“Begad!” Smartwhisker said, interrupting her speech. “A long engagement is regrettable. It is all very well for young people to be engaged, if there is a certainty of their being able to marry within a season. In any case, there will be no difficulties for these two to struggle with, I assure you.”
“A woman of good fortune is always respectable,” Pawsense said. “A very narrow income has a tendency to contract the mind and sour the temper. Those who live perforce in a very small, and generally very inferior society, may well be illiberal and cross.”
Funny, Bandit thought. Smartwhisker and Pawsense were braying like tribal heads facing each other formally, even while they were husband and wife standing close enough to each other to be intimate. He guessed their speeches were meant to be overheard by the young.
“An uncertain engagement,” Pawsense said, “an engagement that may be too long. Imagine! To begin without knowing that at such a time there will be the means of marrying. I hold such an arrangement to be very unsafe and unwise, and something, I think, all parents should prevent as far as they can.”
The sunset looked like it wanted to break into pieces at the hypocrisy! It was as if witnessing this absurd union of two raccoons, it couldn’t stand it anymore and was about to fold itself up and go somewhere else to grace another betrothal. Its colours twisted and darkened. Bandit felt a change in air pressure. The dancing girls looked apprehensively at the sky. And then, the earth lifted and dropped. Abruptly, the wind shifted to the north, whipping the tops of the bulrushes. Behind it would come a pelting rain. The marriage party huddled together seeking a new script for the circumstance. Smartwhisker pulled his wife to his chest and frowned in all directions. Goodpaws began taking charge of her sisters, persuading them to bunch together, heads down, in a measured retreat to the house when the sky relieved itself like an angry bladder and the surface of the pond shot upwards in fountains.
Bandit, standing alone in the downpour, was considering what to do when another raccoon blew into him. The raccoon held him tight, buried her face in his mane, and whispered. “Now’s our chance! Run with me!”
18
The stranger had swum in a determined way from the other side of the channel and then continued up her northern island. His scent trail wound through chance openings in the thicket, not following a communal path, the choices made by a solitary individual who wasn’t leaving his fur on branches. Yet he was a long, tall Raccoon. It was a wonder he had got through here at all. The centre of the island was a maze of trees and bushes and saplings and vines and mosses and grass, whose seeds had floated downriver or been deposited in the feces of birds. A compost heap which had taken on a life of its own, based on random contradictions that had settled over time into collaborations.
Here the traveller had been careless and left a strand of his top fur on the spike of a hawthorn. Touchwit tried to discover what she could. She held it to her nose, then rolled it around in her fingers to feel its texture. Not River Clan – there were no molluscs in this one’s diet. And not the newly arrived Raccoonopolitans her aunt had married into either, who liked spicy Primate food. A stranger coming over to fish, having arrived on the Islands randomly like the trees and bushes? A loner. Whoever he was, he was the only raccoon on the island besides herself. His scent was as fresh as this morning.
Touchwit nosed north through a puzzle of bushes. Here he had left some scat. No, not “left.” He had scraped away the loamy soil to make a hole, used the latrine, then replaced the soil, patting it down with his paws. What raccoon buries his scat? And why? This one wanted to go unnoticed. Was he an outlaw?
Touchwit sniffed his trail northward. One creature the island certainly was a home for was mice. Their paths crisscrossed openly with a disregard for predators, most of which couldn’t reach the island over water. The mice fed on tall-bush cranberries, and black hawthorn berries, and grain that had floated down from the factory, creating patches of long prairie grass.
She came out of the thicket suddenly at the water’s edge at the top of the island. He had lingered here to scratch off some burrs that were caught in his fur. He had relaxed for a moment. His trail now led to the right along the shoreline until it came to a heap of branches and mud partly submerged in the water. An organized pile. Somebody had built a home. The stranger’s trail led to the top of the immense covered nest and paused at a hole where he had sniffed. She did the same. Scents of alder, birch, and aspen. And a dark, pungent body oil that made her sneeze.
“You there! Get off my roof!”
Her sneeze had wakened the occupant. “My apologies.” Mom hadn’t told her about this animal in her Outdoor Ed class – probably because he was of no account. Imagine! A vegetarian who eats trees! She tugged gently at the end of a stick jutting out of the lodge, so she could understand the inhabitant. Giant incisors had made those cut marks. This island was a sanctuary for Rodents big and small.
“Replace that element exactly where it was.”
“Sorry!”
“This is my Making. Every stick holds up every other stick in the Work – though I don’t expect you to understand this principle. It is called Beauty.”
“But I do understand. I, too, am a Maker. I did not see your den was a Making. I thought it was just a dwelling.”
“All Makings are Dwellings, if they are well-made. They are things to dwell in. Now go off and make your own dwelling place.”
“Thank you for your wisdom.”
She picked up the stranger’s scent on the other side of the stick house. He had looped diplomatically around the Beaver’s home and returned on his own scent trail to the northerly point, then gone down the shoreline facing west. This one was clever! She found the western shoreline easier to traverse than the interior thicket, but she had to climb over a tree that had tipped over in a storm, leaving its naked roots facing the west winds. Her loner seemed as purpose-bound as earlier, but she could not glean what that purpose was. She knew only that he was far away from his clan, that he was compelled by some inner necessity, and that he was at peace with himself.
And then she lost his scent. It was as if her realization about him had made his track vanish. She pushed further along the riverbank in the direction he had been headed, then made a circle through the forest back to where his scent ended. He hadn’t veered into the interior of the island: it was low-lying ground intersected by inlets of water, intriguing for its food possibilities but unpleasant to traverse. She stood in a bracken of ferns wondering where he had disappeared to. Dawn would be coming soon. She could gain some perspective in the morning light. But first she should find a shelter to spend the day and wash the mud from her paws.
Touchwit looked around for a big tree where she could curl up out of the wind. This would do. A Tamarack that had rooted deep in the soil and survived countless storms. She climbed up to the lap of the tree where the great lower branches divided. Humans, using the word “climb,” think of guided, decisive movements with pauses inbetween. Raccoons simply walk up a tree evenly. Touchwit walked up, then froze. Someone was already in her chosen shelter!
She sniffed. Nothing. She listened for the sound of its breathing. None. The person, whoever it was, wasn’t breathing. She edged closer. The shape had a nose, it had eyes, and those protuberances at the top were ears. But there was nothing in between. Nothing. The wind blew through empty spaces where the skin and flesh of the head should be. Should she get closer?
What decided her was the smell of him on the nearby bark. The Stranger had climbed this tree earlier. She immediately checked its upper branches for him. No, not there. But examining the bark she saw evidence of his claws, his large claws. So he had gone up this tree recently, and if he had tolerated that non-breathing head, then it would be safe for her to examine it.
When she got closer, the spirit thing revealed its shape to her. It was the head of a raccoon. And when she touched the places where saplings had been woven together to form a jaw, with tiny snails shells sunk into the wood in a row so as to resemble teeth, she felt the Stranger’s hands all over it. And how cunning his hands were, to tie these strands of birch bark into knots. She created pretty makings out of vines she intertwisted, but the Loner made intricate knots – knots of three different kinds, depending on the required force exerted on the joins.
But what was this Raccoon Head for? If it was a Making to dwell in, its dweller was the spirit of a raccoon with a very firm mission. It stared west toward the city. She wouldn’t know until the full morning light what alerted it, what caused its ears to stand up, and its powerful eyes, represented by two silver clamshells, to see so far.
Was the effigy meant to be a Watcher? Did it stand guard over the island, scaring away other raccoons who wanted to settle here? Did it assert the Stranger’s ownership of his hunting ground? If he owned this insular compost heap, he was hardly a gentleman who cared to have property. But then it occurred to her that the representation wasn’t a deed of title. Like all the little forms she wove with her restless hands and left on the ground, this watchful Somebody was made just for the delight of making it. Getting the space just right between the rounded ears represented by fungi, burnishing the nose, which was a tree root with the soil meticulously rubbed off it. All the right Proportions. The Head was a Making composed out of the life of the island. It was as if the spirit of the place had risen from the twigs and soil and vines where it slept, and thought itself into a Raccoon. I exist, it said. And by fashioning this raccoon form, the maker of the form could also say I exist. Even though he covered all traces of himself, all identifying markers that could say anything further about him than just I exist.
With that perception, it became clear to her that she had lost his scent at the place where he had left the island and swum west. The Head gazed forlornly in his direction. She sat in the lap of the tree, looking into the night where her Stranger had gone.
19
Three raccoons analysed the problem presented by a chicken coop. Having approached it cautiously from downwind, they lay under a hedge ringing the backyard, listening to the wind gusting through the poplars beside the canal. There was no drooler tied up outdoors, but a scent indicated one was in the house, which meant they would have to take a chicken and get out quickly. The wind held no news of threats.
“We’ve been told that lights may suddenly come on outside a house during a raid,” Sleekfoot said. “Then a Primate will charge out with a bat.”
“Not to mention a drooler,” Lightfinger said.
“We could circle and attack from the north,” Clutch said.
“Our scent would announce us.”
“But we would be less visible and wouldn’t provoke the lights.”
“Perhaps the lights won’t notice us if we attack from here,” Lightfinger said.
Clutch didn’t pursue the question. Really, he wasn’t all that good at tactics. Better at strategy. “Why don’t we think through the attack backwards? Which of us does what in the action? What is our escape route? Wouldn’t those questions help decide our approach?”
“Worth a try,” Sleekfoot said. “The main problem is that we face a hot-tempered rooster who can make one of us lose an eye. He’ll jump up, whip his legs forward, and rip outwards with his spurs.” The older male raccoon was assuming command of the raid.
“That does present a certain complexity,” Clutch said.
