There was little activity behind my wall for the longest time. Occasionally, someone shifted position and disturbed the others, and once Touchwit sang in her sleep. The rainy season would have to pass before the next event in the family saga.
Instead, I amused myself by feeding seeds to the alpha male chickadee with two wives. One morning, feeling full of himself, he broke into the chickadee mating call which sounds like Hi sweetie and shooed his wives away from my outstretched hand.
He saw my partner’s red hair through the bedroom window and called:
Hi Sweetie!
Where had she found a stethoscope that translated animal speech? The instrument, which came with her job, was quite ordinary. A smartphone with a universal translation app proved to be useless and the diagnostic smartphone app reported only four hearts beating slowly in the manner of hibernants. This act of lurking made me feel uneasy. What right did I have to overhear and retell a family’s private conversations? Yet the raccoons seemed to enjoy my presence so long as I stayed on my side of the wall. They had referred to me casually during the Fall, even at times addressing me deliberately.
Still, ethical concerns linger as happens with technology. How much of what the stethoscope translates is authentic raccoon speech and how much is a human equivalent meant to help me imagine what the creatures are saying? Raccoons don’t say “Delissio pizza.” But the popular brand-name stands for all the common pizza crusts that end up in waste containers in my city and get raccoons through the winter, along with birdseed fallen from backyard feeders and kibble left on porches for stray cats. You see, it isn’t the name but the context that does the naming. Context does most of the work in animal communication which isn’t made up of words but gestures, displays, mood signs, pawprints, scents, and movements. The raccoons wouldn’t have said “glutton” or “voracious,” but simply turned with one mind towards the pizza-stuffed Bandit, sniffed with one nose the body scent of this indiscriminate omnivore, and come to the same comical conclusion.
My partner’s stethoscope is also sensitive to that animal awareness of context, which is called etiquette. For instance, it translates them speaking in an ancient, formal “High Tongue” when addressing the subject of gods, ancestors, and first principles. I would go on to learn from the stethoscope that raccoons have a cultivated polite idiom which they reserve for exchanges with a social equal who is unfamiliar. This is what you’d expect of a mammal raised in a snug family hierarchy and unsure of others until they demonstrate their place in an ordered system. Another example: over three-fifths of the sense-making area in the brain of Procyon lotor, the Common or Northern Raccoon, is directed to touch, not to sight or sound or smell. They have four to five times more sensory cells in their hands than humans. Their brains are in their paws. It is easy to imagine them washing their paws so as to stimulate the touch centre in their cortex in a ritual of self-affirmation. The very name raccoon as heard by colonists in Jamestown from the Pawahtan people indigenous to Virginia is aroughcun (pronounced a-raw-coon), meaning “one who scratches, rubs, scrubs with its hands.”
Eventually, I consulted the literature of the shamans, the original human experts on animal behaviour, who taught through storytelling. Their narratives show a wary, affectionate respect for most animal people. That respect might be summed up as courtesy – a reticence to presume to know things about someone who is mysterious and strange. And this courtesy is shown by a playfulness in the storytelling, a spirit of mischievous fun in exaggerating details and coincidences. “Don’t be solemn. This is only a story – we don’t know for sure how the animal people really think. We just know that they can reason and feel as well as you and me. Enjoy the story for the fun of it, and if you pick up some wisdom along the way, that’s good.”
I read shamanic tales on and off until Spring came and my brilliant house-mates woke up.