“You are not without companionable features,” she said guardedly. “Good company requires only birth, education, and manners, and with regard to education is not picky. A little learning is by no means a troublesome quality in good company. But birth and good manners are essential.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“…”
“You don’t believe in good breeding, do you? That’s just your Mother speaking. She stuck me at the end of this tree branch because I was born in a chimney.”
Sensibel tossed her willow branch into the pond. “Bandit, dear. She put you there because you have fleas.”
Bandit hung his ears, head, and tail. It was one thing to be tolerated because he was innocuous; it was another thing entirely to be a physical discomfort. He would never have a place in Sensibel’s family tree. He would be merely her decorative admirer, midway between a plaything and a problem.
“But I do adore you. I have thought of you ever since we tussled together …”
His ears almost jumped off his head. And how his heart leaped!
“Let us be companions in mind. We shall be the most enduring of speech-friends and we will keep each other’s secrets forever.”
15
Halfway across to the islands, she started to belong to the river. She’d never swum any distance before and never alone – just splashed around the shoreline when she was a cub, sifting for crayfish. The water felt fluid then, it slipped away through her fingers; now, it filled her paws with its heft.
When she joined with the river, its people came alive all around her. Water spiders flicked out of reach. A shape drifting by in the night held her in its infrared eye. A solitary Duck. No danger. She paddled on with her nose just breaking the surface. The scents of oats and sugar from the factory on the far side of the river. The Raccoonopolitans her Aunt Pawsense had married into had settled on the Heights to the north, attracted by the honeyed raisin cereal they pillaged from vehicles that belonged to a factory. She had it in her mind introduce herself to her new relatives – but first the islands. They had beckoned her ever since she’d seen them in the autumn drought sitting above the level of the water, with the roots of their trees exposed, and then again in the spring when they were submerged by the flooding. She took her clan-family name from these islands.
Touchwit looked up to check her direction. Hapticia the Moon was floating on a clam shell across the sky, watched by her partner, the Great Raccoon Ancestor. She repeated a rhyme her mother had taught her:
O Lady Moon, your horns point to the east.
Wax, be increased.
O Lady Moon, your horns point to the west.
Wane, be at rest.
A waxing Moon pointing out her journey. What would befall her? It was exciting to interpret the voices of her senses instead of having their news bundled into sayings by her mother.
Nervous honking. The Geese downriver at the toe of the south island were agitated. What made them alarmed? It couldn’t be her. She wasn’t in their scent vector and they couldn’t see her flattened against the water. The weather then. Geese react to a whisper of change in the weather.
A flap against the water. A fish jumping. Not a danger. The ones that are dangerous are silent and strike from below. Cold-water carnivores with protruding lower jaws that make them look insolent. They eat ducklings. Sometimes they will pull down a full-grown duck. The bird will be bobbing along happily; then, it will cease to exist. Touchwit trembled, and swam faster. The river was warm and she could swim forever, this paddling motion so natural to her, but she felt insecure without a tree close at hand. And the Geese were right. The weather was going to change. She needed to get to the island quickly.
Touchwit chose a Swamp Oak to dry off on because it sent a branch out over the river. Lying on it, she could be in three worlds, the earth and air and water. She settled into the music of her senses.
After touch, which is intimately connected with their thinking, smell is the sense that raccoons trust most. The ears give information about current happenings and bring the other senses to attention. The eyes indicate a creature’s attitude and motion. But the nose provides news of settled truths – who has made a home here, who has passed through, and how long ago. Raccoons can construct a mental map of a place by nose alone. Yet with the breeze carrying scents off the island faster than she could analyse them, she began to feel apprehensive. Her adventure, which had started out proudly, was dissolving in mystery. This Island, with its indistinguishable mass of new spring growth and old rotting trees, its tangle of ground vines and variety of berry trees, and its rustlings, scurryings, and scratchings, held a deep meaning. Withheld was a better word, because the Island seemed unwilling to offer its meaning to her senses. It felt as if it belonged to some forgotten god who visited rarely. Her hands reached for a shoot of long-stemmed acorns to fashion into a circle.
A branch of Alder leaves was going upriver. How could a branch travel against the current? It looked like it was in a hurry.
Then, an explosive assertion nearby. She knew what that was. It was an Owl, a Horned Owl. The call of an owl means someone is going to die. Maybe she should climb higher in this tree. She felt exposed so close to the water – the tree branch going upriver had unnerved her. The island with its distinctions blown away by the wind had become an unknown. It was a concentrated nothingness, a zone where life begins and ends. But raccoons are nightsiders, and darkness gave her an advantage.
It’s hard to tell from her story where Touchwit went because she recounted her movements according to the scent map she’d composed from a few certainties. The smell of water lilies tells us that she reached a narrow channel of still water separating the northern from the southern island. This channel, I mentioned earlier, is where the food is. It is an underwater larder for raccoons and other creatures like great blue herons and mink who use the islands as a seasonal fishing camp. But she ate only some elderberries to sharpen her senses. Touchwit was too intent to be hungry. For, out of the density of growth and decay in this mysterious nothingness, one scent stood out. It was the smell of a Raccoon, a senior male, who travelled alone and covered up his tracks with care.
16
Clutch was glad to see the boathouse the silly Mouse had pointed him to. He needed the company of his own kind. What had the Mouse said? You are going to squeeze through a tight space into your future. You have kinsfolk hiding in a boathouse and they haven’t eaten for nights and they are hungry. You will become a responsible Raccoon. The prophesy sounded heavy with fate but he discarded it. The Mouse was trying to sound significant so it could escape its own fate. Of course he was going to meet some kinsfolk! He was in the proximity of the largest raccoon colony in the city. By telling him about the hideaways in the boathouse, the rodent had made the prediction come true, since no self-respecting elder brother and acting family head hearing this information would fail to help clan members in distress. If not for the mention of kin in a boathouse, he wouldn’t be here, wondering how to break in without alarming its occupants.
Clutch stood on the boards of a dock still warm from the afternoon sun. He understood the building and its function, though he’d never seen one before. It was exactly what the Mouse had said: a boathouse, a den for boats.
The slap and gurgle of waves under the dock echoed inside the boathouse. There was water inside for the boat to float on. But how to get in? The door had a lock that required a key. The fly screen covered a closed glass window. He sniffed the sides of the structure for the scent of raccoons to determine how they entered and exited. Nothing. Not even a strand of fur.
He’d been tricked! The Mouse had contrived a situation that didn’t exist just to obtain its freedom.
Clutch sat in the lee of the wind in a temper, listening to lakewater splash against a closed boathouse door. The south-easterly breeze had shifted around to a stiff west wind making the lake raise its hackles. Water hitting the door the boathouse! Yes! Why not go in the same way the water got in?
Clutch dug his foreclaws into the wood door, swung over, and slowly descended tail first into the lake. This was scary. It was like the time he was suspended between the eavestrough and the cedar tree, kicking at nothing and having a panic attack. In its fear, his body had forgotten how to breathe. Well, he was going to have to forget how to breathe now while he scrambled underwater around the bottom of the door.
He took a deep breath, reached underwater with his foreleg, grasped the bottom of the door, swung himself around under it, and popped up beside a boat. There! That was easy. No existential crisis. On the contrary, he was quite proud of his ingenuity. He clambered onto an inside dock and sniffed the darkness. Fresh pine-wood. Varnish. An empty container for fish. Canvas. Gasoline.
“If you’re an Otter or a Weasel, we’ll rip your ears off!”
The voice came from overhead. Two arched shapes. They were hiding in the rafters.
“I am not an otter nor a weasel. I am Elder Brother of the Island Family of the River Clan, and I have come to help you.”
“Go away. Find your own hiding place, which is the Custom.”
Scents of a young male, a season older than himself, with a female, not fertile, probably his sister. They were hiding just as the Mouse had said. Who were they hiding from? The Creek Town raccoons had all fled and were taking refuge in holes everywhere. The Gander was right – but why? There could only be one threat they were hiding from. His father.
“I am a Raccoon who is unwilling to fight on principle. That should assure you that I can do you no harm.”
“You can do us no good either. If you’re unwilling to fight, you’re unable to help us.”
