Halfway across to the islands, she started to belong to the river. She’d never swum any distance before and never alone – just splashed around the shoreline when she was a cub, sifting for crayfish. The water felt fluid then, it slipped away through her fingers; now, it filled her paws with its heft.
When she joined with the river, its people came alive all around her. Water spiders flicked out of reach. A shape drifting by in the night held her in its infrared eye. A solitary Duck. No danger. She paddled on with her nose just breaking the surface. The scents of oats and sugar from the factory on the far side of the river. The Raccoonopolitans her Aunt Pawsense had married into had settled on the Heights to the north, attracted by the honeyed raisin cereal they pillaged from vehicles that belonged to a factory. She had it in her mind introduce herself to her new relatives – but first the islands. They had beckoned her ever since she’d seen them in the autumn drought sitting above the level of the water, with the roots of their trees exposed, and then again in the spring when they were submerged by the flooding. She took her clan-family name from these islands.
Touchwit looked up to check her direction. Hapticia the Moon was floating on a clam shell across the sky, watched by her partner, the Great Raccoon Ancestor. She repeated a rhyme her mother had taught her:
O Lady Moon, your horns point to the east.
Wax, be increased.
O Lady Moon, your horns point to the west.
Wane, be at rest.
A waxing Moon pointing out her journey. What would befall her? It was exciting to interpret the voices of her senses instead of having their news bundled into sayings by her mother.
Nervous honking. The Geese downriver at the toe of the south island were agitated. What made them alarmed? It couldn’t be her. She wasn’t in their scent vector and they couldn’t see her flattened against the water. The weather then. Geese react to a whisper of change in the weather.
A flap against the water. A fish jumping. Not a danger. The ones that are dangerous are silent and strike from below. Cold-water carnivores with protruding lower jaws that make them look insolent. They eat ducklings. Sometimes they will pull down a full-grown duck. The bird will be bobbing along happily; then, it will cease to exist. Touchwit trembled, and swam faster. The river was warm and she could swim forever, this paddling motion so natural to her, but she felt insecure without a tree close at hand. And the Geese were right. The weather was going to change. She needed to get to the island quickly.
Touchwit chose a Swamp Oak to dry off on because it sent a branch out over the river. Lying on it, she could be in three worlds, the earth and air and water. She settled into the music of her senses.
After touch, which is intimately connected with their thinking, smell is the sense that raccoons trust most. The ears give information about current happenings and bring the other senses to attention. The eyes indicate a creature’s attitude and motion. But the nose provides news of settled truths – who has made a home here, who has passed through, and how long ago. Raccoons can construct a mental map of a place by nose alone. Yet with the breeze carrying scents off the island faster than she could analyse them, she began to feel apprehensive. Her adventure, which had started out proudly, was dissolving in mystery. This Island, with its indistinguishable mass of new spring growth and old rotting trees, its tangle of ground vines and variety of berry trees, and its rustlings, scurryings, and scratchings, held a deep meaning. Withheld was a better word, because the Island seemed unwilling to offer its meaning to her senses. It felt as if it belonged to some forgotten god who visited rarely. Her hands reached for a shoot of long-stemmed acorns to fashion into a circle.
A branch of Alder leaves was going upriver. How could a branch travel against the current? It looked like it was in a hurry.
Then, an explosive assertion nearby. She knew what that was. It was an Owl, a Horned Owl. The call of an owl means someone is going to die. Maybe she should climb higher in this tree. She felt exposed so close to the water – the tree branch going upriver had unnerved her. The island with its distinctions blown away by the wind had become an unknown. It was a concentrated nothingness, a zone where life begins and ends. But raccoons are nightsiders, and darkness gave her an advantage.
It’s hard to tell from her story where Touchwit went because she recounted her movements according to the scent map she’d composed from a few certainties. The smell of water lilies tells us that she reached a narrow channel of still water separating the northern from the southern island. This channel, I mentioned earlier, is where the food is. It is an underwater larder for raccoons and other creatures like great blue herons and mink who use the islands as a seasonal fishing camp. But she ate only some elderberries to sharpen her senses. Touchwit was too intent to be hungry. For, out of the density of growth and decay in this mysterious nothingness, one scent stood out. It was the smell of a Raccoon, a senior male, who travelled alone and covered up his tracks with care.