Apparently, we held a racoon hostage in our garden. I’m not sure how long—anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks—but maybe long enough for her to get Stockholm syndrome. We named her Patty.
It all started about the middle of June, when Roma beans began disappearing as quickly as they came up. The beans, the leaves, and the vines, all nibbled down to a nub. Every day, a few more feet would disappear. At first, I figured it was rabbits, so we put wire hoops over the bean rows, covered the hoops with bird netting, and secured it all with weights and clothes pins.
That worked just long enough to lull us into a false sense of security. Then, we went out one morning, and something had reached through the netting and snatched practically every bean in the row. Rabbits can’t do that. It didn’t stop with beans, either.
A row of sweet potato vines was decimated—every single leaf chewed off, in some cases leaving nothing but a single stem sticking out of the ground, kind of like a middle finger. I got mad and built a twenty-foot long cage out of some left-over horse fencing and baling twine. We replanted a few sweet potatoes, caged them all in, and moved on.
Not long after that, we started seeing weirdness in the barn. We keep a large box of dog bones on top of a refrigerator in there. For two or three days in a row, the box of dog bones was knocked over and dog-bone fragments scattered everywhere. This was too high for even the jumping dogs to reach, and it was way too heavy for mice. So, I went to Lowe’s and bought a plastic container with a snapping lid to secure the dog bones. That worked for about twenty-minutes.
A couple of evenings later as I was walking to the barn, I saw something gray and furry lumbering over the fence between the barn and the garden. It looked at me, it was wearing a mask.
We have an electric fence that we use for the sheep-n-goats. It’s portable, about four feet tall, four-hundred feet long, and sends out a 6,000 volt pulse every three seconds, enough to get your attention, that’s for sure. The next morning, I put the electric fence up inside the regular garden fence. With two fences, surely, our garden was safe.
Evidently, however, Patty was in the garden when I put the fence up—or she got in some time later, maybe when it was off. Vanessa and I were in the garden a few days ago, finding half-eaten eggplants, bites out of tomatoes, and so on, when I happened to look down and see that something had been digging under the electric fence, trying to get out.
Then I looked over and saw Patty slinking into a patch of ground cherries. We stared at each other for a few minutes, and then I removed the electric fence.
Then Saturday morning about six, when we went to feed, I looked up on the top shelf of the counter where we fill the feed bowls and saw two masked eyes looking back at me. Vanessa screamed and, as she later reported, nearly peed herself. All five dogs went into a yelping frenzy, though, honestly, at least three of them were just howling in sympathy, having no idea why. The sheep-n-goats started screaming at the delay of their morning grain.
Poor Patty, if it was Patty, just hung behind the counter, out of reach of the dogs, frozen in panic.
She spent the day on top of that shelf, curled-up, sleeping. I wasn’t sure if she was injured, sick from eating too much dog-food, or just comfortable. Whenever I would go in, she’d look at me, figure I wasn’t a threat, and go back to sleep. We had to keep the dogs out of the barn all day. That was the biggest challenge.
I woke up about three in the morning on Sunday, wondering about Patty. By three-thirty, I had convinced myself she had a broken leg, and I was going to have to deal with her, probably put her down since I’m not going to pay a vet bill for a wild, foraging raccoon, even if I did keep her hostage for a while.
But when we went to the barn on Sunday morning, she was gone, and things pretty quickly went back to normal, except the dogs keep sniffing around the feeding counter.
This morning, the lid was off the dog-food container, so now we’re back to where we were two weeks ago.
Of course, it could be more than just Patty—we could be feeding a whole village of raccoons. I often wonder what happens up in the barn at night, when we’re sleeping safely in our beds.
