Lambsquarters (26 page)

Its mother had been killed—there were no details. The baby was a mere suckling. And because I was desperate about animals and deemed responsible, I was designated to care for it. I filled a baby bottle with milk and sat on a kitchen chair with the coon nestled on its back in my lap. My first soft nursling. Its four rubbery feet wrapped around the glass, its eyes closed wistfully in their black mask, its belly bulged. It sucked, grew, was weaned, became snarly, was released to the wild.

My next contact with coons was in Montreal in the form of an antique coat. It must have weighed more than the combined poundage of the poor souls who made it up in those days before boycotts and spray paint, but it braved blizzards and the deepest snows I’d ever seen. And I wore it to shreds.

Grey County is serious coon-land. Every farmer has stories of raccoons found, raccoons dispatched, raccoons trapped. On the rafters in the hay mow, my first coon here seemed harmless, beautiful, sleek and exotic with ringed tail and reverse purdah, only its eyes hidden. Days later I stumbled on the nest in the hay. Four perfect babies, identical, tiny and trusting furballs, happy to be held and coddled. I replaced the bale but returned each day to inspect, to hold, to show them to my children, defying the cautions of their teachers about animals in the wild. It wasn’t long before the
denlings snarled. Bared their teeth and let me know I was a stranger, as they had been instructed.

My relationship with raccoons has spanned many years. And if it’s a competition we are in, the coons are winning. But I do not submit. The battle is one of wits. And of tenacity. When raccoons move into the barn, they do so not just for shelter, for birthing mangers and sweet-grass suites. They also crave food for their growing broods. And my feed room is a coon buffet. The cat food is their favourite. The small circles of dried protein, fat, flavour—cat Cheerios—tempt others besides my feral mouser and tame tabbies. If the cat food is left in a bag, the coons chew the corner. If it’s put in metal cans with childproof lids, the thieves open the lids and tip the cans. Bungee cords sometimes work. Sometimes not. The coons eventually undo the cords with delicate hands and help themselves.

I find solutions though, am ever innovative. The cat food now sits in an old diaper pail with a fitted lid wedged by its own handle. But the pail can’t sit on the floor. Instead, I suspend it from the ceiling, hang it on a stretched-out coat hanger from a spike in the beam. I bump into the pail and have to detach it each day to feed the pusses. I have to explain it to visitors, this white pail embossed with a golden nursery lambkin that has the nose of a dog and the eyes of a rag doll, swaying in the middle of the room.

Other feeds are more difficult to protect: the oats
in bags and bins, powdered molasses, laying mash. I feel like a locksmith some mornings breaking the bonds of the tinned and bungeed feed as the rooster crows, the hens squawk, the sheep bleat with impatience for their breakfast. And so I resort to the trap.

For years we had just the odd invader, and a borrowed neighbour’s trap would do. We’d use it once, transport the offender to barren land in the next township and let it go. But we’ve become, I believe, the great raccoon repository for the province. The rural Rocky dump. City coons have come calling in slick summer suits in recent years, delivered in traps from the wilds of Etobicoke and Scarborough, Rosedale and Forest Hill. I’ve purchased a trap of my own.

But if, as I suspect, these are swaggering city slickers, plantigrade on pavement as well as turf, they are also trap-wise by now. I picture them working my barn in pairs, one holding the door of the cage while the other ventures in after the marshmallow. Sometimes perhaps one goes it alone with a ballet step, a hind foot elevating the spring-door for eventual exit while the front hand extracts the bait. It can take days to catch one. I find the barn cycloned, cans tipped, grain spread, cat bowls toppled. And the trap tripped and empty. No bait, no coon.

Squirrels are easier prey. One March I transplanted an entire colony of red squirrels in a week’s trapping. Peanut butter was their bait. They walke d
right in—to their immediate regret and unending protest. Local folklore has it that a squirrel must be moved at least nine miles away and across a river. I sent them in all possible directions in this multi-streamed county. The great squirrel diaspora. They will be telling their grandrodents of it now and for ages to come. But they’ve stayed away. Made room for an infestation of chipmunks who live in the ground at the base of the squirrel-den cedar trees and pop their heads out of nowhere like periscopes, dodging dogs, tempting fate.

Chippies run along the six-lane highways of the rail fence, the dog in pursuit, changing lanes faster and with less warning than a black Trans Am. More than once, I’ve found one trapped in the top of a hollow log, the dog on hind legs sniffing her doggy breath into the hole, prepared to park there for as long as it takes. But rarely are chipmunks caught. In the barn their luck lessens with the feline hunters, and more than once I’ve found nothing but a tail lying on the feed room floor or draped over a cat bowl.

But coons outflank cats. And most dogs too. There are legends about farm dogs dispatching masked strangers, and I’ve seen young coons shaken by their necks to their death. But an adult coon scares most dogs. Even coon dogs stop at treeing, satisfied with their role of finding and directing, but leaving the dirty work to the guns.

I can’t kill a coon myself. I see them waddle away
from their mess, amble up the stairs to the mow if I visit the barn of an evening. Easy prey if I were armed. But I can’t do it. My father taught me to shoot a rifle when I was twelve. We shot targets and tin cans, and I got pretty good, shouldering the butt, setting the sights, easing the trigger. But I don’t use a gun here. Wouldn’t think of it. Can’t do it.

Coons have anthropomorphous behaviours that make them difficult to hate. Their feet have five fancy toes, their hands five nimble fingers. Inquisitive and daring, they are thoughtful with their food, washing fish in a river, examining morsels, turning and investigating each tidbit before eating. The raccoon’s English name is distilled from a Native word, derived from the Algonquian family of languages, variously recorded as
arakun
, or
arocoune, arathkone, aroughcun, rahaugcums, rarowcun
meaning “he (or she) who scratches with his (or her) hands.” In French it’s
raton laveur:
“young rat washer,” “young rat who washes.” The raccoon’s walk is as delicate as its wash—hunched, like a daddy-long-legs planted high and round.

One spring evening I saw a coon sitting on an unused chimney on the house. A nest. (Confirmed later by a climb with a flashlight, which illuminated five pairs of small eyes shining up through the dark.) I looked roofward on that first spotting; she looked down. No fear. As if she knew her safety was assured by her batch of babies. Bold, she ambled over the gables,
nibbled on the wooden windows, scratched at the shiplap. And when asked not to, she merely stared, considered, and crept away.

Working late in my loft, catching the last of a June day that streaked orange tongues of sunfire on my desk, I was aware of a presence. There are small Gothic windows on each side of the loft, which open on our shingled lean-to roofs. On the east side was the coon. Standing on the shakes, her hands gently pressed against the screen, she was peering in with myopic nocturnal eyes. Her belly was that of a nursing mother. Six teats, pink, erect, with matted fur around them, pressed flat by suckling babies who would be full now and sleeping in their own lofty nest. She stared hard at me. Mother to mother. She dared me to evict her.

For six weeks she tried my patience. And ate my house. I thought perhaps she chewed the wood for its savour, so I put blocks of salt on the ground at her entrance, a low point straight under the sunroom roof, which she climbed down slowly every evening, peering through skylights and windows on her way. The tenant nodding to the landlord. I yelled at her, lobbed a football in her vicinity, threatened, pleaded and cajoled. She stared with big black eyes and went on chewing. Ignored the salt. On hot evenings the babies appeared, lined up along the upmost edge of the chimney bricks, stretched languidly and slept. Caught the cool breezes from the west. Like lodgers in undershirts, swilling beer on city
porches, belching, oblivious to neighbourly decorum. I don’t know if they played on the skylights while they lived here. I’ve heard they use them for slides in the rain. A water park for the wild.

Finally they all came down for a move to larger quarters, for an introduction to barn raids and cornfield parties. Things calmed down for a time. No further gnawing of house wood, no terrorized cats, no grain upset, no early corn torn in the garden. The raccoon family must have headed off to the woods, the streams, the lush cornfields in the distance. Grass is greener.

But by midsummer they were back. With a vengeance. With a grievance. And nothing could keep them out of the garbage cans of feed, the sealed bags of grain, the leftovers of feline kibble. Every morning the barn was a mess of flung containers, spilled metal mouths spewing forth onto dirty concrete, muddied and manged by ring-tailed critters. Out came the trap. Marshmallows disappeared as fast as I could set them as bait, and almost no one was caught. Occasionally I’d get one. Hunched in the trap, looking deceptively small and sweet, but heavy as heartache to lift and smelling rank and musky and vile. I put the trap on newspapers in the back of the station wagon, opened all the windows and headed out to someplace that needed coons. Across a river. Nine miles of scent glands to freedom. Freedom from and freedom to. Each time
thinking the problem was solved. Each time having a few days’ grace before the next attack.

But then the raccoons crossed the line. They tore open the chicken pen. Pulled back the wire with deft hands. Woke me with the squawking screams of panicking poultry and made off with two of my buff Brahma beauties, prizewinning hens just into their lay.

Worse than wolves, the vermin took more than they needed. They were greedy, relentless, violent. And when I spied a great large male asleep in the Russet apple tree in broad daylight, I called a friend who has a gun. She came. All my pacifist ideals blanched as she shot him out of the tree, finished him off (“they don’t die pretty”) and left me with the carcass, already attracting flies, dead on its back, bloating.

I hauled it onto the trailer behind the tractor, drove it to the back of the farm and dumped it before the kids got home from school. Body disposal. Unworthy of the coroner who would be sure to find it and determine the cause of death as acute lead poisoning. To the head. Raccoon patriarch. Paterfamilias. Dead on his back.

There are hard choices on farms some days. If you have livestock, you will have deadstock. But that raccoon has been my only kill. My neighbours would be horrified to know that I trap coons and let them go: I contribute to the menace. But I’ve discovered peanuts. If they’re wedged into the very inside edge of the trap, the
beasts have to go right in to reach them. Peanuts will not be coaxed or rolled like marshmallows. Peanuts stand their ground. They get their man. They get my coons.

All is quiet now. Christmas coons den down, sleep in soggy skins rank with the odour of the unkempt. Matted and dozy, they appear on warm days but do little harm before burrowing back into fouled and fousty hollow trees. But like butterflies fresh from their chrysalises, raccoons will emerge when the days start to get longer. Sleek and crisp, their masks saucy come-ons, their tails like those of lemurs, they’ll start the cycle again. Females will mate with handsome males, find my barn, investigate my chimneys, drop their young and feed on whatever they can steal. And we will continue our game of cat and mouse, trap and trick, and for the most part, we will co-exist.

POULTRY PODIATRY

THE CHILDREN ARE ON HOLIDAY,
and the chickens, like the residents of Cairo who go to Alexandria for the season, are in their summer residence. In Egypt, Cleopatra’s home lies underwater, drowned in time and washed away in memories, which only surface in the odd flash of gold. Here, the chickens’ Cairo is submerged, awash from a leaking water bowl, making chicken-shit soup in the barn. The coop has been reinforced since the coon capers, Fort-Knoxed to protect my hens and their gilded eggs, and the raccoons have retreated from the echoing blast of the neighbour’s rifle. But a leak has formed a silent and sudden spring on the floor, and the chickens have been removed to higher ground, to a cooler place, to their Alexandria.