was a different beast altogether.
He walked quickly around the north side of the house, cutting a wide
enough berth to keep the raccoon at the back in sight. He came to a
point, well to the north of the house, from which he could see the
front and back yards–and two ring-tailed sentinels.
They were both staring at him.
He proceeded toward the raccoon in front of the house.
When he drew close, the coon put its tail to him and ran across the
front yard. At what it evidently regarded as a safe distance, it
stopped and sat watching him with its back against the higher, unmown
grass of the meadow.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
He returned to the front porch and sat in the rocker.
The waiting was over. After more than five weeks, things were
beginning to happen.
Eventually he realized he’d left his open beer by the kitchen sink. He
went inside to retrieve it because, now more than ever, he needed it.
He had left the back door standing open, though the screen door had
closed behind him when he’d gone outside. He locked up, got his beer,
stood at the window watching the backyard raccoon for a moment, and
then returned to the front porch.
The first raccoon had crept forward from the edge of the meadow and was
again only ten feet from the porch.
Eduardo picked up the video camera and recorded the critter for a
couple of minutes. It wasn’t anything amazing enough to convince
skeptics that a doorway from beyond had opened in the early-morning
hours of May third, however, it was peculiar for a nocturnal animal to
pose so long in broad daylight, making such obviously direct eye
contact with the operator of the camcorder, and it might prove to be
the first small fragment in a mosaic of evidence.
After he finished with the camera, he sat in the rocker, sipping beer
and watching the raccoon as it watched him, waiting to see what would
happen next.
Occasionally the ring-tailed sentinel smoothed its whiskers, combed its
face fur, scratched behind its ears, or performed some other small act
of grooming.
Otherwise, there were no new developments.
At five-thirty he went inside to make dinner, taking his empty beer
bottle, camcorder, and shotgun with him. He closed and locked the
front door.
Through the oval, beveled-glass window, he saw the coon still on
duty.
At the kitchen table, Eduardo enjoyed an early dinner of rigatoni and
spicy sausage with thick slabs of heavily buttered Italian bread. He
kept the yellow legal-size tablet beside his plate and, while he ate,
wrote about the intriguing events of the afternoon.
He had almost brought the account up-to-date when a peculiar clicking
noise distracted him. He glanced at the electric stove, then at each
of the two windows to see if something was tapping on the glass.
When he turned in his chair, he saw that a raccoon was in the kitchen
behind him. Sitting on its hindquarters. Staring at him.
He shoved his chair back from the table and got quickly to his feet.
Evidently the animal had entered the room from the hallway. How it had
gotten inside the house in the first place, however, was a mystery.
The clicking he’d heard had been its claws on the pegged-oak floor.
They rattled against the wood again, though it didn’t move.
Eduardo realized it was racked by severe shivers. At first he thought
it was frightened of being in the house, feeling threatened and
cornered.
He backed away a couple of steps, giving it space.
The raccoon made a thin mewling sound that was neither a threat nor an
expression of fear, but the unmistakable voice of misery. It was in
pain, injured or ill.
His first reaction was: Rabies.
The .22 pistol lay on the table, as he always kept a weapon close at
hand these days. He picked it up, though he did not want to have to
kill the raccoon in the house.
He saw now that the creature’s eyes were protruding unnaturally and
that the fur under them was wet and matted with tears. The small paws