Rascal Read online

  For all his intelligent adaptability, my small friend was aided in every act by intricate and inborn patterns of raccoon behavior.

  On this curve of the shore a very cold, spring-fed rivulet rushed down from the hills, twisting among glacial boulders and the roots of oak trees to fan across the white sand to the lake. In a pool of this stream I placed the bottles of root beer and pop, awaiting our picnic.

  My father and I donned swimming trunks, and soon all three of us were in the lake. Sandpipers tipped and scurried along the beach, darting in and out as the waves advanced or retreated. Rails slithered through the reeds, and somewhere, safely hidden, an American bittern began to “pump” his odd, deep note, like the sound of a sledge hammer driving a fencepost into marshy soil.

  My father was a strong swimmer, using the old-fashioned breast stroke. I was very proud of the fact that I had learned the fast, effective Australian crawl. But Rascal could only dog-paddle.

  He came along bravely, however, keeping his nose out of water, indicating again that raccoons probably can’t dive. For a three-month-old he was doing excellently. But soon he was panting from the exertion and looking to me as his natural protector. We were in deep water now, and the best I could do for him was to roll over on my back in a floating position, arch my chest, and offer him a good platform. He scrambled gratefully aboard, whimpering slightly in self-pity. But soon he had regained his courage and his breath, and in he plunged again.

  I had thought that Rascal had demonstrated his top speed, but as we came around a grassy point I learned my error. There, to her surprise and ours, was the modest mate of the glamorous mallard drake—garbed in becoming brown, and leading a late nesting of downy ducklings. This mallard mother had eleven beautiful babies, light as thistledown, following her for dear life in a straight-line flotilla.

  Rascal accelerated by at least ten percent upon seeing the tempting sight ahead. He obviously had visions of a juicy duckling dinner. I wanted to forestall this slaughter, but my father said quietly, “Wait a minute, son, and watch what happens.”

  The ducklings performed a marvelous maneuver around the mother duck while she turned back to face the intruder. Putting herself between her endangered brood and Rascal, she swam directly toward the raccoon with no more fear than as though he had been a muskrat. On came my crazy pet. On came the determined mother duck. It seemed a duel to the death, or at least a head-on collision.

  At the last possible moment the mallard used her wings and was partially airborne. She aimed one strong and accurate blow of her bill between Rascal’s avid eyes, flew over his head, and wheeled to join her ducklings.

  Rascal wasn’t actually hurt, but his pride was wounded. He swam back to me talking about it sorrowfully, and I gave him another rest after his shattering experience. In a few minutes he began to pretend he had forgotten all about that duckling dinner; and soon we went ashore for other food.

  Raccoons have a passion for turtle eggs, and search for them on every beach. The turtles bury their eggs in the sand to let them be hatched by the warmth of the sun. But many a nest of eggs becomes a banquet for a raccoon.

  Rascal had never been told about turtle eggs. But his keen nostrils informed him that somewhere in this sand was a gastronomic delight he had never sampled.

  For at least three seconds he froze in the manner of a bird dog coming to a point. Then he began digging more furiously than he had ever dug before. Success! Up they came, all thirty-four of them, almost as big as golf balls, meaning that they were the eggs of a big snapping turtle. For the next half hour Rascal was with us physically, but elsewhere in spirit, obviously in some realm where gourmet raccoons feast for eternity, their eyes on the stars while their swift hands and sharp little teeth tear open turtle eggs to gorge upon them.

  While we ate our picnic lunch, Rascal was busy slightly depleting the next generation of snapping turtles. He was so completely satiated that he even refused the last few sips of my strawberry pop.

  The sun was past the meridian, but there were many summer hours to squander before we might hear the first evening whippoorwill.

  My father, who owned farms in this region, decided we might as well visit them to see how the tobacco was leafing out, and how the wheat harvest was progressing.

  It should be said in passing that “ownership” of a piece of property was never that simple with my father. Although he never touched a card, he was a born gambler particularly in real estate. When he took title to a farm he immediately loaded it with a first mortgage and usually a second mortgage. With the money thus liberated he would buy another farm and repeat the process. It was very much like buying securities on a margin. When the market was rising, he pyramided his paper profits. But in every farm recession he came close to disaster.

  I didn’t understand his complex bookkeeping, and perhaps he didn’t either. But at this moment he felt he was fairly wealthy, with a wheat ranch in Montana, and some eight or ten other pieces of endangered property.

  My mother hadn’t lived to see much of this new prosperity. A delicate, highly intelligent woman, she had entered college at the age of fourteen and graduated at the head of her class. She had accepted and married my father, for better or for worse, sharing more years of poverty than of comfort. She did the worrying for the family; and it was largely worry that killed her at forty-seven. My father, who lived in an insulated dream world, took all of his losses philosophically, even the loss of my mother.

  On this summer day in 1918 he had no worries whatsoever, unless he briefly remembered that Herschel was fighting in the front lines in France. The price of leaf tobacco was soaring as were the prices of other farm products, and land was selling at an all-time high. His corn fields were green and thriving and his wheat and oats were promising a record yield to the acre. In lush pastures through which small brooks wandered, his herds of Holstein and Guernsey cattle grazed contentedly in knee-deep grass and clover.

  I always enjoyed these farm excursions, particularly the opportunity to watch colts and calves high-tailing through the pastures. The young of almost every species, it seemed, were glad to be alive, Rascal included.

  Just now, however, my little raccoon was happily exhausted, sleeping off his overindulgence in turtle eggs. He lay on the back seat, his ringed tail coiled neatly over his face. He continued to sleep until “first lamp light” when we were nearing our destination in search of whippoorwills.

  We had no time to visit the site of the cabin where my father had been born or the big brick house on the same homestead where he had spent his boyhood. If we were to reach the Kumlien property, we must leave the car at this point and walk through meadowland along the old Milwaukee trail, long since abandoned. Up this trail from Galena, Illinois had once moved heavy oxcarts pulled by six or eight yoke of oxen. These “toad-crushers,” bringing pigs of lead from the mines to the lake port, had wheels made of the cross sections of giant white oak trees. The screaming of these wheels on their wooden axles could be heard for miles.

  Down this same trail from Milwaukee had come such early settlers as Thure Kumlien from Sweden and my ancestors from England.

  The ruts were now overgrown with grass, and healed by the passage of time, but we could see them clearly as my father, Rascal, and I walked through the gathering dusk accompanied only by the shadows of pioneers long dead, moving through fields and forests of memory.

  Above us circled the nighthawks searching insects, their aerial acrobatics graceful and erratic.

  “Notice the ovals of white under each wing,” my father said. “That is one of the few ways you can tell nighthawks from whippoorwills.”

  “What other ways?”

  “The whippoorwill’s call, of course, and his whiskers.”

  “How can you get near enough to see a whippoorwill’s whiskers?”

  “You seldom can,” my father admitted, “but on those which Kumlien mounted, they were obvious enough: stiff bristles on either side of the wide mouth, probably for sensing the f
lying insects he scoops up for food.”

  We walked on in silence approaching the forty acres of virgin forest which Kumlien had protected from the ax. It is gone now, but it was there when I was a boy, a sanctuary and a memorial, haunted by the spirit of the gentle Swede who played his flute for the whippoorwills.

  We came at last to the flowing well which the old naturalist had dug, ringed with heavy limestone slabs, its cold water gushing up from below and winding off in a little stream through marshy pastures to the lake.

  I was thirsty and went down on my knees to drink from the clear deep pool. But my father said, “Wait a minute, Sterling. Try this.”

  From mint that Kumlien had once planted my father plucked a few leaves, asked me to rub them between my fingers and then taste them thoroughly. They were delightful and tangy. And when I drank from the well, I tasted water more cool and refreshing than any I had ever known. In the amber afterlight around that woodland spring we all three drank; then amid the ferns we waited for my first whippoorwill.

  Very slowly the full moon edged above the horizon until we could see its entire circumference. Rascal roamed a bit, and caught and ate a cricket. But he was still too well fed to be restless. He came back to me, chirring comfortably, and to his chirr were added other night sounds, the wings of big moths soft upon the air, the rustling of small creatures in the grass, meadow mice perhaps, and the chorus of the frogs in the marsh.

  Then, then it came! Three pure syllables, three times repeated:

  Whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will.

  A soloist against the symphony of the night making me feel weightless, airborne, and eerie—happy, but also immeasurably sad.

  Again the whippoorwill called. And on this second invitation another whippoorwill answered courteously. For nearly half an hour they carried on their spirited duet.

  My small raccoon sat listening intently, well aware of the exact direction from which each call was coming. Having had his afternoon nap, he was now ready to make a night of it.

  The concert ended as abruptly as it had begun, and we awoke as from a dream. We scrambled up from the ferns, and by the light of the rising moon, turned westward down the old trail which had brought my people to this land of lakes and rivers.

  IV: August

  THE heavy fighting around Soissons in July 1918 shocked Brailsford Junction out of its complacency. As the casualty lists grew, and personal tragedy came to one home after another, we seemed much nearer to the trenches and the shell-shattered wheat fields of France, red with poppies and with blood.

  One of the first reactions of the saddened town was to forbid the war games we had been playing each Saturday on Earl’s Hill. It seemed a shame, after all our work constructing dugouts and opposing trench systems; for we had thoroughly enjoyed our desperate battles. The only participant to protest loudly was Slammy Stillman, the overgrown town bully, who never had played fair. He was the only boy who threw stones instead of the regulation clods of earth, and the only one who sometimes aimed at our Red Cross nurses who were identified by the dish towel each girl draped over her head.

  The ceremony that really drove home the grim fact that war is not a game was the service held in memory of Rollie Adams, one of the most-admired boys in town. Neighbors of all faiths came to the Methodist Church to hear Reverend Hooton remind us that Rollie had never hurt or hated anyone. The big service flag had been taken down and placed across the lap of Rollie’s mother. Her part of the ceremony was to remove a service star and to sew on the gold one. Everyone wept, and the war seemed terribly near. I found myself praying silently that Herschel’s star would not be changed to gold. We wouldn’t even have had Mother there to sew it on.

  There was a flurry of patriotism among the children of the town, the girls knitting khaki wristlets by the score, and the boys competing to see who could collect the most peach pits, used in making charcoal for gas masks.

  Another lively contest was the scramble for tin foil. Up and down the streets and alleys went the tin-foil hunters, each child for himself. But I had a helper. As soon as Rascal dimly perceived the general idea, he ranged ahead of me searching the gutters for the shining foil. My ball of foil was one of the largest, thanks to an occasional contribution made by my raccoon.

  Rascal’s only other assistance in the war effort was the help he gave me in my garden. While I hoed, he trundled along behind me like a little dog. He also helped me pick peas from a late planting. All the peas he picked, however, he kept for himself, opening each pod as though it were a small clam, and avidly shelling the green pearls into his mouth. He had little relish for the wax beans which were coming on by the bushel; so, while I picked beans, he often took a comfortable siesta in the shade of the rhubarb leaves.

  It was pleasant out there in my garden, warmed by the sun, cooled by an occasional breeze. The wax beans were golden and smooth, with the texture of satin, and they hung in such thick clusters beneath their leaves that it did not take long to fill a basket. Although the grocery stores paid me well for my vegetables, it was reward enough just to plant and harvest such a garden. My mother had told me that seeds carry in their “memory” the whole complex pattern of stem and leaf and flower and fruit, and she had shown me how the stamens and pistils begin the seed-making process all over again. It seemed miraculous then, and no less miraculous now.

  I had been noticing that my little raccoon also carried patterns in his brain, as do the migrating birds and the honey-storing bees. I think I learned more about the orderly universe sitting in my garden picking beans than I ever did on a hard church pew listening to Reverend Hooton’s sermons.

  One serious mistake I made, however, was to give Rascal his first taste of sweet corn. I twisted a plump ear from a stalk in one of my rows, stripped back the husk, and handed the corn to my pet, who had carefully watched the whole performance. Rascal went slightly berserk. No other food he had ever tasted compared to this juicy new delicacy which he was sampling for the first time. He ate most of the first ear, then in a frenzy scrambled up another corn stalk, pulling it slowly to the ground. He wrestled and struggled with a fresh ear, tearing away part of the husk and guzzling greedily as before. Still unsatisfied, he left the second ear half eaten to climb a third corn stalk. He was drunk and disorderly on the nectar and ambrosia called sweet corn.

  I thought Rascal’s binge was amusing. But when I told the story to my father, he looked at us both quite seriously and said, “I’m afraid you’re in for trouble, Sterling.”

  I certainly was in for trouble. Rascal spent less than half the ensuing night in our bed—which didn’t disturb me too greatly, since sleeping with a raccoon in August is a little too warm for comfort. I was aware that he must have let himself out, and gone on a neighborhood prowl. But this was not unusual.

  On subsequent nights he took similar French leave. And he began sleeping soundly through most of the daylight hours.

  I didn’t connect his nocturnal ramblings with his love for sweet corn, principally because he avoided our corn patch. The explanation was simple. To keep my woodchucks out of our garden we had surrounded it with a woven-wire fence and installed a gate with a strong latch. Rascal could have climbed that fence, but found it more convenient to raid the gardens of our neighbors.

  August is an intemperate month in any case when emotions go up with the thermometer. But the angry voices to be heard on our street each morning were sizzling even for August. One neighbor after another—easygoing, salty Mike Conway, handsome, slightly vain Walter Dabbett, the skinflint lumber dealer Cy Jenkins, and the terrible-tempered Reverend Thurman—found their respective sweet-corn patches mauled by some fiendish night raider. Plans for detection and revenge were under way.

  It was Cy Jenkins who found raccoon tracks in the dust between his corn rows and spread the news.

  My father was right. I was facing real trouble. A delegation arrived one evening to sit in a circle around my unfinished canoe, voicing their complaints while Rascal huddled
in my lap for protection.

  “I seen that varmint’s tracks right in my garden,” Jenkins said triumphantly.

  “Like the seven plagues of Egypt,” Thurman sermonized.

  “Now, Sterling, we like your little raccoon,” Mrs. Dabbett began.

  “But the next time he gets in my sweet corn. . . ,” her husband warned.

  The threats came whizzing around us like the buzz of angry hornets.

  “Next moonlight night I’ll shoot him.”

  “I’ll set a trap, so help me.”

  “Skunks, woodchucks, ’coons! What next?”

  “Now, just a moment,” my father said quietly. (Among other civic responsibilities, he served as justice of the peace, and knew from long experience how to handle a group of angry people.)

  Mike Conway was willing to listen. “What do you suggest?”

  “If Sterling buys a collar and leash for his raccoon . . .”

  “Not enough,” Cy Jenkins growled.

  “And builds him a cage. . . ,” my father added.

  Rascal began to whimper, and I looked anxiously from face to face. Most were grim, but Mrs. Dabbett gave me a sympathetic glance, before turning to glare at her husband.

  Reverend Thurman, belonging to a sect which will here remain nameless, glowered at my father and thundered. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” Thurman had been under his Model T all day using pulpit words but not in the Sunday manner. Something about his inappropriate quotation from Holy Writ struck Mike Conway as funny. Mike had a lusty and infectious laugh. And when he threw back his head and roared, everyone except Thurman joined in the chorus.

  “Well, it’s settled then,” my father said. “Sterling, why don’t you bring some glasses and a pitcher of cold grape juice?”