Primer and a raccoon

From Wiki Gonzalez

Posted by penguinmobile on November 22, 2004 at 11:21 PM (#978570)

When I lived on the second floor of a duplex in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, we became aware of the presence of a raccoon family in the vicinity. The first time we became aware of them was when I arrived home at about 9:00 PM and discovered the mama raccoon and her two half-grown kits were enjoying the summer evening on our front porch. After a brief exchange in which I made an abortive sortie towards the stairs and they countered by arching their backs, getting big, and hissing, I granted them temporary ownership of the porch while I settled for temporary ownership of a barstool for an hour or so. When I returned, they were gone.

A few nights later, both the upstairs and downstairs units were thrown open for my best friend's bachelor party. As best man, it was my duty to stay up until the bitter end, and so it was at about 5:00 AM when I found myself on the porch, drunk out of my mind, with one of my oldest friends, watching the raccoons return from an evening's activity to their home in the enormous willow tree at the funeral home across the street.

Other raccoon sightings and encounters followed, none of any great significance until the night we heard an odd noise and mrs. mobile went to investigate. She let out a strange cry, and I followed her to see what prompted it. I found her in the kitchen, pointing at the window. "They were taking the cat food!" she exclaimed.

The raccoons weren't just trying to take the cat food out of the bowl. They weren't trying to take the bowl itself. The were trying to take the new 40 pound bag of cat food, all three of them reaching in the open window from the back porch roof, and pulling on the top of the bag. Even as she explained the scene, the raccoons sat a few feet back on the roof, sizing us up. "You're the guy who we scared away from the porch," their eyes seemed to say, mockingly.

We closed the window and decided that we'd need to remember to close it every night around sunset to prevent losing our cat food. Of course, a few nights later, we forgot.

It was just about midnight on a hot evening, and I was sleeping naked on top of the covers. I was tossing around quite a bit on account of the heat and the not unreasonable fear that the cat, who was sleeping on top of the wardrobe next to the bed, might decide to jump on my testicles from a height of five or six feet as she had memorably done a week before. A decade later, I can still see her dropping towards me, gaining speed in mid-air with her front paws extended straight towards my huevos. It was not shaping up to be a restful evening.

Suddenly, there was a crash in the kitchen. I realized immediately that the window was open and the raccoons were after the cat food again. I leapt out of bed, tore through the dining room, and charged into the kitchen. But I didn't see the hunched shapes I expected to see in the window. There were no raccoons on the roof.

Puzzled, I reached behind me and turned on the light. As I blinked my eyes against the brightness, I realized that the raccoons were in the tiny kitchen, no more than a foot or two away from me. And they were staring at me. This time they didn't need to hunch up, get big, or hiss. They just needed to look at me with beady little eyes that clearly said, "Dude, are you crazy? You just ran into a kitchen full of raccoons, naked."

As I began to back out through the dining room, they turned back to their task at hand, sizing up the cat food bag, and measuring the opening in the window with their little raccoon-sized tape measures while they calculated angles and weights.

Back in the bedroom, I tried to explain to mrs. mobile what had happened while I pulled on heavy pants, a long sleeved shirt, a long coat, and my work boots. She looked at me with the same expression the raccoons had used.

I re-entered the kitchen dressed for freezing temperatures with a broom in one hand, and a mop in the other. The three raccoons again stopped to look at me. They clearly weren't intimidated, but seemed rather annoyed. After a long moment, the mama racoon looked at each of her kits, looked back at me and, I swear on a stack of bibles, shrugged her shoulders before turning around and casually climbing out the window. The kits followed.

Once out on the roof, they turned back to watch me as I closed the sash. As it came down, I thought I could hear them giggling. We never again forgot to close that window, but many more nights that summer I was certain I could hear snickers as I walked by the willow next to the funeral home.