Nature and the Children

Nature and the Children
There comes a time in every child's life when he learns about nature. Not the nice, sunshine-on-springtime-flowers nature that even a city dweller like me knows about, but the nature that sometimes shows up in a National Geographic special right before you change the channel to keep your kids from having nightmares.
My boys, ages two and five, learned about this darker side of nature one summer day a few months ago. We were staying in our trailer on a lake in central Illinois, when a strange purring sound beckoned me outside. I hunted for the source of the noise, and finally found a small baby raccoon climbing on an old window we had stored behind our trailer. (Yes, we have a trailer and junk around it and so have official trailer-trash status. We draw the line at fake animals in the yard, though, so we are classy trailer trash!) It was the cutest little ball of fur I had ever seen, so I called the boys to come see it. “Look, boys, it’s a baby raccoon! Come see it!” They reluctantly tore themselves away from Blues Clues and came behind the trailer. As soon as their feet began clumping on the deck to come around back, however, a curious thing happened. The raccoon was transformed from a cute little baby into a menacing, snarling, hissing thing with bared teeth and an uncanny resemblance to Mike Ditka in a snit. When the boys got to where I was standing and stopped making noise, the raccoon went back to its adorable act, and the boys stood, open mouthed and speechless, for some time, staring at this little baby doing a balancing act on our old window. We stayed like that, conferring in whispers, watching for a few minutes until the boys got bored and decided to do what boys do when confronted by the inexplicable. They picked up some rocks and threw them at the raccoon. Once again, I had a miniature Mike Ditka hissing behind my trailer, and I realized that where baby is, mamma is usually not far behind, and mammas don’t like their babies being stoned. I scolded the boys for trying to hurt a defenseless animal, and herded them back to the trailer for another round of Blues Clues while I decided what to do about the raccoon. I could hear my older son tell his brother, “Let’s be baby raccoons. I’ll make the purring sounds, and you try to pet me” from the open window while I stood watching the raccoon, trying to figure out how to chase it away. Raccoons are terribly destructive, smart, smelly, and disease ridden. Not an animal to keep around your kids. I, too, picked up some rocks and half-heartedly lobbed them near the raccoon, which, I could hear from the trailer window, was now named Herbie and a welcome member of our family. Herbie was not amused. He bared his teeth whenever one of my rocks came close to him and looked like he was about to spring at me, a small grey rocket of death and germy destruction. So I decided to do what any city girl would do when confronted by a country problem. I hid, er..., retreated to our trailer to wait for the man of the house, who was raised in the country, to come home.
My husband grew up on a farm where the realities of life were not hidden from him. His parents routinely had to drown excess kittens and do other fun-filled farm activities that didn’t make it into the pages of any Laura Ingalls Wilder books. So I knew he would meet this problem head-on in a calm, dignified manner. A few minutes later I watched him come down the hill and past our car, where Herbie was now looking for his mother. As Andrew went past the tire behind which the raccoon was hiding, Herbie gave a loud hiss and sprang out at my husbands ankle. Andrew screamed like a woman and jumped about three feet in the air, then sprinted to the deck, screaming, “There’s a raccoon out here!”  “No kidding,” was my reply. When he got to the deck, he paused and said in a much deeper voice, “Hunny, git my gun!” Andrew is Canadian, and you could tell he’d been itching to use this line, complete with Southern accent, for a long time. I tried to talk him out of it. I mean, a gun? Around children? For a poor animal?  But he patiently explained as he loaded up the rifle that this was the only way. Raccoons are not one of those peaceful coexistence type animals. They are all-out war animals. “But what about the boys, shouldn’t we go somewhere?”    (I’ve read enough Family Circle magazines to know that this is where some family member gets shot accidentally. You’re going along; minding your own business and sudden disaster is visited upon you by an unsuspecting relative. “If I’d only checked to see if she was home from the supermarket, I’d still have my wife here to cook me dinner every night.” Never read these magazines before bed. You won’t be able to sleep because you’ll be wondering if your popcorn maker was recalled because of spontaneous combustion. And, are your pilot lights really on or just leaking gas into your home? You can’t be too careful. ) “Just go in the trailer, you’ll be fine in there,” he said. I tried to keep the truth about what was going to happen to Herbie from my sons, but they had seen the excitement in my husbands’ eyes as he loaded the gun and ran outside. So my two sons and I gathered at the window to see Daddy “Take out” Herbie. Behind the window glass and sheet metal walls of our trailer we were surely safe from stray bullets, right?  We couldn’t actually see what happened next because it happened on the other side of the car, but the gun kept going off and we heard Andrew let out some more of his high-pitched screams as he battled the raccoon. I kept giving him helpful little hints like, “Careful, we’re over here!” and “Don’t forget to point down, not up.” He told me later that the gun kept “Self-firing” as he put it, which basically means “It went off when I wasn’t anywhere near the trigger but I don’t want to scare you.” How bad is it that there is an official term for that? After a few shots, all was quiet. Herbie was dead. We silently watched Andrew get a large garbage bag, load up Herbie, and drive him to the dumpster. Then it was back to Blues Clues.
Surprisingly, we have never heard any questions about Herbie and his noisy fate from our boys. They took it in stride, much as my husband probably accepted the death of his farm’s kittens each spring. The boys learned all about the dark side of nature in one afternoon. One minute you’re staring at this adorable animal and the next, when you’ve realized its survival may be harmful to you, you’re watching it get shot and scooped into a black trash bag.
But the boys have never, ever pretended to be baby raccoons again. Yes, they understand about nature.