A Hermit's Wild Friends; or, Eighteen Years in the Woods

by Mason Augustus Walton

He did not take kindly to cage-life, although his cage was under a small pine-tree, so when I was about the cabin I chained him to the tree and let him run outside. I put him into the cage every day before going to the city for my mail. He resented this, and would run up the pine-tree when he saw me lock the cabin-door. One day I pulled him down and whipped him while he lay prone on the ground, with his eyes covered. I took away his food and water. He must have been downright hungry before I fed him. He never forgot the lesson. After that, when he saw me lock up he would sneak into his cage, fearful, I suppose, that if found outside he would be whipped and starved. He preferred food in the order herein named: insects, eggs, birds or poultry, frogs, nuts, red squirrel, rabbit, gray squirrel, and fish. This, without doubt, was the bill of fare of his wild state. He would not touch green corn or milk until I had crushed the former into his mouth, and had dipped his nose into the latter. Afterward he would leave everything for milk.

The first rabbit I fed to him was about two-thirds grown. It was one which a mink had chased into my dooryard and killed. It was evident from the first that the coon was no stranger to this kind of food. He opened the rabbit's mouth with his fore paws and ate out the tongue, after which he skinned the head, turning the skin back over the neck. He crushed the bones of the head and lapped out the brains. On the third day he had finished the rabbit, and the skin was turned inside out, even to the ends of the toes. Squirrels were skinned in the same manner.

This coon decided for me a disputed question. I refer to the whimper or cry of the coon. Night after night, in the nutting season, he would call to his comrades, and they would answer from the surrounding woods.

When the sweet acorns were ripe, Satan was unusually active early in the evening. At this early hour the coons were abroad in search for food, and Satan scented them, and did his best to attract their attention. One coon passed near the cabin every night and answered Satan's cries, so I imagined that it was his mate.

Many writers claim that the tremulous cry attributed to the coon is made by the little screech-owl (Scops asio). It is true, doubtless, that people that do not know both cries may make such a mistake.

The little owls appear to resent my intrusion on their vested rights, so from early spring to late fall they haunt my sleeping-quarters, and divide their time between snapping their beaks and uttering their monotonous notes. As I sleep in the open air nine months out of the twelve, I have a good chance to study both cries, and could not mistake one for the other.

The coon is a ventriloquist. His cry seems to come down from the sky. A friend came in from the city one night to hear the coon cry. It was a moonlight night, and the coon was staked out in the dooryard. My friend was not looking when the first cry was uttered, but claimed that the sound came from the trees overhead. Afterward he saw the coon in the act, and could not make a mistake.

When Satan uttered the cry, he was always sitting on his haunches. He would throw his head up until his nose pointed skyward, then blow the sound out between his half-closed lips.

My friend had brought in a blanket and hammock, and was prepared to spend the night in the open air. He slung his hammock near mine, and we turned in about ten o'clock. He was nervous and restless, and said he could not sleep with the little owls about him. Every fifteen or twenty minutes he would call to me to ask about some noise of the night, common enough, but which appeared strange and startling to him in the strained condition of his nerves. Soon after midnight a small animal, doubtless a stoat looking for an owl supper, dropped on to my friend's blanket. There was a smothered cry, full of fear, and a flying figure that did not stop until my hammock was reached. Nothing that I could say would induce the frightened man to go back to that hammock. He suggested at last that he would sleep in the cabin. I assented, and we soon had a bed arranged in a bunk. The cabin was overrun with white-footed mice, and I looked for more trouble.