavy t
o lift and his sealed eyes protruded from his face. His ears were closed to the sounds of the woods and the purring mother who licked and cleaned him. He had a blunt square nose and gray whiskers. Soft claws grew out from his toes for he was still wet with the water of the womb. The mother’s tongue wiped dry his nose and then pressed his ribs. She forced air into his lungs and he cried as he breathed. She licked him clean then pushed him into the warmth of her haunches with two sisters and a brother. They slept.

  Beyond the protection of the red oak it was raining. The late April storm soaked the earth and sent torrents of water into the woodland meadow. The gaudy trilliums that splotched the woodland floor with their white blossoms reached up into the rain. Their whorl of three leaves spilled the water down their stems to waiting roots. The phlox, just beginning to color the woodland hills with the sky blue of their squared-off petals, bent and bobbed under the weight of the storm. A female song sparrow sat tight upon her clutch of eggs in the opening by the sugar house. She watched the water rise up the hillock to her ground nest near the raspberry patch. There was nothing she could do, and when the water at last seeped into the dry grass lining, she deserted her nest and flew to the raspberry thicket. Tomorrow she would start a new one. One fox squirrel chased another across the shaky bridge of a maple limb to a beech tree. But the chase ended and they rushed to their leafy nests when the rain was joined by hail that murderously pelted the earth. It was well for Procyon on this cold, wet day of his birth that he was snugly housed in the old tree.

  Until the third week of May, Procyon took little interest in anything other than his mother. When he was not nursing he would hug the other cubs in the bottom of the cavity, sleeping until he was ready to feed again.

  One night he awoke to hear the scratch of claws moving up the inside walls of the home. He worked his head out from under the paw of his brother, and his misty black eyes followed the sound. Two days ago his eyes and ears had opened but his vision was still blurred. He watched the murky den entrance, his head wobbling as he tried to discover the cause of the noise. Something dark was moving toward the spot of light that hung high above him.