A Marauder

Although this is a residential community with the usual dogs and cats, we have a great number of other domestic animals and quite a few wild ones as well. There are a few chickens and goats, horses from the stables down the road, and even miniature donkeys which bray once in a while.

We get occasional forages by deer and rabbits and our gardens are eaten by gophers, snails and banana slugs. Ravens swoop about and call raucously; robins feast on whatever berries are growing, whether ivy, cotoneaster or blackberry. Once in a while a gray squirrel will climb the cypresses and run along the telephone wires. A mole made a neat little road of hillocks in the front yard.

At night, there are the owls, the rare possum, skunks and raccoons, lots of them. I am not a friend of the raccoons because they can open the most tightly-sealed garbage can with their dextrous little paws and will scatter the trash far and wide, looking for tidbits. If they get under the house, they will tear out insulation or styrofoam to make nests. They look cute with their little bandito masks, but they will growl and show their teeth if you cross them.

So after a small earthquake and a power outage which lasted longer than usual, we were not sympathetic to the big raccoon who was banging the crawlspace door, trying to get it open. We leaned out the window, shined the flashlight on her, and told her to get a move on. She backed off a bit and waited to see if we would go away. Her eyes were like headlights. Finally she crept away in the dark.

I try to meet the critters halfway. There is a small A-frame down by the fence, under the ivy, where they can get out of the wind, and I keep water for them in a concrete bowl out front. Beyond that, I am not feeling very hospitable when it comes to the raccoons.

"I hope she wasn't pregnant," Nicodemus said.