Rascal

by Sterling North

  Similarly (unless handled by a racing driver) few early Fords could top twice this speed—sixty miles an hour, or “a-mile-a-minute.”

  The mathematics of this race seemed obvious. A very fast trotter was matched against a well-attuned Ford. By any sensible odds, Reverend Gabriel Thurman should have been asked to drive his tin Lizzy four times around the half-mile oval while Donnybrook wheeled Mike Conway twice around this track.

  All through the grandstand the news spread swiftly. Mike had bet that he could go twice around the track while Thurman and his Ford made a mere three rounds! There was one shrewd catch, however. Donnybrook needed no cranking, and Thurman must wait for the starting gun before cranking his Ford, jumping into his roadster, and streaking off after the stallion and his master.

  Mike Conway had watched the impatient and impetuous Gabriel Thurman crank his Ford on many occasions. He knew that Thurman always took reckless chances in three departments. He placed the gas and also the spark lever much too low. When aggravated he always jerked the choke wire (which emerged at the left of the crank), thus flooding his carburetor. Mike was no mechanic, but he had often used his stop watch on Thurman’s futile attempts to start his car.

  Gabriel Thurman was aware of his impetuosity. He knew that in his eagerness to make his Ford rumble and roar he caused backfires that nearly broke his arm. He was being tremendously cautious, putting the spark and gas barely below the permissible level, and promising himself he would not touch the ring attached to the wire that primed the carburetor.

  The flag was lowered, the barrier raised, and Mike and Donnybrook were off in a flash. It was sheer joy to watch that stallion lift his white-stockinged feet. Mike rode comfortably on the seat of the sulky, as much a part of his trotter as though he had been astride.

  Gabriel Thurman gave the crank a whirl, and was nearly knocked into the dust by the backfire. He rushed to his steering wheel, adjusted gas and spark, and tried once again. A very small “pop” created such exasperation that the minister pulled the priming wire with a desperate yank. The carburetor flooded until it dripped gas beneath the car.

  By this time Mike Conway and Donnybrook had completed a full round of the track and had only one more to go. By luck rather than skill, Thurman now started his Ford. And off he blasted, sounding his Klaxon and pulling his gas lever to the lowest notch. This was almost an even race, if the Ford could make sixty miles an hour while Donnybrook held thirty.

  On the open road, Thurman might have won. But taking the curves without leaping the fence was his problem. Donnybrook crossed the finish line leading by two lengths, the indisputable winner.

  There was one other reward for Rascal and for me. Donnybrook moved over to the fence where my raccoon was watching and waiting eagerly. With more than 1,000 spectators enjoying the sight, Donnybrook nuzzled Rascal, while Rascal ran his hands over the stallion’s nose and bridle. Once again we had tasted victory.

  I came home in the early evening to the empty house. I called the telegraph office in the railroad station to learn if my father had wired from Montana telling me when he was coming home. But of course he had sent no message.

  I took Rascal to his cage, and sat for a long time talking to him and petting him while he ate his evening meal. Then, steeling myself to the dreadful deed, I stepped from the cage and closed the door behind me, hooking it firmly on the outside.

  Rascal didn’t understand what had happened at first. He came over to the door and asked me politely to open it and let him out. Then the thought suddenly struck him that he was trapped, caged, imprisoned. He ran swiftly around the square of wire, then into the barn, through the hole I had cut, and all over that inside enclosure, then back again, frantic now.

  I went into the house to get away from his voice, but it came to me through the open windows—pleading, terrified—asking for me—telling me he loved me and had always trusted me.

  After a while I couldn’t stand it any longer and I went out and opened the wire door. He clung to me and cried and talked about it, asking that unanswerable question.

  So I took him to bed with me and we both fell into a fitful sleep, touching each other again and again throughout the night for reassurance.

  VI: October

  RETURNING to school had always been a pleasure. It meant new pencils and composition books—the pencils smelling of cedar as you sharpened them. Most of the texts were dog-eared and scrawled with unfunny comments and crude drawings. But occasionally we were furnished two or three books fresh from the presses, fragrant of new paper and printers’ ink. The beginning of this school year was particularly memorable because I was entering Junior High School.

  The Senior High School pupils, who sat in the forward part of the main assembly hall, were disdainful of those of us who sat at the rear. But we realized that some day we would be as grand as they; and we had our own loyalties and interests which saved us from suffering too deeply the stigma of being both small and young.

  At least two of my new teachers were greatly gifted. Miss Stafford made English a delight. And Miss Whalen loved biology as my mother had loved it.

  My only reluctance upon hearing the first schoolbell in October, 1918, was that I must end my summer with Rascal and lock him firmly in his chicken-wire mansion. I had moved Wowser’s large doghouse to a position just outside Rascal’s door. It would have been a brave boy or dog daring to risk intrusion upon my raccoon’s privacy. Well aware of his trust, Wowser lay just outside the cage, his huge muzzle and deep, compassionate eyes turned toward the small prisoner just inside the wire. Rascal, reaching out to his shoulder, patted Wowser’s nose, and the Saint Bernard invariably licked the little paw extended in friendship. When Rascal chirred or trilled, Wowser answered with a big, gruff, affectionate bark, ending sometimes in a howl of sympathy. Donnybrook was also concerned, adding a soft whicker from the nearby paddock. There was real companionship in that back yard.

  I did what I could to make the imprisonment more bearable. I always shared at least one meal a day in Rascal’s cage, and we were together before and after school. I took him to the garden to help me harvest the dry navy beans and Hubbard squashes. He liked to have me rake leaves, burrowing into each bright pile and popping up to surprise me from unexpected places. And he became a real asset in the new job I had taken selling magazines. He attracted customers wherever we went.

  There must be hundreds of thousands of men who sold the Saturday Evening Post when they were boys, and I joined their ranks during the first week of October. I was very short of cash, and I realized that I would have to work harder if I were ever to earn the money for the canvas for my canoe.

  Putting Rascal in my bicycle basket, I pedaled down to the magazine and stationery store owned by Frank Ash, which occupied the building next to the Tobacco Exchange Bank. The big bundles of Posts had just arrived on the Thursday train, and each of us took fifty copies as a starter. On the cover was a little girl placing a garland of flowers around a service flag. And I was impressed all over again by the fact that this magazine had been founded by Benjamin Franklin.

  Either Frank Ash, or the circulation manager of the Curtis Publishing Company, had made a diabolical decision in a desperate attempt to unload another of their periodicals. For each fifty Posts we had to sell five copies of the Country Gentleman. Ours was a town filled with retired farmers, but not one of them wanted that magazine. Rascal furnished such an animated sideshow, however, that we often persuaded customers to take both publications.

  We bicycled through the autumn dusk crying, “Saturday Evening Post, five cents. Get your Post here, Mister, five cents—only five cents! Saturday Evening Post?”

  It was rumored that in biology class we were to learn the facts of life that year. Most of us already had some misinformation on the subject, but I was very vague as to how little girls are constructed. However, being not-quite twelve, I was not in complete despair about my ignorance.

  What did puzzle me however was how such a lovely, delicate
creature as Miss Whalen, with lights in her hair and eyes, could possibly tell a mixed class how babies are made. Fortunately this would come much later in the term, and she would have many months to lead up to the subject by way of the lesser fauna.

  Our biology teacher had her own method of inspiring the class. She taught instinctively. If wild geese were noticed crossing the October sky, she would call us all to the windows to hear their distant clangor and to watch them V-ing southward. She told us how one gander after another took that difficult position at the point of the V, breaking the air resistance for those behind, and how these same brave male birds—sometimes a widowed gander—kept lonely vigil all night, guarding over the flock while the others slept.

  “We are on a branch of the great Mississippi Flyway,” she said. “That is why we have the wonderful opportunity of watching so many thousands of birds migrating northward in the spring and south again in the autumn.”

  Then she told us that wild geese (like swans) are mated for life, and accompany each other, season after season, to rear their goslings in the Arctic and to winter in the southern bayous.

  “That is why it is wicked to shoot a wild goose or swan,” she said. “It leaves a widowed mate.”

  On the first day of school she captured our attention by asking each of us about our pets. Almost everyone had a cat or dog or canary or pony. But I was the only one in the class who had a raccoon. Many animals were to be invited on various days to attend our biology class.

  She asked Bud Babcock to bring his little terrier to school, and other pupils to bring goldfish, a parrot, and a tame squirrel. But Rascal and I had the honor of receiving the first such invitation.

  After class I stayed for a moment to talk to Miss Whalen about my raccoon, and to ask her a question which had been intriguing me for several weeks.

  “Do you think raccoons will become human beings sometime?” I asked hopefully.

  “Why, Sterling, what a strange idea.”

  “Earnest Hooton, who lives next door to us, is studying anthropology. And he has a theory that the hands teach the brain.”

  “Yes,” Miss Whalen said thoughtfully, “possibly they do.”

  “And he thinks that because our apelike ancestors stood up and used their hands, and developed simple tools, their brains developed too.”

  “That’s an exciting idea,” my teacher said.

  “Well, my raccoon uses his hands all the time, and gets brighter every day. So in one hundred million years or so, couldn’t raccoons develop into something like human beings?”

  “Stranger things have happened,” Miss Whalen said. “I’m very eager to see your bright raccoon.”

  She gave me a warm smile, but she didn’t laugh at me or call my question silly. And I left the classroom feeling that Miss Whalen was a very special person.

  On the morning Rascal was invited, I brushed and combed him until his dark guard hairs shone and his gray underfur was as soft as lamb’s wool. I used silver polish on his nameplate and saddle soap on his slender collar and leash. After all, it was to be Rascal’s first day at school, and I wanted him to make the best possible impression.

  Fortunately biology was our first class in the morning, so we didn’t have too long to wait.

  Rascal’s behavior was excellent. Clean, well-groomed, alert, and polite, he sat on Miss Whalen’s desk as though he had spent most of his short life addressing biology classes. He asked a few questions about her glass paper-weight (which, when shaken, produced a snowstorm over a toy village); and he gently examined this small globe of glass.

  “As you can see,” Miss Whalen began, “raccoons are curious.”

  Then she wrote on the blackboard: Raccoon—an Indian word meaning “he who scratches.”

  Slammy Stillman raised his hand. “Does he scratch because he has fleas?” This produced laughter, and the teacher rapped lightly for order.

  I raised my hand and was acknowledged. “Miss Whalen, Rascal is perfectly clean. He goes swimming every day and he never had a flea in his life.”

  “I think,” said the teacher, “the Indians meant that raccoons scratch and dig for turtle eggs and other food along the shore. Sometimes they even dig for earthworms.”

  Slammy scowled and slumped deeper in his seat.

  “Does this raccoon remind you of any other animal?” Miss Whalen asked.

  “He looks like a little bear,” Bud Babcock said.

  “You are right, Bud,” the teacher agreed. “He is a cousin of the bear and is sometimes called a ‘wash bear’ because he washes all his food as we will show you in a few minutes.” She took a piece of chalk and again wrote on the blackboard: Procyon lotor—his Latin name. Lotor meaning “washer.”

  I was intrigued because Miss Whalen was telling us certain things that even I didn’t know about Rascal. Now she brought out a shallow enameled laboratory pan, which contained not only water, but, to my surprise, a crayfish. This she put before Rascal on her desk.

  “Now let’s see what the raccoon will do.”

  Rascal, like the wonderful little ham he always was, looked around the class and off through the windows while running his hands with a kneading motion all over the shallow pan. He knew exactly where the crayfish was, but he was showing off. Suddenly his body stiffened for a pounce, and two seconds later he had his prey fast in his grip and was washing it blissfully in anticipation of his feast.

  By this time the class was as happy as Rascal, and almost everybody clapped.

  “Raccoons are omnivorous,” Miss Whalen said, writing the word on the blackboard. “This means they will eat almost anything. They live from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from southern Canada to Mexico. They have from two to six raccoon kits every May—usually in a hollow tree. And these kits mind their mother very well, trundling after her as she teaches them how to fish the edge of the creeks. They are friendly animals unless attacked, but can sometimes kill a dog if backed into a corner.”

  Miss Whalen asked me if I would tell briefly of my experiences with my raccoon, and I stood before the class, petting Rascal as I talked. I think we had the attention of all but Slammy, particularly when Rascal climbed on my shoulder and started vaguely playing with my ear.

  “I even sleep with him sometimes,” I confessed. “He’s a wonderful pet.”

  Everyone wanted to touch him after that. So, one by one, my classmates came up and petted him, some of the girls pretending to be a little frightened. Slammy was last of the line and he slouched up, shifty-eyed and sneering. I was watching for trouble, but was a moment too late. Just as he reached the raccoon, Slammy stretched a heavy rubber band and snapped Rascal in the face.

  Very rarely before had I heard Rascal emit his scream of rage. But this was pure fury—a fight-to-the-death cry—and in a split second Rascal sank his fine, sharp teeth into Slammy’s fat hand.

  Slammy yelled until you could have heard him in the assembly hall. He danced around shaking his hand, screaming, “Mad ’coon! Mad ’coon!—you gotta shoot him now—mad ’coon!”

  Miss Whalen’s voice was cold and severe. “Slammy Stillman, everyone in this room saw what you did. If you think this is a mad raccoon, then you need no other punishment than the worry you will experience wondering if indeed you have rabies. Here, use some of this iodine on your little bite. Class is dismissed. Sterling, will you stay for a moment?”

  I didn’t know what my teacher would decree, but it proved almost as severe a punishment as she had given Slammy. She said, “I’m sorry, but under the circumstances you will have to cage your raccoon constantly for the next fourteen days. If he should show signs of rabies we would still have time to get Pasteur treatments for Slammy.”

  “But he isn’t rabid,” I protested. “You saw what happened.”

  “I certainly did. And I feel certain he is a perfectly healthy animal. But we can’t take a chance.”

  She was silent for a moment. When she turned back to me her mood had changed and she said quietly, “Rascal is a wonde
rful pet. Thank you for bringing him to class, and for your good oral report.” She petted the raccoon and added, “You’d better take him home to his cage, Sterling. I’ll explain to the other teachers why you’ll be absent for the rest of the day.”

  As I pedaled homeward, with Rascal in the bicycle basket, he had already forgotten his recent fight. It was a crisp, clear autumn day as we entered the cage to begin the two-week sentence. I had a crazy, affectionate thought: if they have to lock up Rascal, they’ll have to lock me up with him.

  We sat eating soft-shelled pecans, wishing we could stay side by side forever, sharing a meal and each other’s company.

  Slammy, unfortunately, did not die of rabies. In fact the punctures in his hands healed almost immediately. But the punishment inflicted on Rascal and me continued. We were jailmates for as many hours a day as I could join him.

  Rascal was beginning to get slightly plump in preparation for the winter. I gave him any food he wanted, so we were not too unhappy in his cage.

  On the fourteenth day of his confinement, when he had not shown a single sign of any sickness, I opened the door and we frisked out into the autumn world. We walked up the street to Crescent Drive and turned down the country lane through a world ablaze with autumn. It was Indian summer. The corn shocks, pale as buckskin tepees, pointed upward to the immense blue curve of the sky, and maples flamed along the ridges.

  As we passed Bardeen’s orchard we helped ourselves to a few apples. Farther down the lane where the fences were garlanded with wild grapes, Rascal dyed his muzzle purple with this pure pigment.

  Each autumn it was necessary to examine the hickory and walnut trees we hoped to raid, and to estimate the number of muskrats living in the sloughs and ponds where we hoped to trap. This was a jaunt I usually took with my trapping-and-hickory-nutting partner Oscar Sunderland. Oscar was not at home, however, so Rascal and I made the survey without him.