September 21, 2002

• When I rescued my attack-trained New Jersey dog Angel from the Boulder pound (as related in a past issue of the redheads’ online magazine, Rousette), I already had a pet.

  
  

  My boyfriend Stony and I were living in a big apartment building full mostly of students, faculty and staff from the university, with a sprinkling of hippies and dope dealers. We met a family traveling through in an old panel truck. They had a raccoon. He was captive-bred and about as tame as wild animals get… which is not very. His owners had fallen for him in a pet shop and shared their life on the road with him until he became too big and aggressive for them.

  
  

  They gave Mr. Coon to us, to the boyfriend and me. Coon never bonded with the boyfriend although Stony did enjoy letting him ride his shoulder in public.  Very soon Coon and I became quite close. He was an extraordinary animal, as housepets go. The first evening we had him, while we were getting to know each other, he stole the ring off my finger, scampered into the dark bedroom and stashed it, then hurried back and reached for my hoop earring. Just as I have done when I had babies to care for, I stopped wearing jewelry for as long as I had Mr. Coon.

  
  

  He soon trained me to keep an eye on his litter box and clean it frequently. If he went to make a deposit and found a previous deposit still there, he would throw out the old stuff and a lot of the litter as well. He also expressed his feelings with feces. On separate occasions, after run-ins with Stony, he left turds in Stony’s shoe and on his pillow.

  
  

  He was so clever, it was a joy watching him try to solve problems of access to things and places we tried to keep him out of. It wasn’t always fun waking up to discover that he’d solved one of the problems as we slept. One time, he opened each of the drawers under the kitchen counter in turn, using them for steps. Once on the countertop, he moved the toaster to use for a step, and opened the upper cabinet door.

  
  

  He could have had many goodies, but he contented himself with honey and oatmeal. He opened the screw top of the jar of honey and overturned it on the counter. He dumped the contents of the oatmeal box into the pan of water in his feeding area. His enjoyment of the meal was evident in the many tracks he made back and forth between the honey puddle and the gruel in his water pan.

  
  

  Any solid food he ate, whether it was kibble or fruit or vegies or bread, went first into his water. I gave him a commercial food formulated for raccoons, and supplemented it with nuts, fruit and vegetables, but he had some of his own favorite snacks. He would try to beat us to the toaster when our toast popped up. Each time he found his way into a kitchen to steal food, he chose some kind of grain: the oats, a bag of wheat flour, boxes of cereal. A few times, I laid out newspapers for him and set in the center a small dish of honey and peanut butter.

  
  

  He groomed himself much the same way cats do. He groomed me, too. I always had coon slobber in my hair. It freaked me a bit the first time he licked the corners of my eyes, but after a while I got used to that. I got used to a lot of things with Coon. I don’t think I ever taught him anything, but he did a lot of training on me.

  
  

  Late one night we were awakened by a knock at the door. Before opening it, I looked around for Coon, to be sure he wasn’t poised to scoot out at his first opportunity. No problem. What greeted me when I swung the door back was a tousled, irate man holding Mr. Coon at arm’s length by the scruff of his neck. We were on the third floor. Our irate neighbor had left his fifth floor balcony door unlocked. Coon worked the latch on our balcony door, slid it back and climbed two floors, and slid open his door. The couple heard him rearranging pots and pans in their kitchen.

  
  

  When Stony and I moved out of our apartment into a big shared house with friends, we took Coon and Stony’s dog Smoky. Shortly after the move, I got my dog Angel. The dogs never learned to coexist with each other and were always fighting each other or the Rhodesian ridgeback owned by a housemate. There were also cats in the household who were frequently chased or cornered by the dogs. Coon had no problems with any of them. The cats retreated quietly when the raccoon swaggered into a room. The dogs couldn’t resist crowding in close to sniff at Mr. Coon, but when he swung on them with his chattering warning cry and showed his teeth, they backed off.

  
  

  In each of the places where we lived, Coon found the most secluded spot for his den. Whether a closet, or a cupboard, or the space behind a sofa, his chosen places had one thing in common: defensibility. One of these places he picked, in the home of some friends of ours, was particularly inconvenient for the primates involved.

  
  

  When our group expanded and moved from Boulder to Breckenridge to work on condo construction jobs, we settled, along with some other hippies, in the abandoned mining town of Tiger. Stony and I lived in an old school bus, and our friends moved into existing cabins, using plastic sheeting to cover the windows.

  
  

  Coon, who stayed in the bus with us or on a chain attached to his collar from the bumper of the bus, quickly made friends. Kids and adults would stop to talk to him or to us about him whenever he was out on his chain. When we went to work, we left him out on the chain. Several people, including our good friend Zeke who also helped me exercise Angel, looked out for Coon while we were away.

  
  

  One night we came home and saw Coon’s chain lying slack on the ground, with his collar still snapped onto it. One of our friends came from a nearby cabin to intercept us. He was wounded and agitated. He expressed concern about rabies, and we assured him that the raccoon’s immunizations were current.

  
  

  He implored me to come and get my raccoon. I followed him to his cabin, where he stopped at the foot of the stairs and pointed to a curtain that covered a closet door on the landing at the top of the stairway. Keeping an eye on Coon for us was one thing, but approaching him or trying to pick him up was something few people besides myself would try. Stony had been slashed enough that he wouldn’t try to touch Coon. I knew how to do it, and could grasp him by the loose skin on his back until he got past his instinctive defensive response to being grabbed, and climbed onto my shoulder.

  
  

  When he slipped his collar, our neighbors watched him nose around the compound, basically a short wide street with cabins on both sides and our bus in the middle. He entered the cabin by clawing a hole in the plastic sheeting over a window, and the neighbors watched him climb in and sniff around until he finally ascended to the closet at the top of the stairs. It was cute and adorable until someone climbed the stairs to one of the bedrooms up there.

  
  

  Coon rushed out of his curtained den making the chattering noise that all our friends now recognized as a warning/threat. They backed off. Others tried it throughout the day, but Coon terrorized them all.  The second story was now his territory, it seemed.

  
  

  My capture of the mad raccoon was anticlimactic. I lifted him by the scruff of his neck and he went limp in my hand. I cradled him in my elbow and let him climb to my shoulder. Then I put on his collar and leash, and we sat around in the neighbor’s living room, schmoozed, had dinner with them and went home.

  
  

  During a hospitalization and my subsequent convalescence, my friend Zeke cared for Angel and Mr. Coon. It was winter, and raccoons are semi-hibernatory animals. They sleep all winter, rousing once or twice for a drink of water or a snack. When I was ready to retrieve my animal friends, Coon was asleep in the root cellar under Zeke’s cabin. We left him there, and when the thaw started, Zeke found Coon’s tracks leading down to a creek, where he lost the trail. We never saw Mister Coon again.

  
  

  

  • 4:23 pm
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