He saw my partner’s red hair through the bedroom window and called: Hi Sweetie!
Where had she found a stethoscope that translated animal speech? The instrument, which came with her job, was quite ordinary. A smartphone with a universal translation app proved to be useless and the diagnostic smartphone app reported only four hearts beating slowly in the manner of hibernants. This act of lurking made me feel uneasy. What right did I have to overhear and retell a family’s private conversations? Yet the raccoons seemed to enjoy my presence so long as I stayed on my side of the wall. They had referred to me casually during the Fall, even at times addressing me deliberately.
Still, ethical concerns linger as happens with technology. How much of what the stethoscope translates is authentic raccoon speech and how much is a human equivalent meant to help me imagine what the creatures are saying? Raccoons don’t say “Delissio pizza.” But the popular brand-name stands for all the common pizza crusts that end up in waste containers in my city and get raccoons through the winter, along with birdseed fallen from backyard feeders and kibble left on porches for stray cats. You see, it isn’t the name but the context that does the naming. Context does most of the work in animal communication which isn’t made up of words but gestures, displays, mood signs, pawprints, scents, and movements. The raccoons wouldn’t have said “glutton” or “voracious,” but simply turned with one mind towards the pizza-stuffed Bandit, sniffed with one nose the body scent of this indiscriminate omnivore, and come to the same comical conclusion.
My partner’s stethoscope is also sensitive to that animal awareness of context, which is called etiquette. For instance, it translates them speaking in an ancient, formal “High Tongue” when addressing the subject of gods, ancestors, and first principles. I would go on to learn from the stethoscope that raccoons have a cultivated polite idiom which they reserve for exchanges with a social equal who is unfamiliar. This is what you’d expect of a mammal raised in a snug family hierarchy and unsure of others until they demonstrate their place in an ordered system. Another example: over three-fifths of the sense-making area in the brain of Procyon lotor, the Common or Northern Raccoon, is directed to touch, not to sight or sound or smell. They have four to five times more sensory cells in their hands than humans. Their brains are in their paws. It is easy to imagine them washing their paws so as to stimulate the touch centre in their cortex in a ritual of self-affirmation. The very name raccoon as heard by colonists in Jamestown from the Pawahtan people indigenous to Virginia is aroughcun (pronounced a-raw-coon), meaning “one who scratches, rubs, scrubs with its hands.”
Eventually, I consulted the literature of the shamans, the original human experts on animal behaviour, who taught through storytelling. Their narratives show a wary, affectionate respect for most animal people. That respect might be summed up as courtesy – a reticence to presume to know things about someone who is mysterious and strange. And this courtesy is shown by a playfulness in the storytelling, a spirit of mischievous fun in exaggerating details and coincidences. “Don’t be solemn. This is only a story – we don’t know for sure how the animal people really think. We just know that they can reason and feel as well as you and me. Enjoy the story for the fun of it, and if you pick up some wisdom along the way, that’s good.”
I read shamanic tales on and off until Spring came and my brilliant house-mates woke up.
7
Another rainy night in a Spring that is happening in a series of stop-action frames instead of a uniform surge. Raccoons can handle the cold, but if they don’t have to leave their dens to eat they can put a wet night to use by being clever. The familiar chittering behind my wall suggests that Mistress Slypaws has resumed her home schooling.
“Sex Ed. Or for aspiring alpha males present, Relate, then Mate,” was how my partner’s stethoscope translated it.
Clutch: “Snore!”
Slypaws: “We shall tiptoe around any discomfort raccoons may be feeling by talking about Trees. Trees are hot. Soon they’ll be drenching us in their love-talk and making Touchwit sneeze.”
Clutch: “Like I said, boring.”
Slypaws: “Raccoons need to know their Trees – which ones to sleep in, which ones to climb. Trees ’R Us.”
Slypaws has the clarity of an army boot camp instructor. She often begins with “Listen carefully: what I’m going to say will save your life,” then proceeds to “There are three basic facts you need to know … Fact One.” But tonight she puts method teaching aside.
“Snap Quiz: Name the Tree People surrounding our den. Touchwit.”
“Cedar families, front and back. The folk along the roadway on the winter sun side are Silver Maples. They have hard bark, slim trunks, few branches, and zero escape options except straight up. Do not climb.”
Touchwit is being diplomatic about my barricade of trees. They grew together in a row all at once, causing them to trade off spread for height in their race for sunlight. Their tops wave in the breeze like poplars, and they leave a carpet of pale yellow seeds on the service road that runs along the south side of my property. In the Fall, they cover the road with yellow leaves. My neighbours are grateful for the opportunity this gives them to sweep the leaves up. They lean on their rakes and exchange good-natured gossip about neighbours and their attitude towards trees. When they’re feeling really devoted to cleaning up after the trees, they use a power blower. You don’t know what it’s like to enjoy a Fall Saturday morning if you haven’t heard the sound of a power blower through a two-pane insulated window with the drapes drawn and a pillow over your head.
“I like the Silvers,” Touchwit says. “They’ll throw a shadow over our dwelling and keep it cool so we don’t pant in the Summer.”
Dear Touchwit! She’s taking my side in a neighbourhood dispute about what to do about these messy trees that might be my responsibility or the City’s, depending on where the property line runs. For some reason, no one has cared to find out exactly where that is. It disappears on its way to meet the river into an impenetrable thicket of buckthorn and grapevines, and that is the end of the question. Besides acting as twelve air conditioners, the silver maples keep me in relative obscurity from the parade of people who use the service road to cross a footbridge over to the city. There are mothers pulling their toddlers in grocery-laden carts, men returning from the store with cases of beer on their shoulders, elders driving their electric rickshaws, groups of joggers wearing lime-green vests and lights on their foreheads, families strolling, individuals bicycling, groups walking for a charity, and people walking their dogs, especially an athletic woman with a greyhound.
Touchwit says: “Turning to the sunset side of our den, there is the mighty Sugar Maple halfway down the lawn – she’s a matriarch. And on the riverbank is her elder daughter.”
The grandmother sugar maple that Touchwit mentions appears in a city photograph of around 150 years ago and is now over a hundred feet tall and so old her branches are drooping.
“And in the Buckthorn thicket there is a Red Maple. Everything about him is red: twigs, buds, flowers, and leaves – but only when they appear and when they fall.”
“Excellent,” Slypaws says. “But you forgot the brawny Maple who has muscled his way in among the Silvers. Treat him with respect. He’s a survivor, like us raccoons. His kind grow in the back lanes of cities, wherever they can grab a toehold. Maybe you passed over him because you don’t know his name.”
I know its name. It’s the Manitoba Maple that leans dangerously over my house, trying to reach a patch of sunlight in the unanimity of shade thrown by the Silver Maples – an opportunistic individualist sticking out brashly in a sedate arboreal community.
“It’s a good climbing tree for raccoons,” Bandit says.
“We call it the Maple That Wants To Be Different because its leaves are like those of the Ash in their design, and because it separates its sexualities.”
“Mom! You said separates its sexualities?”
Bandit, of course. Just like him to be intrigued by the phrase. I’m intrigued too. Mom’s explanation is going to be fascinating:
“By sexualities, I mean what a tree shows in its flowers when it blossoms. The flowers contain its reproductive organs. The Maple That Wants To Be Different keeps its sexualities a distance apart from each other by separating their reproductive organs so that male and female are not in the same flower. There are girl Raccoon bodies and boy Raccoon bodies. So, in the same way, there are girl Maple bodies and boy Maple bodies of this kind of tree.”
Silence follows. Presumably, Bandit is pondering this news. His sister and brother are considering it in their different ways. Who will speak next? I guess it will be Touchwit because she has an impulse to leap ahead of discussions with her insight. Or will it be Clutch, drawn out of his innerness by the fact that in the tree world individual male and individual female bodies are the exception, not the rule? But it is Bandit who breaks the silence.
“Do the male trees jump the females?”
“Bandit is uneducable,” Touchwit points out.
“Trees mate without tussling with each other,” Slypaws says. “Take the Sugar Maples. Soon you’ll see them wearing their mating gowns of pale green. The garments are composed of clusters of flowers with long stalks. Their sexual organs dangle from the ends of the stalks. The boy flowers are longer than your finger and they’re hairy. The girl flowers are shorter than the boys’ and they have two long tubes with widened tops that are sticky. Sugar Maples are tricksters. They can make their boy and girl sexualities appear on separate trees, or on separate branches of the same tree, or even on the same branch of a tree. Boy flowers are mostly low on the tree; girl flowers are mostly high up.”
Touchwit asks: “Don’t we also keep our two sexualities in the same body?”
“It can’t be that perfect,” Clutch says. “Otherwise, we’d mate with ourselves.”
“Clutch is right,” Slypaws says. “Maybe what you’re asking is: does a Boy Raccoon have two sexual energies in his one body? Of course, he does. The girl energy holds back while the boy energy goes looking for a Girl Raccoon. Similarly, a Girl Raccoon has two energies in her one body, but the boy in her is smart enough to keep his mouth shut while the girl is courting.” Slypaws is looking hard at Touchwit.
“Trees ’R Us,” Clutch repeats knowingly. “So we should normally expect to see boy and girl features in the same flower.”
“Oh, I see,” Touchwit says. “Our bodies are girl-boy, but at any time we are a little more girl than boy, other times a little more boy than girl.”
“When you were tussling with cousin Sensibel,” Clutch tells Bandit, “there were – count them – four sexualities at play all at once.”
“But the Tree That Wants To Be Different is unique,” Bandit insists. The remark is a statement, not a question.
