A Bandit on the Broken Plow

With minutes to spare before I’d be late leaving for work, I grabbed a cup of coffee and headed out the door.  The car warmed up quickly and I backed it down the driveway to leave the Broken Plow Farm for the day.  I reached the end of the drive and checked carefully for oncoming vehicles.  Right, left, a quick scan all around and I’d back out.  But something caught my eye.

Opie had cornered something… or someone.

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Our little black and white dog, Opie, sat in the front yard, staring intently upward.  When a dog does that, it makes sense to try and see what it is looking at.  It took me almost a minute before my eyes were able to make out the object of his interest.  A little dark ear stuck out beside the power pole.  I moved around the yard a bit and a masked face stared down at me.

Opie had cornered a bandit.

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Our farm, The Broken Plow, is permanent residence to quite a few raccoons and, with thousands of acres of woods just to the north, west, and south, our yard is often used as a shortcut for ‘coons passing through on some important raccoon business.  I figure that was what this one was doing when Opie took up the chase. 

I’ll say “him” but, without close examination, it’s impossible to tell a male raccoon from a female one with absolute certainty, and I think “he” goes better with the implied occupation.

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The name raccoon comes from a Powhatan Indian word, “aroughcun”, which means “[the] one who rubs, scrubs, and scratches with its hands,” but many interpret it as, “one who washes.”  I like that expression better but the “scratches” one fits too.  Both translations refer to the critter’s habit of feeling its food just before eating it.  When that food is crawfish, minnows, or other aquatic life, it really does look like he is washing his food.

Wikipedia says, “Its diet consists of about 40% invertebrates, 33% plant material and 27% vertebrates.”  In other words, the raccoon may appear fastidious but he’s far from a picky eater, and not really much of a clean-freak either.  We have a mulberry tree in the yard and, when those delicious, sweet berries are ripe, it’s not uncommon for a coon to make his way across the yard, through our pack of ravenous dogs, and take up residence in the tree for days at a time.

I grew up playing and singing, “Here We Go ‘Round the Mulberry Bush,” but believe me, when a raccoon is living in that mulberry, you don’t want to get too close.  The most comfortable place for him to sleep is in a crotch along the trunk, which is exactly where he is when the digestion stimulating berries have their effect.  “Digestion stimulating” is a nice way to describe something that is basically nature’s form of Ex-Lax.  Now you get it.  He’ll stick his ringed tail out and let ‘er rip.  That’s the time of the year you’d rather play, “Here We Go WIDE Around the Mulberry Bush!  The base of that tree looks like it was used as a potty by a big bear doing what they do in the woods after a big meal of prunes.

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At one time raccoons were classified taxonomically with the bear family.  Now they are classified as being closer related to dogs.  That just goes to show, scientists don’t know everything.

One scientific fact is that dogs walk digitigrade (on their toes) whereas bears walk plantigrade (on the whole foot) leaving tracks resembling those of a barefoot person.  Guess what?  Raccoons walk plantigrade too.  Their tracks have been mistaken for a human baby lost in the woods.  A dog’s natural diet consists mainly of meat. Bears will make a meal of just about anything, from meat to grass to rotten stuff.  Yep, raccoons eat almost anything too.

That explains why some old-timers, like some native American tribes, called the raccoon the little brother to the bear.

As I said, ‘coons, like bears, are among nature’s most opportunistic feeders.  If they find easy food, they’ll return to the spot looking for more.  It doesn’t matter if it’s seeds in your bird feeder, food in your dog’s bowl, eggs from your prize laying hens, a road-killed rabbit, or food scraps you’ve bagged up and left out on trash day; it’s what’s for supper.

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Raccoons’ fur consists of lots of soft under-fir to go with relatively few guard hairs.  This makes it not only hold in heat quite well, but makes the pelt quite beautiful too.  Those facts, along with stories of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, helped lead to a fashion craze in the early 20th century.  Full length raccoon coats got so popular in the 1920s that they were one of the stereotypical college boy’s fashion staples.

In the 1950s Walt Disney cast Fess Parker as Davy Crockett and the coon skin cap perched on Davy/Fess’s head turned every young boy’s dreams toward owning one.  I came along at the end of that decade so missed the craze, but with David as my first name and a little Davy Crockett t-shirt as one of my earliest articles of clothing, I became a fan of old Davy.  Then Davy Crockett returned to the big screen played by none other than John Wayne in The Alamo.  Yep, he had his coon skin cap on.  Fess Parker hit the small screen by playing, not Davey, but Daniel Boone, when that show came to TV in 1963.  Yep, Fess/Davy/Daniel wore the furry head-cover.   

Needless to say, I just had to have one.

Thus, when I was out hunting one day and saw a ball of fur in the top of a young oak, visions of a coon skin cap instantly came to mind. 

Now, in those days I had little money and frequently had no, or next to no, ammunition for my hunting excursions.  On that particular day I had ammo only for my .410 shotgun, and that consisted of just one shell.  Because it was all I had, I carried my Winchester Model 42 to the field with that one shell…a slug.

Shotgun slugs are designed for hunting medium-size to big game – coyotes, deer, and the like.  There is no shotgun slug intended for something the size of your average raccoon.  I was not about to shoot a raccoon with that shell. 

I studied the situation.  Despite the breeze riffling his fur and swaying the tree to and fro, I was pretty sure there was no movement in his body.  My boyhood best friend and mixed breed mutt, Lad, was with me.  I called him to me and tried to get him to bark, but all I managed to elicit was an amused look.  I sucked in a lungful of frigid air and gave my best, most authoritative, “Hey!  Raccoon!  Are you alive?”

No movement.  Nothing.

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It had been well below freezing for several days so I surmised the little tree-panda had climbed into the branches and frozen.  A hard-frozen raccoon could make acquiring my coon skin cap less violent, if I could solve the most obvious problem…how to get him out of the tree.

Now, you have probably already thought of and discarded the most obvious, and most dangerous, idea but, to my 13-year-old brain, it was the plan with the most potential for success.

I shed my cold-weather hat and coat and placed my unloaded my .410 on them.  Then I broke off a stick about a foot long, shoved it in my back pocket, and made my way through the fallen tree branches and thorny vines to the base of the tree.  I wrapped my arms and legs around the foot-thick tree and shinnied up to the first limb with a single-minded purpose.  The little tree swayed farther and faster as I climbed upward. 

The raccoon never moved.

When I got to within arm’s reach of my goal I held on and pulled the stick out of my back pocket.  I said something like, “Hello-o-o coon skin cap!” as I poked the raccoon…the sound asleep – but very alive – raccoon.

Now, I can imagine how I would feel if I had been in that raccoon’s place, sound asleep and dreaming about pretty girl coons, good food, and a warm den, and somebody had poked me with a stick.  I can imagine it NOW, but THEN it had not even occurred to me… until I poked the ‘coon.

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His body seemed to swell and his face turned toward me.  THAT is when I saw the WHOLE coon, the very UPSET coon.

There I was, 20 feet up an oak tree and face-to-face with a 15 pound bundle of razor sharp teeth and rapier-like claws…and HE was MAD!

From less than arm’s reach of a live, healthy, angry animal with teeth that can bite through the thickest hickory nut and claws that effortlessly dig into the hardest oak bark, you can see things you’ve never seen before, outside a werewolf movie.  His eyes bored into mine and narrowed with fury, and the snarl that came from deep within his chest was less like Rascal and more like Cujo.

It was then that I realized I didn’t really need a coon skin cap after all.

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It’s amazing how many things can flash through your mind at a time like that.  After I abandoned my dreams of a new hat, it occurred to me that I did NOT want to be in that tree within easy reach of a critter that was about to transform into a whirlwind of razorblades.  I also realized that the only options for me at that moment were the famous, “fight or flight.”  At that snarl the idea of fight was abandoned and flight from 20 feet up into a tangled mass of dead limbs and thorny vines took on a more appealing aspect.

Luckily the raccoon thought quicker than me and chose flight over fight.  He leaped out of the tree and sailed down to land with a plop in the vines below.  Uninjured, he disappeared into the thick brush.

At that point, 20 feet up an oak tree in below-freezing temperatures, I may have warmed the air a bit with my verbal appraisal of the situation.  I said, “Holy cow!” 

Or something like that.

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About 30 years ago I witnessed another story, one that didn’t end as well for the raccoon. 

I was on my way to the midnight shift at a factory.  We lived on a quiet country road so you can image my surprise when the top of a power pole beside the road exploded like a box of expensive fireworks.  A blinding flash was followed by blazing sparks streaking down to the ground.

Farmers’ all-night yard lights blinked out for miles around.

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The next morning, on my way home, I stopped adjacent to the same power pole and found a burnt object beneath it.  A raccoon had evidently reached from one wire to another as my car approached and shorted out the loop.  The powerful 14,000 volt charge had passed through his body, instantly converting him into a furry form of the filament in an incandescent light bulb.  His toes and most of his feet and legs had been immediately burned off.  I’m sure, if I had been closer to the pole when it happened, I would have seen the coon plummeting to the earth like a blazing meteor.

Of course, maybe I’d be dead if I was that close, so I didn’t feel too bad.

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Getting back to my present-day raccoon up a pole in our front yard, it occurred to me that he might meet the same fate as that unfortunate one from long ago.  As I turned into the driveway that afternoon, I eagerly checked out the power pole. 

The bandit of the Broken Plow had made a clean, spark-free, getaway, and I was glad of it.

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