Harold’s Room
Chapter Nine
The month of November has been much like October, with wide temperature swings that have confused poor little Harold terribly. As you are well aware he has been cutting back on his food intake and cycling down for hibernation since late September. He spends a lot less time perambulating about his domain, and a lot more time tucked into various corners thereof, napping. He has started spending most of his time in the potted jungle, and he stopped retiring to the turtle hut at night. He turns around occasionally, but doesn’t change his actual location by more than an inch or so for two or three days at a stretch. It is at this time of year that Lisa and I most frequently find him in his “dead turtle” pose, which scares the hell out of both of us. It’s the one where his neck is fully extended, his head turned at a hard angle to the right, his chin on the floor, all four legs also fully extended, likewise at terribly uncomfortable looking obtuse angles, and you can’t get him to move for hell or high water unless you actually touch him. He does not care to be awakened that way, but sometimes we just have to do it. He looks like he is bloody dead! We have to make sure he is not. Oh my does he get irritated! Such a huffing and a chuffing! And “the stank eye?” Oh my again! Daggers. Pure daggers. If he had a brow it would be furrowed. He is obviously not pleased. But obviously not worried about anyone biting off his head or extremities either.
It is at this time, when he starts exhibiting these behaviors, that I retire the turtle hut to the closet and move “The Fortress of Solitude” to its winter position. It sits slightly further into Harold’s courtyard and closer to the center of the room than the hut was, so I have better maintenance access. Which reminds me, I need to spray him down today. Mustn’t let my boy dehydrate. Must remember to do that in a bit. In previous years the temperature in early November has remained low enough that the resulting sunroom temperature is suitable for Harold’s hibernation requirements, and he is ready to retire around the beginning of the second week of November. This year he has no freaking clue what he wants to do. We have seen temps in the teens, and we have seen temps in the seventies. We have seen snow and ice, and we have seen flowers trying to push up new shoots. It has been much the same with Harold. He has a three day nap while it’s cold, and a three day romp when it warms up. He has even eaten “sausages and toast” on several occasions when he was on a romp, and eventually ended up in the courtyard, impatiently looking back and forth between me and the place where his food bowl is supposed to be. I took the hints when given, and every time I have brought him his bowl when he asked, he has eaten most of the worms and at least a bit of the wheat bread. He has no interest in raw vegetable matter what-so-ever. He wants carbs and fat. This is the first time he has eaten anything after Halloween. In prior years, nada. No interest what-so-ever even on days when he was awake and roaming. It makes me a little nervous, because once they stop eating you are supposed to withdraw food for the duration of the hibernation period, but it was obvious during these warm stretches that Harold wanted food, and every time I brought it he was on it like a duck on a June bug, or Harold on mealworms. This business has messed me up, too, and I figure he knows what he needs better than I do, so I bow to his superior intellect and wisdom. Be right back. I need to go get his misting bottle before another squirrel runs past. When he is on his romps he makes sporadic visits to the hot tub to soak, so I don’t worry about him then, but when he lolls about for three days in the potted jungle playing dead turtle I spray down his bed and tuck him in. He has been back in the fortress for several days now and his bedding is drying out. Can’t have that.
Okay then. All done. That wasn’t too bad. He wasn’t pleased, but at least I didn’t get “the stank eye.” He looks good: eyes are clear, no snotty nose, breathing nicely, not too irritable. He gets grouchy and introverted when he’s sick, but then again I suppose we all do. He sat and glared out of the door of the fortress at me for a bit, after I so rudely interrupted his private musings, but he has now turned back around to face the corner and has snuggled back into his turned, fluffed, and freshly misted bedding. It’s supposed to stay in the mid-to-low thirties for the highs the rest of this week, so I expect we won’t see much of “His Highness” the next few days. The squirrels still look for him this time of year, but they don’t dwell on it too long if he isn’t around, and usually proceed to the shelling of sunflower seeds within a very few moments if they can’t find him. I have no earthly clue as to why they look for him, but they do. Maybe it’s a security or safety issue: “Hey guys! The turtle’s here! He says it’s okay!” They don’t seem to be too concerned if they don’t find him, but they look just the same, and they seem calmer if he is at the window, or at least in sight.
Harold and I were conversing the other day, a warm day when he was awake and ambulatory, and we wondered why we constantly have different raccoons showing up for a while, getting accustomed to us, and we to them, with a modicum of trust between us: we offered, they accepted from our hands. No rancor. The ones who did not trust us did not come, and if they did we encouraged them not to. That typically put an end to it. I am, after all, the biggest coon here. But then our friends would disappear, just go away, and new, unknown guests would arrive, and we would start the whole process of “Hi! Who are you? Would you like some nice, tasty, peanut butter dog cookies?”
“Can I trust you?”
“Sure! Can I trust you?”
“Well, yes, but a lot of humans don’t. I don’t trust them either. They yell and throw things and try to hit me with things, and well, you know.”
“Yes, I know, but neither myself nor Lisa or Harold mean you any harm. We believe we can all get along.”
And that’s how it goes: We have to start all over again, all of us, bipedal and quadrupedal. We did not understand, because from all of our previous experience with raccoons, they are territorial, and the same individuals show up in the same range over and over again, and subsequent research when we began to wonder about this constant departure of old friends and influx of new ones supported our conjecture. They are typically territorial in nature and stay in a general area where they are comfortable that has a consistent food supply, and the progeny are the ones who eventually wander off to find their own less populated territory.
But new evidence has come to light: One of the neighbor’s granddaughters professed that her grandfather was trapping and relocating raccoons. Hmm. He lives one street over from us, virtually on the bank of Pigeon Creek. Hmmmm again. Pigeon Creek is prime raccoon territory: virtual raccoon heaven, the promised land, everything any raccoon could want in its wildest dreams. So this gentleman moves into the neighborhood and begins to shanghai and exile the existing residents, neighbors he could get to know and get along with like we do. He creates vacancies on this prime real estate, and these vacancies are of course immediately claimed by total strangers wandering along the creek bank looking for an opportunity just like this. And so, instead of having a stable population of individuals with whom you are familiar and whose reactions you can somewhat anticipate, you have a constant influx of strangers you do not know at all, and therefore have no idea how they will react to any given situation: Cower? Run? Bristle in defense, and then retaliate? I prefer to know, or at least have an educated guess, so that I have some idea as to how I should approach them, and how I myself should react when they approach me. So far I have not had any problems, knock-on-wood, either with those with whom I am familiar, or with those I am not. I can usually gauge them pretty well, but sometimes I am concerned for Lisa because she has not had as much contact with them throughout her life as I have. I love to light the fire pit and sit outside with them on summer nights, and hand feed them bread, dog biscuits, marshmallows, and whatever else we might have lying about that Lisa would prefer to be rid of. They accept it graciously, and we get along quite well, so my neighbor’s reasoning does not resonate in my mind. Ah well.
Which brings us to Grizzle. He is a newcomer who evidently moved in to fill one of the vacancies, but not a newbie by any means. Grizzle is an older raccoon with a considerable number of scars, quite a lot of gray on his face and muzzle, and an odd white spot on the end of his nose I originally thought was mud, but it never washes off. He’s slightly scruffy looking to be honest, and, well, he is grizzled, which is, of course, how he got his name. I assume he must have previously had contact with humans at some point in his life, because we started to get along fairly quickly. He was a bit hesitant to approach me at first, I assume due to some less than convivial discussions with humans in his past, but it was only a matter of two or three days before he was coming to the door to see if I was about, and to give me the old “Oh! Hi! You wouldn’t happen to have any bread or dog cookies you could spare, would you? I’m awfully hungry” spiel. Of course, as you know, if they come to the door when I’m in here, they do not go away empty handed if I have a single crumb of food left in the house. Grizzle found this arrangement agreeable, and I of course try to not make any sudden movements that my friends find startling or threatening, so we “bonded” within a week. He is still a bit skittish sometimes and scampers away if I open the door too quickly, but he never goes far, never stays gone for more than a few minutes, and always appreciates any offerings we might have available. We like Grizzle.
Back to sleeping beauty over there in The Fortress. As November has progressed the weather has remained inconsistent with widely varying temperatures, so Harold’s sleep patterns have continued to be equally inconsistent: up and down, up and down. Thanksgiving is approaching, this coming Thursday in fact, and the weatherman tells us it should be nice. It is entirely possible that Harold, to my knowledge, may see Thanksgiving for the first time in his life. I fear we have no cape for Thanksgiving. Once he retires to The Fortress the capes are retired to the closet for the winter. His damp bedding is not conducive to the adhesion of tape, and I am fearful of the cloth getting damp and mildew setting in. Can’t have that. Besides, what is the sense of getting all dressed up if you aren’t going out? I suppose we could make him a Thanksgiving cape, but we have no cloth with a turkey motif, though I would surely love to see him in one. If he’s up this year I may have to consider looking for a swatch of turkey cloth for the future. I would hate to miss an opportunity to harass him. Oh my! I could give him pure hell over that: “Get your butt over here, Turkey Boy! It’s time for your bath!”
Well, time has passed again. It did get warmer for Thanksgiving, and yes, Harold did get to see it. I may not have mentioned that my darling wife loves to decorate for the holidays. She has cut back quite a bit since we moved here, and a ton of decorations were given away to friends and loved ones, more left in the rained-on garage sale, and the rest went in a bulk lot of goods sold too a co-worker of Lisa’s he resold all he could at a mart in a local mall. And now. And now! And now I get to tell you about the bin rack she bought to hold the ones she kept. There were still quite a few decorations left, enough to fill the bin rack, maybe ten, twelve, fifteen (?) plastic storage bins? I can go count them if you like, but that would slow down the pace and flow of the narrative, don’t you think? Did I mention I’m having a sip of Jameson? No? Ah. Well, I am. There were also enough bins to take up most of the shelf space mounted along pretty much one entire long wall of the garage. And there were a few odds and ends stuck in closets, and some big plastic garbage bags with garlands and such, several in fact, that went up the fold-down steps into the attic above the garage. For Christmas the following year she asked for another bin rack. It is now also full. So. Harold got to see Thanksgiving, for real. I took him on a tour, and let him crawl about the human space for a bit. Lisa doesn’t go overboard for Thanksgiving, but he was impressed. At some point soon I simply must tell you about RuPaul and Paulette. Soon, I promise, but we still have some ground to cover.
As I mentioned, time has passed, and we are well into December now. Harold has spent most of his time in The Fortress, so there has not been much out of him. Life has pretty much gone on without him, the feeding of the children, and several unusual sightings of a fox. Counting the two times I chased them, I had only seen one four times total since we moved here. Now I have seen one four times in two weeks. Interesting, hey? Always at night, under the red floodlights, and typically just at the back edge of the feeding area, standing there looking this way. They stay for just a moment or two, and then saunter off to the left over behind my neighbor’s house. They are quite beautiful animals. I have now seen more foxes since we moved here than I have in my entire life prior to, and I had certainly never chased one before. Never had a reason to. Shoot, I used to hunt squirrels, so I fear I probably would have wished the fox good luck way back then. Shhh. Don’t tell the squirrels. I have been trying to keep that from them. Lisa threatens to occasionally, when she is not pleased with me. She figures they will mob me if they find out I used to pop them between the eyes with a .22, skin and dress them, cut them up and fry them, whip up some mashed potatoes and some very, very tasty squirrel-cracklings milk gravy… Oh my. Better not go there. Not sure I could fend off nine or ten angry squirrels. Have you ever seen their teeth? They gnaw through black walnut shells for God’s sake! Ever try to gnaw through a black walnut shell? Good luck. Not those paper thin English walnuts. Black walnuts. Hard as a rock, with thick, thick hulls. Those teeth are very long, very hard, and are like carpenter’s chisels. No thank you. We will all have to just get along. I have not fired my Marlin lever action in twenty-eight years. That was to kill a snapping turtle in my pond that was eating all of my goldfish. I still felt bad about it. The last time I killed a squirrel was several years prior to that. I missed the head shot. I never miss the head shot unless I shoot over their head and miss completely. My uncle Ray taught me that. This time that was not the case. It moved as I pulled the trigger. The squirrel fell backwards, then slid down under the limb it was sitting on and I thought it was coming down, but it managed to maintain a grip, hung upside down for a moment, then righted itself and took off. I ran after it, stopping to take another shot when I could. It’s hard to hit a squirrel running through tree branches with a .22, but you can’t just walk away when you have wounded an animal. You just don’t. Finally it was on the ground. There were four bullet holes in it, only one of course which was immediately fatal. That was the last time I shot at anything other than that turtle (Oh my God do not tell Harold!) that was killing all of my goldfish. I wrote a poem about that a long time ago that was fairly well received. It is titled “Playing God.” I believe it’s in a book somewhere. The Aerie I believe. A student publication. It might have made it into The Southern Indiana Review. I don’t remember.
My how I have digressed. Where were we? Oh yes. The forecast for Christmas is warm. In the seventies. Sunny. I certainly have no Christmas cape. If our boy decides to celebrate with us, what shall we do? This presents me with a dilemma. His Christmas dinner is not a problem of course. All he has wanted since Halloween is sausages and toast, but we will all be decked out for the holidays, and as touchy as he is he is quite likely to feel left out and pout. Oh crap. We have no New Year’s Eve accouterments for him either! What if it is warm then, and he is up and about? Oh! Never-mind! As Roseanna Roseannadanna was wont to say. He’ll be asleep by dark anyway, and I doubt the gunshots and fireworks will bother him. I’ll put him in a diaper New Year’s Day and I’m sure he’ll be good with that. If not, too bad. We certainly did not expect him to be up this time of year, and therefore did not plan accordingly in order to cater to his prima donna necessities and requirements. The drama queen will just have to take what we give him and get over it. We’ll be ready for just such a situation next year.