Rascal

by Sterling North

  I told my father that Rascal and I would be away all afternoon and evening on a long canoe ride. I think he knew what I was planning. He looked at us quite sym-pathetically.

  Taking jelly sandwiches, strawberry pop, and more than a pound of soft-shelled pecans, I led Rascal to where my canoe was waiting near the edge of the flooded creek. In a moment it was launched upon the racing stream. All unknowing, my raccoon stood at the prow, occasionally coming back to me for another pecan. I remember thinking that it was sad that Herschel had not come home in time to see my handsome pet.

  We floated down the creek, ducking to pass beneath the bridges. Soon we sped out into Rock River, and turned upstream toward Lake Koshkonong. Rascal fell asleep during the hours I labored against the current. He awoke toward sunset as we reached the quiet mirror of the lake itself, heading toward the dark, wild promontory named Koshkonong Point.

  It was an evening of full moon, much like the one when I had found my little friend and carried him home in my cap. Rascal was a big, lusty fellow now, thirteen times the weight of the helpless creature to whom I had fed warm milk through a wheat straw. He was very capable in many ways—able to catch all the food he needed along a creek or in a marshy bay. He could climb, swim, and almost talk. As I thought over his accomplishments I was both proud and sad.

  We entered the mouth of Koshkonong Creek by moonlight and paddled up this stream several hundred feet into the depths of this wet wilderness. It is a region rich in fish and crayfish, fresh-water clams, muskrats, and mallards—the many forms of life that love wildness and water. The peepers shrilled, and bullfrogs thrummed their bass fiddles, and a little screech owl trilled a note reminiscent of Rascal’s when he was much younger.

  I had decided to let my raccoon make his own decision. But I took off his collar and his leash and put them in a pocket of my corduroy jacket as something to remember him by if he should choose to leave me. We sat together in the canoe, listening to the night sounds all around us, but for one sound in particular.

  It came at last, the sound I had been waiting for, almost exactly like the crooning tremolo we had heard when the romantic female raccoon had tried to reach him through the chicken wire. Rascal became increasingly excited. Soon he answered with a slightly deeper crooning of his own. The female was now approaching along the edge of the stream, trilling a plaintive call, infinitely tender and questing. Rascal raced to the prow of the canoe, straining to see through the moonlight and shadow, sniffing the air, and asking questions.

  “Do as you please, my little raccoon. It’s your life,” I told him.

  He hesitated for a full minute, turned once to look back at me, then took the plunge and swam to the near shore. He had chosen to join that entrancing female somewhere in the shadows. I caught only one glimpse of them in a moonlit glade before they disappeared to begin their new life together.

  I left the pecans on a stump near the waterline, hoping Rascal would find them. And I paddled swiftly and desperately away from the place where we had parted.

  TURN THE PAGE TO SEE

  MEMORABILIA & PHOTOGRAPHS

  FROM ILLUSTRATOR JOHN SCHOENHERR’S

  PERSONAL COLLECTION.

  The original New York Times ad for Rascal, which appeared in the August 18, 1963, issue

  From the August 25, 1963, issue of The New York Times Book Review

  The photographs on these pages were taken by the illustrator, John Schoenherr,

  and used as reference for the original endpapers for the book.

  * Father of Earnest A. Hooton, anthropologist and author.