Prior to the day that the duck pen door was left un-latched, the potential danger to our ducks had been purely anecdotal. “We’ve heard that raccoons eat ducks,” Linda ventured, during a visit to Rupert Murdoch’s farm.
“They don’t bother me,” Rupert declared as a procession of his geese marched by.
“Raccoons don’t eat ducks?” I asked.
“Not when you keep a dog around to scare off the raccoons. Get out of there!” he shouted to a goat that had joined the parade and was worrying the tail feathers of the last goose in line. “Some of your dogs will chase down a duck, and if they don’t learn, you’ve got to get rid of the dog. Especially if it’s a hound.”
“So you haven’t lost any ducks to raccoons?” I tried again.
“We’ve had problems with owls. There’s nothing an owl likes better than a duckling. An owl can smell a duckling from miles away, and you’ve got to keep them inside your barn until they’re too big for an owl. Even that won’t necessarily stop the owl. We had an owl come around and eat just the heads off a few of our full-grown ducks. He didn’t touch the rest of the duck, he just ate off the head.”
“Aye-yi-yi!” exclaimed Linda. “What did you do?”
“I waited outside in the yard all night, and when the owl came down, I shot him.”
“But you haven’t had trouble with raccoons,” I prompted.
“If I ever do, I’ll shoot them.”
Clearly, the placid world of the plastic duck pond possessed a violent flip side that we knew nothing about. Not until the morning we woke up to hear Peggy’s rasping voice just below our bedroom window. “The ducks are out!” Linda cried. She was outside in the half-darkness rounding them up before I was even out of bed, and she was back inside before I had a chance to throw on my clothes. She was as upset as I had ever seen her. “Something got Martha,” she sobbed. The shades were still drawn. Light filtered in from the living room along with the sound of fluttering wings from one of the caged birds in the dining room. “It’s all my fault. I should have checked the pen when I put them back yesterday.”
A familiar numbness passed through me, a prickling sensation like the nearness of heat, a disembodying calm that often carried me past the first stages of a bad event. “It’s not your fault,” I told her, as I worked the buttons of a shirt. “We’re both responsible for checking the pen. These things sometimes happen.”
“It’s my fault.” She stood stiff and shivering. “Part of her is down by the fence. Another part of her is on the back deck.”
“I’ll take care of it,” I told her. But I couldn’t think of a worse way to start the morning.
At the bottom of the hill, I found a hollow thing with feathers, a thing I didn’t recognize as having once been our duck. Its black and grey plumage was more like a crude charcoal sketch of Martha than any aspect of Martha herself. It wasn’t simply that the life had been taken from her. What was left of her was literally hollow. On the worn rectangle of cement just outside the basement door, I found an internal organ that looked too large to ever fit inside the hollow thing. I put my eyes on it just long enough to scoop it up onto the flat blade of a snow shovel and carry it down the hill for reunification with the feathered part. I sobbed as I buried both pieces, but the sobs felt forced as the abruptness of the incident and the dregs of sleep drearily circled one another. I hadn’t been close to Martha. The ducks were cozy with one other, not with us. But I had failed the most basic responsibility of keeping an animal safe, and the mistake had no remedy.
Linda squeezed a prayer through her tears. “Dear Lord, please tell Martha that we’re sorry. Tell her that we miss her. And we hope she’s with Simon and Binky in a wonderful place with lots of other ducks. Tell her that we love her, and please protect our other pets.”
“If she’s with Binky,” I told Linda, clutching her hand, “I wouldn’t necessarily call it a wonderful place.”
Linda thought that a dog had taken Martha, but I disagreed. Since Martha had apparently been killed for food, a raccoon was the likelier suspect. The only dogs within a mile of us were fat and happy individuals that might have killed a duck for sport, but not for food. And a dog that killed for sport probably would not have stopped at attacking a single flightless duck. It would have gone after our entire flock. There were certainly enough resident raccoons to do the deed, but in spite of my suspicions, I continued leaving table scraps near the bird feeder for our nocturnal visitors. Especially after losing Martha, I saw logic in keeping their stomachs filled. I also refused to believe that the bird feeder raccoons would bite the duck that belonged to the hand that fed them. The killer had to be an outsider, I surmised, a rogue raccoon that didn’t benefit from our largesse. After all, by eating our food, the bird feeder raccoons had entered into a social contract with us that prohibited them from attacking our pets. I imagined they had the intelligence to understand our tacit deal, and the stories I had heard about raccoons supported my belief.
SIX YEARS BEFORE we met, Linda had briefly lived in a roughhewn rental house near the northern Michigan town of Pierson. One November evening while she was washing dishes, she heard a scuffling against the outside wall and decided to investigate. The door felt heavy when she opened it, almost as if she were pushing against a mound of snow, and the latch was difficult to turn. As the door swung open, she confronted a full-grown female raccoon hanging from the doorknob by both arms. Taking little notice of Linda, the animal dropped to the floor and sauntered through the kitchen into the living room where Linda’s eleven-year-old son, Erin, sat on a throw rug, engrossed in The Dukes of Hazzard. As Linda watched in horror, the raccoon reached for Erin’s head, but only to begin carefully grooming the boy’s blond hair.
Early the next morning, Linda called her landlady to report the strange behavior of the raccoon and ask her what she might know about it. “I was afraid the raccoon was going to hurt Erin, so I threw a blanket over her and put her outside, but she kept getting back into the house somehow,” Linda told Mrs. Handleman. “I must have put her out three times before I figured out how she was doing it. You know that hole in the bathroom floor? She was getting in through there. I had to block it off with an old board I found in the garage and stick a rock on top of it that we’ve been using to prop up the woodstove pipe. After that, she left us alone.”
The older woman chuckled. “Oh, you must have had a visit from Jackie.”
“Jackie? Who’s Jackie?”
“Jackie was one of our favorite houseguests,” Mrs. Handleman explained. “She must have dropped by to say hello. She was probably looking for my husband.”
Jackie’s saga began years earlier, when the Handlemans had been enjoying a country breakfast of freshly laid eggs and store-bought bread. As he was spreading margarine on his toast, Mr. Handleman experienced the unnerving sensation that someone was watching him. It wasn’t the children, who were too involved in an argument over whose turn it was to chop the firewood to give their beleaguered father more than a glance. Unable to shrug off the spied-upon feeling, he glanced up at the ceiling to find a raccoon peering down at the breakfast table through a baseball-size hole in the plaster and lath. Rather than shoo the animal away, Mr. Handleman stood up and handed it his toast. From then on, Jackie was fed at every meal. Jackie repaid the favor by emerging through the bathroom-floor hole to introduce the Handleman family to the family she had been raising between the walls. Her cubs grew so tame that a young male adopted the Handleman beagle as his protégé, leading Mickey on daylong adventures in the woods that left the dog wet and panting by dinnertime but unmolested by raccoon tooth or claw.
As impressive as this account was all by its lonesome, I had even more evidence that raccoons were inherently civilized sorts. When my brother-in-law, Jack, was a child, his family had taken in an orphaned raccoon named Raffles who sat on the couch with the kids and plucked popcorn from a bowl. A cousin of mine in Houston kept a dish of canned cat food on the kitchen floor for a raccoon that slipped in through the kitty door each night, ate his fill, and left without a single breach of etiquette. A Canadian TV program profiled a Toronto woman who opened the patio sliders to her living room each night to ply a full dozen well-behaved raccoons with treats. Because raccoons easily form close relationships with people, and because they have cute faces and handlike paws, I romanticized these semimysterious nighttime visitors as the next best thing to elves. Once they had been properly habituated to humans, the most mischievous and unschooled raccoons were no more threatening to our ducks than overweight squirrels.
After losing Martha, Peggy and Daphne needed another little friend, according to Linda. Thus I found myself in Rupert Murdoch’s backyard watching Linda orbit his double row of duck pens like the electron of a waterfowl atom. Though Rupert had as many ducks as ever, she immediately disqualified the majority from consideration. Linda didn’t want to bring home a rerun of the breeds we had already owned, which eliminated call ducks, black and white Cayugas, Muscovies, and Blue Swedes, nor would she consider the Indian Runner duck that had captured my soul. Male ducks were also out of the question, since we didn’t trust Daphne and Peggy’s ability to remain celibate. That narrowed the choices to either a Bali duck, which resembled an Indian Runner duck with a feather pompom on its head, or a drab brown Khaki Campbell female that undoubtedly compensated for her plainness with a great personality and wonderful sense of humor. After caroming from pen to pen to make sure no potential alternatives concealed themselves behind a feed dish, Linda finally gave a Khaki the nod.
“The Khaki Campbell is considered a show duck, you know,” Rupert apologized, as he transferred the female to a plastic cat carrier we had brought with us in place of the usual cardboard box. “I’ll have to charge you ten dollars for her.”
After a modest fashion, the Khaki female was attractive. The soft nobility of her face was complemented by eyes set high up on a narrow skull, giving her an air of royal inbreeding, while a close examination of the feathers on her back revealed unexpected flecks of golden brown. Nevertheless, by no stretch of the imagination could this plain brown wrapper of a waterfowl be gilded with the label of show duck, and I told Rupert Murdoch so. “I don’t think ten dollars is too much to spend on a duck, but I sure don’t see anything showy about her,” I said.
“The females are nothing special,” Rupert admitted, as if he were breaking the first law of duck husbandry by owning up to this obvious fact. “The drakes are the show pieces. Handsomest things you ever saw. I’m just sorry I don’t have any here to prove it. But you get yourself a Khaki Campbell drake as a mate, and this little hen will produce a male you could show in any fair.” On the way back home with our new duck, I prayed that I’d be spared such a fate.
Chloe, as we named the newcomer, won quick acceptance from Daphne and Peggy. Watching her splash around the plastic swimming pool, probe the mud in a freshly watered flower garden with enthusiastic stabs of her beak, or race across the yard flapping her wings in mindless joy reminded me why I subjected myself to the bother of keeping ducks. My worst moods seldom survived watching the trio tool through the grass like wind-up toys as they pursued some obscure goal that apparently evaporated just as they reached it with a disappointed breaking of ranks. None of our rabbits had impressed me with its cerebral intensity, but the lowliest of them was a savant compared to the brightest quacker. A fence was too abstract an object for a duck to comprehend with any degree of reliability. When agitated, she might suddenly disregard the solidity of wire mesh inches from her breast and try to strain her plump body through the holes. But I had to admire our ducks’ powers of observation. They would freeze en masse in the middle of the yard, cocking an eye toward the heavens. Looking up, I wouldn’t be able to see anything at first, but if I strained my eyes to vein-bursting extremes, I could just make out the dust speck of a bird of prey soaring hundreds of feet above the ground.
Despite a voice as boisterous as Martha’s, bland brown Chloe was the demure female of the trio. As far as any duck could be said to be delicate, mild-mannered Chloe carried off the feat by balancing her waddle with an airy sense of poise. Much to my dismay, she would also later prove to be a diligent if unwed mother when we added abstinence-disdaining male Khakis to the flock.
The Internet had just gone mainstream, and I was upstairs engaged in important on-line activities, when I heard Linda calling from the yard.
“Something’s wrong with Chloe,” she told me, as I joined her in the pen. “She can’t walk. She can’t even stand up.” It was a rare June day in Michigan; the sun was shining unobstructed by slabs of clouds, and gusty breezes swept deliciously through waggling trees. Unfortunately, on such fine days we hadn’t yet learned to put a rock in front of the duck-pen door to prevent it from slamming upon an entering or exiting duck, which was what apparently had happened to poor Chloe. We waited until the next morning, hoping for improvement. When none was evident, I took her to Dr. Hedley, the robust veterinarian who had correctly treated Stanley’s groin injury with a no-nonsense regimen of intensive non-treatment. After examining Chloe’s leg and then x-raying the bone, he prescribed around-the-clock nontreatment for her, too.
“The femur is broken,” he said and frowned, setting down the kitty carrier that was fast becoming our duck transport of choice. The tip of an olive-colored bill poked through the carrier-door grate. Chloe was calm. I was the ruffled one. “The break occurred at the top of the bone about as close to her abdomen as you could possibly get. That would make the bone very difficult to pin, since there’s almost nothing to pin it.” He deftly pantomimed a broken femur and an ineffectual pin with his thumb and index fingers as he spoke. “We could anesthetize her and try exploratory surgery to see if something else could be done, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Number one, ducks don’t do well with anesthesia. Number two, they can be slow recovering from surgery.”
“What’s the alternative?” I asked, feeling about as useful as the pin.
“Do nothing. Let nature take its course. Give the bone a chance to heal on its own.”
“Does she need a splint or something?”
“I thought of taping her leg. But because of where the break is situated, I would have to wrap the tape all the way around her body underneath her wings, and that would make a great big mess. There’s a much better solution if you have a small cage at home. It needs to be large enough so that she could stand up if she’s able to, but small enough to confine her movements and keep her from thrashing around.”
I remembered the rabbit cage that had most recently housed the demon ducklings and nodded. From somewhere down the hall, a parrot’s squawk complained about whatever indignity it was undergoing. Chloe shifted around a little in her carrier, but otherwise didn’t make a peep. This was fortunate. The parrot was loud enough, but if Chloe had let loose her braying quack inside the examination room, Dr. Hedley and I would have both been forced to communicate with the world by note pad for the next couple of days.
“If we can keep her relatively still for about three weeks, there’s a ninety-percent chance that the broken bone pieces will knit back together. Now, they may not knit together in the right alignment, and she could end up pigeon-toed.” His outstretched hands demonstrated this consequence. “But unless the misalignment is serious, it shouldn’t be a problem for the bird. We had a similar case with a Maribou stork that got a foot tangled in a rope, and we caged him and let him heal on his own. He hobbles a little when he walks, but he regained full use of the broken leg.”
I understood that Dr. Hedley was referring to his consultation at a zoo. He never made direct reference to the zoo. It was always a “we had to sandpaper the teeth of a Komodo dragon last week” sort of mention that took it for granted I knew about his specialized patients. If this was a form of bragging, it never bothered me.
“Put her cage out with the other ducks so that her environment is familiar and she isn’t unnecessarily stressed. After three weeks you can try letting her out. If her leg is going to heal, it will have healed by that point. If not, we’ll take it from there.” Then, instead of rushing off to see another client, he answered my questions about the pileated woodpecker houses he was still building up north, described the various visitors to his backyard bird feeder, and just generally made me happy that Chloe and I had such an exuberant personification of animal well-being in our corner.
As we transferred Chloe to the bunny cage, Linda reminded me of how Daphne and Peggy had managed to peck the call duck ducklings through the bars. Birds just could not resist ferreting out weakness in their flock and trying to drive off underlings, presumably to ensure the survival of the group. Dominance was another issue that led to bullying. Howard and Stanley continued to jockey for power in our dining room, no matter how close an eye we kept on them. We talked about encircling Chloe’s cage with the ring of fencing that had protected the ducklings, but the fence proved unnecessary. As soon as I placed the cage in a corner of the duck pen, Peggy plunked herself in front of it and would not let Daphne get anywhere close. She did her best to menace us, too, forcing us to shoo her away whenever we wanted to give Chloe food or water.
Altruism in animals is unusual. I’ve read books about extraordinary pets like Philip Gonzalez’s The Dog Who Rescues Cats: The True Story of Ginny, which chronicles a pooch whose goal in life is finding injured or abandoned cats and convincing her big-hearted owner to take them home. But you expect a certain degree of heroism in dogs that you don’t expect in other pets. Otherwise, Saint Bernard might be the name for a gargantuan breed of helpful rabbit, fire stations could use a speckled goose as mascot, and Lassie might signal danger by meowing strenuously. Talk to anyone who spends hours a day around animals, from farmers to zookeepers to misguided individuals like myself. They’ll probably express admiration for their charges. They probably won’t ever describe them as motivated by selflessness. But Peggy was an exception.
Peggy always relished her periods of freedom from the pen, when she could search the yard for worms, exotic varieties of mud, and other delicacies too refined for human tastes. During the weeks that Chloe was confined to her cage, Peggy barely budged from sentry duty. Once in a while, succumbing to Daphne’s forlorn squeaks or the call of a luscious puddle after a heavy rain, she might briefly join the Muscovy for a jaunt across the lawn. But these outings were rare. Her place was at the convalescing patient’s bedside, where her raspy voice offered occasional quiet mutterings of encouragement. “How’s that drumstick today?” she might quack, in an attempt to cheer up the brown duck. “Your food looks good, but the grub’s much better in the garden.”
When three weeks passed and we could finally release an increasingly restless Chloe, Peggy seemed to anticipate the moment of liberation as much as we did. She darted around my feet as Linda kneeled down on the dampish straw of the duck pen, reached through the door of the bunny cage, and gently placed Chloe on the floor beside her. Chloe didn’t keep us in suspense. Her chubby body immediately popped up on a pair of working legs that propelled her out into the yard. Wobbling significantly but still maintaining her balance, she moved with surprising speed toward an alluring patch of weeds, followed closely by Peggy, who, for perhaps the only time in her life, let Chloe take the lead.
I was still thrilled at Chloe’s recovery when I held her in my arms at Dr. Hedley’s office a couple of days later. He shared my joy, but his face grew tight as his fingers probed the length of her leg, carefully working her limb in every direction like a video-game joystick. Chloe’s face, in contrast, was unperturbed, wearing the same look of mild forbearance that a duck acquires almost as soon as it lurches out of the egg.
“Do you mind if I take another X ray?” he asked. “I won’t charge you for it. I just want to satisfy my own curiosity.”
He was visibly more relaxed when he returned with Chloe, though my stomach clenched when he explained that the bone hadn’t actually knitted back together at all. “The femur is still broken, just as I had thought. But she’ll still do fine.”
“If the leg is broken, how can she possibly walk?”
“The muscles in her leg are supporting the broken bone. Ducks are incredibly lightweight for their size, and their muscles are quite strong, as you would know if you ever tried to handle a large bird that wasn’t this cooperative.”
I grimaced. “Won’t that hurt her to have the loose bone end spearing her muscle?”
“The muscles grip a large enough section of the bone to act as kind of a shock absorber,” he explained, capping the fingers of his left hand with his cupped right hand in another of his dexterous broken-bone pantomimes. “ I don’t think she’s experiencing too much discomfort, or she simply wouldn’t walk at all. A few years ago we had a condition similar to this with another kind of bird—”
“A flamingo,” I suggested, anticipating an anecdote about a zoo.
“Oh, good heavens, no,” he chuckled. “Where on earth would I get my hands on a flamingo? No, it was a Magellanic penguin, the kind you see swimming off the South African coast. We never thought this little guy would ever walk again, but despite a break not unlike your duck’s, he did very well for himself.”
Dr. Hedley turned out to be right about Chloe. Her leg supported her throughout the summer, and when winter came she kept vertical as successfully as any South African penguin, Magellanic or otherwise. Thanks to her wide feet—the same clumsy boats I had laughed at during temperate months—the ice that sent me sprawling headlong down the hill barely troubled her at all, nor did the six inches of snow that fell one night shortly after Christmas. Buoyed by the fluff, all three ducks half-walked, half-swam away from their pen, kicking their legs to toboggan across the yard, leaving tattletale trenches behind them. But with no seasonal treats to forage for except varied flavors of slush, they only sledded as far as the closest patch of sun, basking contentedly while I wrestled miserably with the usual pushbroom, hose, and shovel.
WHEN SPRING FINALLY wormed its way loose from the beak of a fierce Michigan winter, a familiar visitor made his first appearance. While other raccoons played the part of stylish partygoers by waiting for darkness before dropping by, a young male favored us with his presence in the late afternoon. As early as five o’clock, we would find him on the flat roof of the milk house just outside our dining room window eating seeds I had flung up there for juncos, cardinals, and jays that would not use the hanging feeder. As we ate dinner, he scrounged whatever the birds had left behind. Soon he was joining us for breakfast, too, showing up at a sunlit hour when other self-respecting nocturnal creatures had long since retreated to their hidey-holes or closed the lids of their coffins.
Under normal conditions, I simply ignored the raccoon population, but this was anything but a normal spring. Raccoons and possums usually poked around our feeder as a lazy alternative to scavenging natural foods. But an uncharacteristically dry April and May evaporated a swamp that should have squirted out mosquitoes by the millions. The lack of rain also squelched other insects and early-blooming weeds that in past years our animal residents had plucked from nature’s big buffet. Conditions were so desperate that bug- and berry-loving Baltimore orioles were reduced to eating our sunflower seeds. We had never seen that before. Linda split an orange in half and skewered it on the end of the bird feeder support pole. A male and female oriole pecked the fruit down to the pulp within hours. Soon she began putting out two orange halves each day. Since the raccoon’s survival prospects seemed dire, I decided to share leftovers of Linda’s tortilla-chip-crumb-and-potato-water casserole (“I never made that,” she claims), skillet-fried tofu shapes, faux-tuna Tuno burgers, and failed bread-machine experiments.
While I trusted a human-habituated raccoon to steer clear of our ducks, we still took the precaution of keeping the girls inside their pen until the sun was high in the sky. Early mornings and late afternoons were off-limits, no matter how loudly Chloe quacked for freedom. We also double-checked the pen door latches at night to avoid a repeat of the attack on Martha. We were vigilant. We just weren’t vigilant enough.
I was at work when I received an anguished call from Linda. She had waited until midmorning to let the ducks out, heard a commotion twenty minutes later, and found a frightened Daphne and Chloe wandering more aimlessly than usual. Peggy was missing. A trail of small white feathers leading to the back fence told a tale with a terrible ending.
Too upset to do anything else, I drove home from work and spent several pointless minutes calling for a duck we knew couldn’t possibly come home. We didn’t even find anything we could bury, though I stopped short of searching beyond the black raspberry bushes for the kind of grisly remains that Martha had left behind. I didn’t want to remember Peggy like that. I wanted to remember her brimming with an intensity of life far out of proportion to her size, a lioness inhabiting the body of a twelve-inch-tall duck. There was no question in either of our minds that our daylight raccoon had extended his usual visiting hours for a meal on the wing. And Linda had no doubt that slow-moving Chloe was his intended target and that Peggy had intervened to save her life.
“I can just see Peggy protecting Chloe,” Linda told me, after we had calmed down a bit. “She probably tried to chase him off while Chloe and Daphne ran away. She wasn’t afraid of anything. That’s exactly what she would do.”
I missed Peggy more than I ever expected to miss a duck and turned my sorrow into rage against the raccoon. Whenever I saw him on top of the milk house, I tore outside and chased him off with a broom. Whacking the handle against the side of the roof from ground level, I scared him into jumping down, then ran to the back of the shed and threatened to pummel him with the broom head as he made a beeline for the back fence. His agility and my essential cowardice saved us both from harm. After a few of these chases, upon hearing the angry slam of the basement door, he would climb out of broom range up the hackberry tree overhanging the milk house. I peppered him with a hail of pebbles as he clung forlornly to the trunk. I sprayed him with jets of water from the backyard hose. I hollered at him until my throat hurt, “Kill my favorite duck, will you?” and “You’re not welcome here anymore!” The raccoon just wouldn’t take the hint. Staring down at me with a slightly perplexed air, he bided his time until I stalked back into the house, then resumed his usual seat at out rooftop cafe. Nothing I did had any effect.
“I’m just glad I don’t own a gun,” I said to Linda. Otherwise, of course, I might have shot myself in the foot.
I had trouble sleeping, sick about losing Peggy and obsessed with ridding our property of every last marauding raccoon. The following Saturday, on my weekly visit to the feed store, I asked the owner, Ted, if he sold live traps large enough to catch a raccoon. He had exactly the model I needed. The cardboard box even featured fanciful artwork of a captured raccoon whose wide eyes indicated he was anxious to make a fresh start at a remote location.
“You won’t go wrong with this one,” Ted said. “I use one of them myself.”
“Is it tricky letting them go?” I asked. “I’ve read about people getting their leg chewed on by an animal they’ve just released.”
“I don’t release them,” he said with an insinuating squint. “I take care of them.”
The irony of using live traps to lure animals to their doom not only was lost on Ted, but it also escaped the trap manufacturer. Bait-and-capture instructions were provided, but not a word from the Humane Live Animal Trap, Inc., literature mentioned how to spring the raccoon. In fact, the pictured list of features referred to the Quick-Release Rear Hatch with Easy Slide-Out Bolt under the heading of Bait Insertion Door, though the door was clearly designed for the animal’s escape. The whole procedure seemed so ominous from the raccoon’s perspective, I shook the empty cardboard box to make sure I hadn’t overlooked an included Humane Gutting Knife.
Once I had mastered the art of prying open the spring-loaded door and securing it to a hook that set the trigger without the door snapping shut and breaking my fingers, the trap was easy to use. Just before the raccoon’s usual afternoon arrival, I positioned the primed and ready contraption underneath our bird feeder. Tipping open the rear escape hatch, I inserted pungent bait—week-old tofu stir fry plus a dollop of canned cat food—then slid in the Easy Slide-out Bolt. I barely made it back indoors before the raccoon sauntered into the neighborhood’s newest miniature diner and found himself clapped behind bars.
I hated to make him spend a couple of hours in the trap, but I wanted to wait for nightfall to release the raccoon, not wanting to be seen releasing a raccoon. Stealth definitely required a trade-off. Darkness put me at a disadvantage with a nocturnal creature accustomed to biting and clawing in inky blackness, so I compensated by packing a flashlight and protecting my hands with leather gloves so thick and stiff I couldn’t operate the flashlight. I swaddled my torso in a knee-length down jacket, stuck my feet into hiking boots the size of file-cabinet drawers, and pulled on a stocking cap to guard against a desperate lunge for my hair. After I was fully suited up, the full scope of the heat-generating ability of the human body hit me. I wasn’t especially mobile inside my portable sauna, but at least my captive wouldn’t be grabbing free samples of my flesh.
The caged raccoon’s huddled posture and offended look tempted me to let him go on the spot. I stiffened my resolve. “Sorry, but you’ve got to find a new place to live,” I explained, picking up the carrier. “Don’t worry, you’re all right.” The centrally located handle put trap and trap carrier wildly off balance as the animal scuttled from one end to the other. I wrestled the oscillating apparatus into the trunk of my Camry, tuned the radio to a suitably dramatic piece of classical music, and took a back road into Lowell.
My first choice for release on the Grand River was nixed by necking teens in a station wagon certain to be unnerved by the Michelin Man. I crossed the river and chose an access road alongside the railroad tracks. Nervous and cooking inside my protective suit, I set the trap on the ground, aimed it toward a shallow woods on the riverbank, whisked the bolt from the escape hatch, and flopped back into the driver’s seat, slamming the door behind me.
The raccoon did not budge.
Breathing hard, I cautiously left the car again and lifted the escape hatch with a screwdriver to demonstrate that nothing but a hinge impeded his departure. “You’re free,” I urged him. “You can go now. Go on!” He hid his head. The third time I raised the hatch, this animal—that I had never seen move faster than a lumbering trot—issued a menacing snort that sent me flailing backward and streaked into the trees faster than my eye could imprint.
Over the next two weeks, I trapped four more raccoons and released them at the same spot on the river. I congratulated myself, until I stepped outside the basement door one night just before bedtime to call our cat and saw another three raccoons beneath the feeder. I caught these as well, but more still came. They were as plentiful as mice. In fact, the snarl of successive raccoon shifts punching in throughout the night woke me up over the course of the summer.
The following August, Linda’s friend Deanne was having dinner with us when a fat raccoon in search of a canapé wandered into the trap. The sun wouldn’t set for another couple of hours, but Deanne was eager to witness the animal’s joyous moment of freedom. I had never let a raccoon go in daylight. It just seemed to go against the catch-and-release lifestyle. But because my release spot was sheltered from prying human eyes, I agreed to show off my wildlife skills for our guest. Despite a voracious mosquito population near the river and a feisty raccoon that growled at me with uncharacteristic savagery, the liberation went off without a hitch. But just before we drove away, Deanne pointed to a break in the wall of trees that stood between the railroad tracks and the river and asked me, “Isn’t that someone’s driveway? I’m sure I see a house back there.”
“Oh, no, nobody lives out here,” I insisted. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
Linda pressed her head against the glass. “I see someone’s house. It’s yellow. And there’s a red car in the driveway.”
“There can’t be,” I whined, turning around on the access road as quickly and quietly as possible. “I would have noticed someone living here.”
“We’d better get out of here,” Linda urged. “Someone might come out with a gun. They’re probably looking for you.”
Her warning was surely excessive. Or maybe it wasn’t. In the fifteen months since Peggy had died, I had dropped off at least thirteen raccoons on those people’s doorstep. That’s thirteen raccoons added to the local raccoon population—thirteen raccoons bitter about having been caught in a trap.
The realization of what I had done filled me with terrible guilt. It also increased my paranoia. Now, after dark, whenever a car grinds to a halt on the shoulder in front of our house, I no longer assume it’s an innocent passerby stopping to check a map. Instead, I’m certain that some sneak with an animal problem is dumping raccoons on our property. And come to think of it, that’s probably how we got so many of them in the first place.