Canine Hangover
(Critters • )
Bosco was still so tard this afternoon that he was sound asleep with his eyes open.
He partied late last night, along with some wayward raccoon.
I crashed the party about 1 a.m., awaking from a stupor to hear the dog barking in a howly, urgent way that I should’ve recognized immediately but didn’t, because I was still off somewhere in the fifth dimension of dreamland.
I staggered about 40 yards out into the backyard, following the noise and walking through the filtered moonlight finding its way down to the ground between the pecan branches. Only at that point did I fully realize I was standing there barefoot in my camouflage boxers.
Something big was climbing through the branches in an old but rather short holly tree. Some limbs hang over the side fence, others push up against the roof of a little shed. Whatever the critter was, it probably thought that tree was real handy as an entryway into the yard.
I’m sure it was a coon. It was too big and too fast to be a possum, too big and too distinct a growl to be a cat, and we don’t have bears unless one escaped the circus. I was still half asleep and forgot my trusty flashlight and ax handle, and when I got within 30 feet of the shed, the presumed coon saw me and jumped to the ground on the far side.
Bosco ran around and jumped on him and seemed to be dragging him around in a giant ginger clump, but the beast fought hard, probably to keep the dog from getting a grip on its neck. It had a deeper growl than the mid-sized coon involved in the last backyard bout, and I never got a good look at it, but imagined by the way it was bending tree branches that it was larger. I thought about joining in, but was too slow with sleep, and too far from the garage to get a weapon.
The dog never did get a good grip on it, but knocked the presumed coon into a tree trunk, which gave the coon a lifeline out of there.
It hustled up the trunk and took a branch that hangs over our back fence and a nearby neighbor’s shed. I stumbled back into bed and slept fitfully if at all the rest of the night. I could hear Bosco as he kept charging in and out of the ginger clump trying to find the coon that was by now back down at the river licking its wounds.
I went to check the dog for cuts this morning, but he was so dead tired I could only examine one side of his body. Just two or three nicks on his nose.
Good boy.
→ B.Dunn, Aug 06, 2009, 03 22 pm
