Once Johnny’s absence was discovered by the young raccoon, all the others came to the window and took turns looking in to see what had happened. It became a nightly routine: Oh dear, what can the matter be? Johnny’s so long at the fair.
Sometimes, perhaps by accident, perhaps by design, they would tap the glass with their claws. The noise didn’t wake up Johnny but the other two dogs would charge over to the window, barking at the top of their lungs. The raccoons merely stared, as though in disapproval, at such a lack of gamesmanship. It was funny the way they paid less attention to the noise of the big German shepherd and the hysterical spaniel than they did to the almost inaudible growls of the little Scottie. That they showed good judgment can be attested to by a tree surgeon, now nameless but not forgotten, who has the dubious distinction of being the only person ever bitten by one of our dogs. After trimming the trees on the adjacent property he climbed over the concrete wall into our patio to pick up a fallen limb. “I was keeping my eye on the two bigger dogs,” he said, several stitches later. “I never thought of watching the runt.”
The raccoons were smarter. They watched the runt.
Our possums were as tame as the raccoons, but it was a different kind of tameness. The raccoons had sized us up carefully and decided we were okay, the possums simply seemed oblivious to our presence and carried on their affairs as if we weren’t there.
One of these affairs was a knock-down-drag-out fight that started low in the tea tree and got higher and higher until the battle between the two twelve-pound beasts was being waged on the uppermost branch which was hardly more than a twig. Underneath the twig, a long, long way down, was solid concrete. The possums might have survived such a fall but they couldn’t have escaped injury of some kind, so I tried to stop the fight by pounding on the window and shouting at them. The only effect this had was to draw the dogs into the action, which in turn drew Ken out of his study.
Ken took the situation in at a glance — not too surprising since it involved a couple of fighting possums, three furiously barking dogs and a large over-excited woman — and decided to try a different approach. He would coax the pugilists down from the tea tree with food. Grabbing a box of cookies out of the cupboard he went down to the patio, turned on the floodlights and began placing cookies underneath the tea tree where the possums couldn’t help seeing them. That is, the possums couldn’t help seeing them if they looked down. Only they didn’t look down. They looked at each other, and the battle continued. To attract their attention Ken threw a cookie at them. It missed. He threw a couple more and they also missed, but as his temper got worse his aim got better. The fourth cookie clipped one of the possums on the nose and the fifth hit his opponent square in the eye. Both animals loosened their grips and peered down as Ken let go with another round of ammunition.
Possums are not very bright but I think even they recognized that there was something unusual about being attacked by Nabisco Vanilla Cremes.
When the young raccoons were about two-thirds grown, the parents began treating them not as their own offspring anymore but as unrelated adults in competition for the food supply. Fights were shrill and frequent, on the porch and ledge, in the cotoneaster tree, on the patio and on the lower terrace beside the concrete birdbath which was knocked over nearly every night. During the winter one pair of raccoons deserted us, presumably to seek more peaceful surroundings. For the others a system was eventually worked out, much like the pecking order among birds.
The large male arrived first. He climbed up the cotoneaster alone, inspected the food in the wooden dish and on the deck of the porch and ate what he fancied. The same procedure was repeated on the ledge, and it was all done in a very leisurely manner, as if he couldn’t have cared less about the four hungry creatures who were waiting. The next diner was the female, and after her, the three young ones.
By the time their turn came, there was usually nothing left but bread crusts and orange rinds and half-eaten grapes, so I decided to even things up a bit. As soon as the two adults had eaten and gone on their way, I would sneak extra food out to the youngsters, hard-boiled eggs, bananas, cheese, doughnuts, bread and honey. They caught on to this arrangement very quickly and I would find them waiting for me just outside my office door. When I opened the door they would put on a show of scampering away in terror, but it wasn’t very convincing. The young members of any species are bolder than their elders — or perhaps more trusting.
With a house to run I couldn’t devote all my time to raccoons and I was sometimes late putting out the food. When this happened they jogged my memory by rearing up on their hind legs and tapping on the windows. Every section of glass accessible from the porch or ledge bore the tracings of their delicate forepaws and the smudge marks of their wet little noses. In the beginning the dogs made a terrible racket when they saw the three black-masked faces peering in at them. Eventually a truce was reached and it became a nightly routine for the three dogs on the inside of the window, and the three raccoons on the outside, to stand and quietly size each other up.
It seems a fairly safe assumption that neither group arrived at a very favorable opinion of the other. It must remain an assumption, however, since the two groups never met in the open as far as I know. When the dogs were let out in the evening they stayed on the front part of the property and the public road, as if they realized that after dark the canyon belonged to the night visitors.
15
Rainbirds on the Roof
It was the first day of autumn, 1964. Those Santa Barbara residents who lived within a block or two of the sea woke up to a dense fog and the ominous warnings of the foghorn at the end of the breakwater. The rest of the city was awakened by the brilliant rays of a September sun and realized it was going to be a hot day. How hot none of us could ever have guessed.
The summer that was ending had been one of drought, as usual. The last rain measurable on our gauge was a tenth of an inch in May. September occasionally brings some moisture — the hundred-year average is about a quarter of an inch — but it is better known for bringing our hottest and driest days. For us this is the month of santanas, the scorching winds that blow in over the mountains from the Mojave Desert, a vast area covering some 14,000 square miles.
We are accustomed to sea winds and their ravages: tons of kelp strewn along the beaches, alive with tiny octopi and starfish and skate eggs that look like black plastic comb cases; boats escaped from their moorings, loose anchors and racing buoys, dead fish and sea lions and leopard sharks; battered sea birds, surf scoters and whitewings, all kinds of gulls and terns and cormorants, western grebes and horned grebes, arctic loons and red-throated loons; and once — and only once, thank Heaven — the newly severed head of an enormous wild boar, brought to my reluctant attention by our German shepherd, Brandy.
Sea winds may be violent and cruel, but in a coastal town they are a natural part of life. Santanas are strangers, intruders from the other side of the mountains. They are not polite or kindly strangers. We give them no welcome and they in turn come bearing no good will. One of them almost cost our city its life.
A santana ordinarily arrives on a calm, quiet night. Some people claim it gives no warning, others sense its approach or “feel it in their bones.” Nothing psychic is involved, and no bones either, merely skin and mucous membranes reacting to a rapid lowering of humidity and rise in temperature. In southern California the temperature always goes down with the sun, and this rule is broken only by the arrival of a santana.