Rascal

by Sterling North

  The canoe itself was as safe as a rowboat, four feet shorter than the one I was building, and twice as wide. It was a handsome craft, riding the water like a swan and taking us lightly over the shallows where trout lay on the clean gravel, nosing upward against the current. They were almost as invisible as a woodcock among brown leaves.

  There were very few good fishing places along the first quarter mile below Bert’s pool, and I did not put aside my paddle to take my rod until we had passed the second bend.

  Here we found water so peaceful that we could cast our bucktail flies at leisure while letting the canoe drift slowly with the current. A noisy kingfisher disputed our right to his domain, darting angrily across our path, his crest as erect as the war bonnet of an Indian. For perhaps thirty seconds a mink watched us from a sand bar, appearing from the underbrush and disappearing again so quickly that we might have doubted our senses had not all three of us seen him clearly. My father hooked a small trout but returned it to the stream.

  As we left the pool we again took our paddles to dart precipitously down another chute. Guiding this craft among the boulders, I thought happily of my own canoe at home which some day would be ready for the water. My raccoon and I would be afloat every possible moment.

  About a mile below Bert’s cabin, Rascal’s sensitive nose caught a scent that spelled danger, and he trilled a warning. Just then my father and I saw a blueberry patch that looked as though it had been hit by a small cyclone. A little farther down the stream, a hollow tree had been ripped open as though by lightning, with shreds of bark and rotten wood and dark honeycomb strewn over a gravel bar. There could be no doubt about it. This was the work of a bear.

  Talking softly now, and paddling quietly, we progressed cautiously over tranquil water around a wide bend in the stream. And there they were, at the foot of the pool, a mother black bear and her two cubs. She had just tossed a big trout to her offspring from the rapids below this pool, and the cubs were fighting over the fish, snarling and snapping.

  Rascal’s high trill diverted her from her fishing, and with a deep-throated growl she stood her ground for a few moments, eyeing us angrily. Rascal didn’t need to be cautioned against swimming to meet these big, rough cousins of his. He stood transfixed at the prow, fascinated but trembling.

  The bear spoke sharply to her cubs and plunged into the willows and aspens with a great crackling of brush. And her obedient young raced after her. They disappeared as completely as the mink, and soon there was silence.

  “Well, Sterling, you’ve seen your first bears.”

  “And my first deer, and my first porcupine.”

  Nothing could top this experience, I thought, but at the next trout pool there was one to match it. I overcast the pool into the rapids below and was retrieving my bucktail in an erratic manner to avoid a snag when a smashing strike bent my pole as though it were of willow. My line was taut, and the fish had hooked himself solidly on the wet fly and seemed inclined to take it all the way downriver to Lake Superior.

  My father backed water to hold the canoe steady against the slight current running through the pool, and I did my best to keep the trout from tangling the line in the half-submerged log in the rapids.

  Other fish can fight, but there is nothing quite like big trout for style and grace and courage—as though they drew strength from the whole wilderness. Rascal was as excited as I, chattering and chirring.

  Changing tactics, the fish made a dash upstream into our pool. I reeled in slack line as rapidly as possible to keep the needed tension on the hook. For one dreadful moment I thought I had lost him, but a few more twists of the reel showed me that the trout was still solidly hooked, deep in the Brule. In another few moments he surfaced, saw the canoe, and started a wide, circling run upstream.

  My father swung the prow one hundred and eighty degrees to give me the best chance to play my fish, which now broke water in a great gleaming leap. Rascal’s high trill was like a cheer of praise.

  When at last my father slipped the net under my fish and brought him into the canoe I found that I had a fine brown trout, one of the largest I would ever catch in a lifetime of fishing. By the scales in my tackle box he weighed just over four pounds.

  “He’s as big as you are, Rascal,” I said with delight.

  “He’s a beauty, Sterling.”

  “Shall I try for more?”

  “If you like.”

  But as I put my fish on wet ferns in my creel, I decided I would leave all the other trout in the stream for that day. With pulse still beating a tattoo, I took my paddle and we began the tough return journey against the current.

  Somewhere it must all be recorded, as insects are captured in amber—that day on the river: transcribed in Brule water, written on the autumn air, safe at least in my memory.

  That was the best trout I have ever eaten. It made a feast that evening for the three of us. But soon after dousing our campfire a wind arose, roaring through the pines, and driving the cold rain like sleet through the dripping forest. We hastily packed everything in the car, put up the side curtains, and spent an uncomfortable night huddled on the seats of the Oldsmobile. Next day we started home through air washed clean by the storm. We were tired and damp, but replenished by two weeks among the pines of our magnificent north country.

  V: September

  WHEN we curved up our drive, Edgar Allan Poe came swooping down from the Methodist belfry shouting, “What fun! What fun!” Wowser, who had thought he was totally deserted, came bouncing from the barn, leaped to put his paws on my shoulders, and knocked me flat on my back in the grass where he lovingly washed my face with his big tongue.

  Rascal and the crow were soon fighting over something, and Wowser stopped licking me long enough to put an end to the squabble.

  It was a wonderful homecoming.

  Sweet corn was no longer an issue, being dry in the husk. But I had made a promise and was honor-bound to keep it. I couldn’t postpone indefinitely the collar and leash, nor the building of the cage. We had been granted our reprieve and now must face our problems.

  One of those problems was money. I had earned and saved enough to buy one Liberty Bond, but my available supply of ready cash was very low. I counted the quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies in my earthenware crock and decided that if I bought the leash and collar, and the lumber and chicken wire for the cage, it would set me back about six months in purchasing canvas to cover my canoe. And that meant the canoe would have to stay in the living room another winter.

  Not one of the boys I knew was granted an allowance or would even think of asking his father for a loan. I felt fortunate to be permitted to keep the money I earned from mowing lawns and selling my garden produce.

  I took four precious quarters from the crock, put Rascal in the basket of my bicycle, and pedaled slowly and sadly downtown. Buying a collar and leash for my pet raccoon was like buying a ball and chain for a dear friend. But I thought it would be wise to have Rascal’s approval and assistance; it might lessen his terror when he found that his freedom had vanished.

  We stopped at Shadwick’s Harness and Leather Emporium, which smelled delightfully of tanned leather, saddle soap, and harness oil. It was a perfect place for Rascal to browse, examining the stirrups of both Western and English saddles, the brass buckles on the work harnesses, and the exquisite silver mountings on a set of driving harnesses being made for the local banker’s high-stepping team.

  Garth Shadwick, like his father before him, was a craftsman in leather whose skill was known as far away as the county seat and the state capital. He made handsome leather luggage, custom-fitted riding boots, and engraved book bindings. But most of his trade was in harnesses; and harness-making was a profession threatened by the automobile.

  At this moment Mr. Shadwick had a jeweler’s glass in his right eye and was engraving scrolled initials on a silver nameplate. I would not interrupt him at such a moment, and waited patiently until he took the glass from his eye and looked up from
his work.

  “Well, Sterling?”

  “We don’t want to bother you, Mr. Shadwick . . .”

  “Boys and ’coons don’t bother me,” the harness-maker said.

  He returned to his engraving for several minutes, then tossed it aside and exploded, “It’s these gol-danged automobiles, smelly, noisy, dirty things, scaring horses right off the road . . . ruin a man’s business . . . Well, son, speak up. What is it you want?”

  “I want a collar for Rascal,” I said, fighting the stinging moisture in my eyes, “and a braided leash to match. . . . And they’re making me build a cage to lock him up.”

  “Gol-danged buzzards,” the harness-maker said. “Cage for a little ’coon like that? Going after boys and ’coons now, are they?. . . You want his name engraved on a silver plate on the collar?”

  “I haven’t got much money,” I said hesitantly. “But that would be wonderful. . . . His name is Rascal.”

  “Come here, Rascal, and let me measure your neck,” Garth Shadwick said, leaning over to pat my complacent pet.

  “You don’t need to measure him, Mr. Shadwick. Here’s a string that’s just the right length for the collar, with knots where the holes and the buckle should be, and allowing a little for when he gets bigger.”

  The harness-maker came as near to smiling as I had ever seen him. With swift precision he went to work on a strong, light collar of pliable, golden-brown calfskin, about half an inch wide. He used his smallest awl to make the holes and his smallest needle and lightest waxed thread. Then he went to his safe and brought out a tiny silver buckle which he sewed to the collar with almost invisible stitches. It was the sort of work he would have done if asked to make a harness for a fairy coach. Finally he put his glass to his eye, and on a very small silver nameplate inscribed “Rascal” in a fine Spencerian script.

  “That’s the most beautiful raccoon collar I ever saw in my life,” I said.

  “It’s the only raccoon collar you ever saw—” the harness-maker chuckled gruffly—“and the only one I ever made. . . . Better try it for size.”

  I wasn’t certain that Rascal would like to have the collar put around his neck, but I couldn’t hurt Mr. Shadwick’s feelings. I let the little raccoon feel it and smell it first, telling him it was his newest treasure. Rascal liked the shining buckle and nameplate and the texture of the soft leather.

  Finally I slipped it around his neck, and to my surprise he didn’t struggle or try to nip me. Instead he sat up on his square little bottom and began feeling the collar the way a woman sometimes fingers her pearls.

  Mr. Shadwick brought the floor mirror used for viewing riding boots. And Rascal, who had never before seen his mirror image, became greatly excited. He wondered what other raccoon was being fitted for a collar this morning. First he bumped his nose trying to get through the mirror. Then, talking and trilling, he raced around behind the glass to meet the other raccoon, who of course wasn’t there. Back he came, completely mystified, but still entranced. Finally he gave it up as a puzzle too deep for his small brain and merely sat and viewed himself, chirring happily.

  Making the leash took a little longer, but again the harness maker worked with amazing dexterity. He cut six very slender strips of the same calfskin, and began the most elaborate job of braiding I had ever seen. His fingers worked so swiftly I could not see which strands went over and which went under and through. The finished leash, inch by perfect inch, was as slim as the tip of my steel fishing rod.

  At my end of the leash he fastened a silver harness ring, at the other end a snap to attach to the collar.

  I knew that I didn’t have enough money in my earthenware crock to pay for such a collar and leash complete with silver fittings. So I put my four quarters on Mr. Shadwick’s work bench and said it was a down payment and that I would bring him something every week for the next six months.

  The harness-maker gazed off through the window the way Rascal often did—his mind going back, perhaps, to his own boyhood when there weren’t any gol-danged automobiles to ruin the finest profession in the world.

  “Why, son,” he said, “I’d be cheating you if I took more than twenty-five cents for that leash and collar. Now get along with your little ’coon. I’ve got work to do.”

  There had been an overcast when we had started downtown that morning. But the sun was shining brightly as we pedaled homeward.

  The opening of school was postponed for a month in the autumn of 1918. With so many young men away at war, the women and older children tried to fill their places on the farms around Brailsford Junction.

  In this rich tobacco region, the crop is harvested in September—late enough to avoid “shed burn,” but early enough to avoid frost. This is heavy work—chopping the tobacco stalks, spudding these plants on laths, and hanging the tobacco in the sheds to dry. I was too slight to be of much assistance in the harvest field, but I continued to produce food in my war garden—bushels of carrots, beets, and potatoes.

  I used my garden as a justification for delaying the building of Rascal’s cage. But I knew that his imprisonment could not be postponed forever, particularly after he developed a craving for a new nocturnal delight, the grapes hanging in purple clusters in nearby arbors. Rascal also sampled apples of many varieties—Jonathans, Winesaps, Tolman Sweets. And he was growing increasingly casual about obeying my imperative trill, which meant as he well knew, “Come down from that tree, you bad raccoon!”

  I came to the reluctant conclusion that I would have to buy the materials and start constructing the cage. Taking my small hoard of coins from the earthenware crock, I snapped the leash on Rascal and walked down Albion Street toward Cy Jenkins’ lumber yard. My raccoon had been introduced to his leash so gradually that he no longer strained against it painfully.

  Considering my mission, I found it hard to enjoy this season which had always given me so much pleasure: the yellow elm leaves drifting down, the first flash of crimson in the maples.

  Cy Jenkins had cheated me when I had bought lumber for my canoe. But he was so eager to see Rascal caged that he now pretended to be giving me a bargain on two-by-fours and chicken wire. He merely asked how much money I had and took it all.

  “Comes out right to the penny,” he said.

  The old miser added one other concession, promising to deliver the material by truck on the following morning if I would start building the cage on its arrival.

  I stopped at the post office to get our mail, and found a letter from Herschel addressed to me. My fingers trembled as I opened it. I had dreamed several times that he had been wounded, and I had been reading Arthur Guy Empey’s Over the Top, a crude but vivid book about the war. In every scene I imagined Herschel.

  In one persistent dream I saw him leading a reconnaissance squad into no-man’s land at night, flattening him-self as star shells burst, and making his way through barbed-wire entanglements where corpses dangled grotesquely. Much later I learned that he had made scores of such excursions between the lines.

  Censorship made communication almost impossible in World War I, and Herschel’s letter merely sent his love and confirmed the fact that he was unwounded. I remember one sentence in particular because it was typical of his wry good humor:

  “Send me some Paris garters, Sterling. They claim in their ads that ‘No metal can touch you.’”

  The fact that Herschel was still alive and unhurt, and that Rascal and I still had one afternoon before I must start building the cage, raised my spirits considerably. I made jelly sandwiches for the two of us, and we climbed the cleats I had nailed to the oak tree, taking with us our picnic lunch and a copy of Westward Ho.

  High in our favorite crotch, we ate and I read, fascinated by the adventures of Amyas Leigh. Rascal meanwhile indulged in a favorite pastime of raccoons, sunbathing on a lofty limb. He lay flat on his fat little belly on a branch he could comfortably embrace, letting all four legs dangle over the sides in easy balance. His muzzle pointed upstream on the bough, and his
handsome ringed tail lay straight behind him. And there he dozed for hours, absorbing the healing sunshine of September as though he were storing up warmth for the long, cold season ahead.

  I was equally happy, and quite as lost to the world, as I sailed the Spanish Main with Amyas, followed him into the forest to find the beautiful white girl Ayacanora, and moved with mounting excitement toward the defeat of the Spanish Armada. We were tree-dwellers, my raccoon and I, and we rather wished we would never have to set foot on earth again.

  Hunger brought us down at last, however, My father was in Montana on ranch business, so Rascal and I ate whatever we pleased for supper, and then climbed our tree once again to watch the stars come out. I told him some of the things my mother had told me about those distant suns, arranged in their shining constellations. Then I had a sad but happy thought. If Ursa Major, the Great Bear, was my constellation, Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, was by natural right Rascal’s constellation. Long years after we were both gone, there we still would be, swimming across the midnight sky together.

  There were two things I must do: plan the cage carefully, and convince Rascal that it would be a pleasure to live in his new home.

  I had been observing him closely for the last few days to discover which part of the back yard he enjoyed the most. There could be no doubt about his preference—it was an area about twelve feet square which extended from the base of the oak tree, below his hole, to the side of the barn. This included a smooth expanse of grass and white clover, and my bait pool with its running water and constant supply of minnows.

  Just as I had let Rascal become slowly acquainted with his collar and then his leash, I now invited his help in constructing the cage. When the wire and two-by-fours arrived, I laid out the square, dug holes for the posts, and also sank a six-inch trench along each side for pegging down the bottom edge of the wire.