Raccoons and the Alpha Male

My schedule is always the same on a working morning: up at four and out the door at four thirty. Every morning as I step outside, the motion sensor light comes on shining directly into the bedroom window of Leo, the farmer who lives next door. Leo is the protector of the neighborhood and every morning when my light comes on, he gets out of bed to look out his window to see if someone is stealing my gas again.

This morning, I was putting on my jacket before exiting the house when suddenly, the motion sensor light came on. I looked through the window of the front door to see what might have set it off and was surprised to find a large family of six raccoons moving around my car. Obviously, they had been in my orchard helping themselves to plums, grapes, apples and the rest of my kiwis. I am always so happy to keep the area wildlife sufficiently fat with my produce.

This particular family of raccoons was like any human family; two of the young males were clubbing each other on the head while what I assume to be an adult female was hanging back with two babies, all the time screeching at the large male, seemingly complaining about why he never helps with the kids. They were all no more than six feet away from the front door when I stepped outside and waved at Leo.

“Ok, everybody move on. Nothing to see here.”

For the most part, they all scattered around the front of the hedge with one midsized coon crawling under my car. The alpha male though stood his ground. Not only did he stand fast, he stood upright with his front legs spread out like a cross and he growled at me.

Now wait. No one is going to out alpha male me in my own yard, so I lifted my arms holding my lunch pail over my head and made myself look big. I then growled and started stomping towards the male raccoon. He, still standing upright, was slowly walking backwards. I was pushing him back around the front of the hedge, feeling very alpha male-ish when something unfortunate happened: as I had completely backed the upright alpha male raccoon around the hedge, the motion sensor light went out. I waved my arms madly to reactivate it, but now in the pitch darkness I was out of range.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this wasn’t the raccoon’s first circus because now I could hear the big guy growl and they all started running… toward me.

You know, for a guy who is 65, I am not really in shape to be chased by six raccoons, but Leo said that when the motion sensor light came back on again, I had at least a ten-foot lead. As I was being chased around the rear of the house, the back-porch motion sensor light came on. I made a mental note that the grass in the backyard needed to be watered, but not now.

Around the front of the house again, I set off the front motion sensor but this time Leo had moved to his front porch to sit in his boxer shorts in his lawn chair for a better view of the race and to catch the audio. Pumping my arms wildly and losing my lead, my lunch pail accidentally hit the side of the garage which caused it to pop open scattering my lunch all over the driveway. I think this is the only thing that saved me from starting a series of rabies shots. The family of six pounced on my lunch and stopped chasing me. Leo mentioned that he had to chuckle seeing them walk past the motion sensor light with a banana, a peanut butter sandwich and a package of Twinkies in their mouths.

So today I was 15 minutes late for work because I had to make another lunch, but on the drive in to work I was able to sooth my bruised ego by telling myself that I could have been the alpha male if those had only been bunnies.

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