There was more wild life on the new side of the lake. There was a rock shelf eighty feet from shore not quite covered when the lake is at its highest and of considerable area when the lake is low. Ducks roost there. When we arrive there is always at least one merganser family, the ten or twelve ducklings riding on mother’s back. We check on them throughout the summer, watching the dreadful attrition, seeing her at last with two or three who live to reach her size. Large migratory seagulls always rest there in the fall, loners who sit scruffily on the rocks, looking as if they were pondering whether such long trips are worth the effort. Wild Canada geese lay over in the shallow bay to the east of us, arriving and leaving with that incredible communal chortling which sounds like a D.A.R. convention after some scoundrel has spiked the punch.
The fine people who own the land to the east of us, the Leightons and the Zimmermans, have their place beyond the shallow bay and own the major share of the lake front between our camps. I own the rest. We are leaving it as is, and now it is the last place at our end of the lake where the wild things feel safe in coming down to the water.
Deer water there. We have not bothered them. If we happen to come too close, they trot a minimum distance and continue browsing on witch hopple. One year there was a doe with twin fawns, and their hoofmarks in the firm damp sand at the water’s edge were dime-size, beautifully crisp, and perfect. There are red squirrels and chipmunks and white-foot mice, scarce one season, abundant the next. Some summers the bird book is used constantly; other years we have a few marsh sparrows, nothing more.
Porcupines have come onto the back porch at night to gnaw the salty handles of the tools. There are fishers in the area, dark, long, heavy-bodied, catlike animals built close to the ground, and of such incredible speed and agility they can spot a red squirrel halfway up a tall tree and grab him before he can reach the branches too slender to bear their weight. Brown rabbits graze in the small open area behind the house.
I remember the day a few years ago when we got up at dawn to watch the television broadcast of the first time we put a fellow into the lower limits of space, in a sort of lob shot. We looked out the big window in the living room and saw a pair of otters down our shore line, playing some intricate game of amphibious tag. The one swam out to the rocks, dived, and caught a large chub, perhaps a pound and a half. He killed it and washed it and carried it ashore to the other one, and they shared it.
The next time I saw Sam Prentiss, I said, “There are some funny semantic values involved here, but somehow those otters seemed to me more important than heaving somebody in a piece of hardware a thousand miles across the ocean. In some nutty way having the otters show up seemed to make that space shot sort of sad and comical and artificial. And maybe pretentious.”
Sam, with wry glance, said, “It’s taking time, but you are learning.”
We hear the shrill yap of the red fox. One of the standard amusements is to drive to the town dump at night, leave the headlights on, and watch the bears. They are the native black bear, up to six hundred pounds in weight. They have one magic I shall never understand. If you placed Roger cat on a loose 45-degree slope composed of cans, bottles, miscellaneous trash, he would make a rumpus akin to dropping bed-springs into greenhouses. But those big bears can drift across such a slope like a bulge of dark smoke, making not the slightest clink or rattle.
Homer Preston, the game protector for the area, is continuously apprehensive about tourists who go to see the bears, who get out of their cars and, conditioned by the myths of Disney and the bears’ mild acceptance of being watched, might one day try to pet one. Homer knows that if this ever happens, the bear is going to pat right back with an energy, speed, and force which could separate the tourists into two or three unattractive pieces.
Not long ago the New York State Conservation Department, in co-operation with Cornell University, conducted a three-year study of the large community of bears in the central Adirondack region. After sides of bacon and culvert traps had been used to catch them, they would then be knocked out by means of a hypo gun and, while unconscious, would be weighed, measured, tagged, and get one ear notched. In the case of the male bears, one testicle was removed and shipped in dry ice to the lab at Cornell. One can imagine that the male bears awoke in a state of some confusion. I believe about six hundred were trapped over the period of the study, and they discovered that the male bears are potent only in alternate years, one half their number being potent in any given year. During the off year their reproductive equipment is non-functional. Though the layman is not likely to get much conversational mileage from this discovery, I assume it must have stimulated the professionals vastly.
One summer not long ago, when the cats could not be with us, for reasons I must explain later, we fed a family of raccoons on the front terrace. For some time Dorothy had been feeding some unidentified creature, leaving a paper plate of scraps out behind the pump house at night. We had to go to New York City for a week, and when we returned the raccoons had become so anxious about the sudden cessation of the handouts, they came around to the front of the camp, a huge female who looked practically round, and her half-grown child. We would leave the outside floods on after they became bolder. We fed them puppy biscuits by hand, but this was hard on the nerves. Those front teeth are like chisels. They move very slowly toward the biscuit and then suddenly take it with an awesome snap.
(We had to stop feeding the red squirrels by hand when, one day, Dorothy walked out without peanuts and the irritable squirrel jumped from the cement deck up to her hand and sliced the pad of a finger open as if a razor had been used.)
One night when we were watching the two raccoons through the window, a huge male raccoon came lumbering slowly up the three concrete steps at the end of the deck, and the female went waddling to meet him. We were certain we were going to see a vicious battle. Among most animals the females will drive the males away from their half-grown young. She reached him just as he got to the top step, and they put on the most incredible greeting we have ever seen. They smooched shamelessly, nuzzling into each other’s throats, rubbing heads, for at least a full thirty seconds, and then together came trundling to the food she had left. I have never seen this kind of display of affection between the male and female of any wild species. It was definitely not the practical business of checking each other’s coat for scents, nor was it a shared washing or scratching, nor even a mating prelude. It was simply a very warm and happy hello.
(Sarasota County has been diligently eradicating the raccoons from the keys and the mainland for several years, on the basis of someone somewhere being bitten by a rabid one. Competent naturalists were quick to inform the county commission that rabies is endemic, relatively dormant, and in non-violent form in every sizable raccoon community in the world. They rarely infect other species, and it is one of the rarest of instances to have one of them go berserk. But minor agitation by the ignorant, the uninformed, the timorous, the nature haters who will not feel safe until the entire earth has been covered with asphalt, this minority gave the commissioners an excuse to set up a permanent patronage post of raccoon-killer, with an assistant to do the scut work, thus devising in perpetuity a nifty little way of rewarding the party hack who might foul up if given a more demanding position. Today a raccoon is a rare sight in the county, and the things the raccoons used to keep under control are beginning to create other problems, much to the bewilderment of everyone. I treasure the memory of the comment of one county commissioner who defended the eradication program by saying, “They are a very dirty animal.”)