I kept on hearing high-pitched screaming and squeaking tonight. Finally, after careful contemplation, I realized it’s the time of year when the raccoons come up from the forests.
You can tell when they tire themselves out yelling at the garbage cans, because they start to sound like squeaky Radio Flyers moving sporadically in the distance.
Edit to add: now they’re lackadaisically wolf-whistling. Raccoons are ridiculous animals.
We had a raccoon pull some loose stacked bricks aside, go under our house and get lost. A lot of screaming happened from under the floor. Sounded like the monkey version of a banshee having a panic attack. It found its way out eventually.
We had to use a lot more loose bricks and rocks to hide the raccoon entrance, they kept going under, finding the hollow walls (old house, no insulation), and climbing up into the attic to wander around, push stuff everywhere, and be noisy.
They are ridiculous little animals with strange hands and even stranger voices. I love them.
It’s raining hard and there’s lightning and thunder, and I just went out on the porch in the cool, wet air. Which means I now have the rather strong, very specific urge to go to a deep body of water, preferably an ocean, and jump in facefirst in order to dive to the bottom.
I don’t know why this happens. It’s a specific urge, and not at all intellectual. I mean, I sure wouldn’t mind being able to do that, but it’s not a conscious want.
I wish I could oblige it.
Also, there was a fuzzy little adolescent raccoon hiding beside the porch, and I scared the fuzzy little pants off him. I wish raccoons weren’t so feisty, they look so soft and I’d love to touch one.
man, you guys are bored today, because in ten minutes ive had ten requests for this. so i will briefly tell the story of the cat-raccoon incident.
in most of the camps we stayed at, there were cats. dogs, too, but the cats were everywhere. food stores and garbage that a good-size camp needs means there’s a high chance of rats or mice, and one of the best ways to deal with that problem was a good mousing cat. so most every camp had a couple hanging around. the officers mostly turned a blind eye to them.
there was one camp we were at for a few months, and the mouser there was this huge fluffy grey lump they called Kilroy. (it was not a very original name; i think i met six camp cats called kilroy) Kilroy was a remarkably lazy cat, when he wasnt hunting, but also pretty friendly. he was also an amazingly warm personal heater for whoever he decided to grace with his presence. that being the case, he was welcome in most barracks when the weather started to go cold.
mice are active at night, though, so often he would linger in the kitchen until a couple hours after sundown, then head to the nearest barracks and scratch at the door until somebody let him in.
one chilly night in february, there was a scratching at the door of our barracks at nearly two in the morning. we were all asleep and even when it got loud enough to wake us up, none of us wanted to move. but it persisted. so eventually falsworth got out of his bunk–he was closest to the door–let Kilroy in, and got back in bed.
Kilroy ambled a few steps in, then started heading for gabe’s bunk. which was when gabe and falsworth realized that what had been let in wasnt a Kilroy.
it was a raccoon.
i dont know if gabe had some sort of raccoon related trauma in his past or if he just hates them in general, but he screamed and bolted upright in his bed. which woke the rest of us up, quite startled, and, since we were in bunks, resulted in about half of us hitting our heads on the upper bunks. dumdum, who’d insisted on sleeping top bunk, lunged awake so hard it actually tipped the whole bunkbed over, and wound up spilling him and happy sam on the floor.
all the chaos caused the raccoon to be terrified, and it started running around, looking for an exit. all of us were tangled in blankets, and most of us had no idea what was happening, and the only two who did were gabe and falsworth. gabe was screaming like he was being attacked by a six foot spider, and falsworth had started chasing the raccoon around. the rest of us were yelling, trying to figure out what was going on, and there was this angry bright-eyed thing running around, scratching and biting anyone who came near. soon enough, it cornered itself behind steves footlocker, but it kept biting at anyone who tried to grab it.
at that point we’d made enough noise to wake half the camp. peggy, who’d been staying nearby in the ops center, stormed over to see what was happening. she burst through the door like an avenging angel and found a squad of battle hardened commandoes with bedhead, wrapped in blankets, two bunks overturned, gabe still yelling, and half of us bleeding from raccoon bites.
she marched in , stole steve’s blanket, tossed it over the raccoon, bundled it up, and carried the whole thing right back out of the barracks.
when she came and found us at the medic’s after she’d let the raccoon loose in the woods, she was not impressed to discover that every single howlie had somehow gotten injured, either from the raccoon itself, by blundering into each other in the dark, or by falling out of bed.
Chapter 20: Peggy is a Boss, Dum-Dum is Not, and Kilroy is a Cat has been updated on Ao3!
(As some of you may know, raccoons are not native to Europe! (which is something I forgot when I made the reference in the last story, and had to do some quick research.) However, they are there now, as an invasive species. Part of the reason for that is that during WWII, a german fur farm was hit by a bomb, releasing raccoons into the wild. So this would have been one of the first raccoons loose in Europe. Neat!)
Raccoons are the worst. You expect them to go through your stuff and steal your food while you’re camping, but they don’t stop there – half the time, they’ll be curious enough to come over and touch you. They prod your sleeping body with their horrible little people hands, run their claws through your hair, hold your fingers with their own. I’ve never been aggressively menaced by one, but they’ve slapped my ass through hammock fabric on multiple occasions and stroked my face or hands on others. I’ve played tug-of-war with large raccoons through my window when they grabbed the string to the yarn-and-cup telephone I’d set up with my neighbor.
Many scientists have used a test paradigm in which the creature under
investigation has to figure out how water displacement works in order
to reach a treat. As it turns out, some raccoons just don’t buy into the
premise.
The paradigm of water displacement actually comes from an ancient
Greek fable written by Aesop called “The Crow and The Pitcher”, and it’s
been used to investigate whether birds and small children understand how cause and effect work.
The fable is about a thirsty crow that can’t drink from a pitcher
with a low water level. To raise the water level higher, the bird drops
stones in the pitcher until the water level rises and it can drink.
(This paradigm has actually been tested on New Caledonian crows with amazing results.)
Now, a group of researchers from the University of Wyoming and the
USDA National Wildlife Research Center has found that raccoons have a
different way of being innovative when it comes to getting their sweet
prize.
BettSplendens Tumblr Evac 