On July 6, exactly a week after the two parakeets first met, B.B. appeared for breakfast alone. She ate in a more leisurely manner than she had for some time, and after breakfast she retired to the tea tree to preen her feathers and hone her beak, and now and then doze off. There was an air of complacency about her, as if she was perfectly sure her grooming wouldn’t be interrupted or her sleep disturbed.
She was right, of course. It’s possible that Mr. Rett’s theory about the danger to parakeets from owls applied in Gus’s case. More likely, though, B.B. decided that rather than lose her pleasant, peaceful life as a spinster, she preferred to lose Gus. Whatever her methods — and those two vicious pecks I’d seen her give him surely offer a clue — we never saw Gus again.
The three dogs, Johnny, the Scottish terrier, Rolls Royce, the red cocker, and Brandy, the German shepherd, paid little attention to our exotic bird visitors. To them a troupial was no better or worse than a robin. But the unfeathered four-footed wildlife kept them in a state of excitement, especially at night.
Johnny had a regular raccoon watch. As soon as the sun set, he took up his position at one of the two small louvered windows that had been put in below the main picture window for ventilation. Typically, the louvers never quite closed tightly and John would sit with his nose pressed against the slits, sniffing the evening air, his beady little eyes peering into the darkness. He ignored the rats, who were too common to bother about, and the possums, who were too slow and dull to arouse his interest, and he concentrated on the raccoons. Probably the basic reason for this is that his sight and hearing were failing with old age and the raccoons were the easiest of all our night visitors to hear coming and to keep track of once they’d arrived.
Even if the house was full of people and the hi-fi was fying its highest, the approach of the raccoons could hardly go unnoticed. It was announced by a series of loud, high-pitched shrieks. After this would come the snapping of twigs and crackle of oak leaves and eucalyptus; then, when they reached the silverleaf cotoneaster which was their staircase to the porch, there would be another series of shrieks. As far as I could tell, the raccoons’ fights, which were not confined to mere vocalizing, had to do with the order of ascent, first up the path from the creek, then up the tree to the porch railing. During the mating season, which seemed to last a good part of the year, these noisy sessions were more prolonged and even noisier and were mistaken by most of the neighbors for tomcats fighting.
If I happened to be working late in my office I would see the cotoneaster begin to shake violently — although this kind of cotoneaster (pannosa) is usually referred to as a tree, it is, in fact, a shrub, and not meant to support the weight of twenty-five to fifty-pound mammals. I’d hear the rustle of leaves and the thump, thump, thump, thump, as one after another of the raccoons jumped from the porch railing onto the ledge.
This was the moment Johnny had been waiting for since sunset. His tail would shoot straight up into a black furry exclamation point, stay there for a minute or two as if paralyzed with astonishment, and then it would start to wag. Guests seeing this performance for the first time invariably thought it meant that Johnny wanted to get out on the ledge to play with his new friends. Certainly he wanted to get out, but the purpose wasn’t play and the tail wagging was simply a nervous habit. I have seen him do the same thing just before he leapt for the throat of a hundred-pound malamute. Years of experience — and veterinarians’ bills — have taught me that most male Scotties are inveterate fighters, long of tooth and short of tact.
Johnny’s raccoon watch was watched on the other side of the window by the raccoons’ dog watch. There were three raccoons to begin with, two males we called Rascal and Pascal, and a blithe and bonny female named for our fellow zoophile, Mary Hascall. A plentiful supply of one of their main dietary staples, acorns, supplemented by the hard-boiled eggs and peanut butter sandwiches we provided, had given them thick glossy coats, and moist black noses that shone like patent leather.
Moving in single file along the ledge, the three of them would pass the louvered window beside my chair with barely a glance. But when they reached the window where Johnny was lying in wait, they rose up on their hind legs like little dancing bears and began going through all kinds of dodging and ducking and swaying movements, as if in time to Johnny’s soft, ominous growls.
They also jabbed the air with their front paws in a manner that reminded me of the workouts of a punch-drunk fighter I used to see on the beach. Almost every day he came down to shadowbox on the wet sand. He chose early morning or late afternoon when the sun’s rays were oblique and lengthened his shadow into a formidable opponent. Watching his shadow intensely, almost as if he expected it to make the first move, he would jab and feint, lunge and retreat, weave and bob, twist and twirl. Such a performance invariably attracted an audience, especially kids, many of them Mexican-Americans who stood and watched, half-envious, half-contemptuous. They called him Gavilan and I am not sure to this day whether the reference was to Kid Gavilan or to the numerous gavilans (sparrow hawks) that frequented the playing fields nearby. They called him other things, too, but he didn’t seem to mind. There wasn’t a shadow on the beach he couldn’t lick, just as there wasn’t a Scottie on the other side of the window that our raccoons couldn’t stand up to.
Another raccoon joined us that spring, and in early August the first babies were brought to the ledge, the most irresistible trio I’ve ever had as guests. They were then about two months old, weighing as many pounds and looking like exact miniatures of their parents. At this stage the mother was extremely protective and did her best to shield them with her body when they had to pass Johnny’s window. This wasn’t easy when they got older and more venturesome and so she had to teach them the art of self-defense. These early lessons included, of course, the shadow boxing routine meant to outwit and confound Johnny.
Perhaps the sight of seven raccoons going through such ridiculous motions proved too much for Johnny, or perhaps it was simply that old age began creeping up on him. Each night his raccoon watches started later and ended earlier, and finally, as winter approached, they ceased altogether. The raccoons didn’t notice his absence immediately. They took it for granted that he was on his side of the window just as surely as they were on theirs. Eventually one of the younger members of the group became curious, put his front paws up on the window sill and peered inside. Seeing no sign of Johnny he got bolder and pressed his forepaws and his nose against the glass.
To animals which are mainly nocturnal, like raccoons, the sense of touch is often more important than vision and becomes highly developed in a number of organs. Our raccoons loved to explore things, both with their slim, dainty forepaws and their restless little noses that seemed constantly in motion, sniffing, probing, twitching. I’ve frequently watched a raccoon as he took stock of an item of food I’d never put out previously. He would see it and smell it first, of course, but the main investigation was done by touch. He stroked it slowly and carefully with his front paws, then felt all around it with his nose. If the item of food didn’t pass the test I would find it on the porch or ledge the next morning untasted, without so much as a tooth mark on it. Raccoons are supposed to be omnivorous; ours were not.
If the raccoon decided the new food was worth a try, he would pick it up in his front paws, put it in his mouth and carry it to the large ceramic saucer that served as a birdbath at one end of the ledge. Here he would wash it vigorously, so vigorously that the food frequently disintegrated like a piece of cake tossed in with the family laundry. Eventually the raccoons stopped this practice of washing their food, and just about in time, too — I was getting thoroughly sick of cleaning up the mess in the birdbath every morning.