BY HARRY WEEKES
If there were raccoons living in the valley when I was a kid, they would have been living in my house. They probably would have come to school with my siblings and me.
My mom’s bakery was in our garage. We had anywhere from five to seven full-grown dogs, as many cats, horses, a pig and, for a brief period, chickens. From a raccoon’s perspective, there was food and opportunity everywhere.
But raccoons were nowhere. Not that I remember. I am pretty sure the first raccoon I ever saw was when I was in college, and that striped bandit was across the country in Vermont when I was a teenager.
Over the last two decades, though, it seems that raccoons are everywhere. My sister, who had a house similarly filled with cats and dogs, used to have a family of raccoons come in the dog door, eat her dog and cat food, and then disappear into the night.
A couple of years ago I was at school, working early on a Saturday morning, and watched a huge raccoon trundle across the Hailey Greenway, navigate between our modular classrooms, and disappear under the porch outside my window.
I jumped two of the masked marauders on the edge of a huge dumpster one dark night in Ketchum.
Most recently, an early morning frost covered the boardwalk at the Draper Preserve. Light was just coming on as I turned from the mallards and headed toward the Bow Bridge. And there were the prints. A series of wet, elongated fingers, unmistakably and characteristically human-hand-like. There was enough distance between the water and the edge of the boardwalk to rule out a skunk or a muskrat, and no telltale drag signs of either beaver or otter.
There was a nice ambling evidenced in the footprints as they crossed to nearby bushes, but no other evidence of the beast that left them, who could have been anywhere.
There is something about footprints that moves you along the spectrum from totally unsure to fully certain. If totally unsure is that you have no evidence, and fully certain is you are standing and looking at the thing, then footprints represent that “I am pretty sure” in between. If you can identify the tracks.
As mysterious to me as when the raccoons first showed up here are the meanderings of most every animal. While I am pretty sure that most things don’t simply drift about aimlessly, even the little things that drift about, truly understanding the intention of another animal is always more of a leap than a step. And that is a span that is as difficult to access as it is difficult to cross.
Unlike the boardwalk. Which this raccoon seems to have vaulted him or herself onto, and then two or three loping strides later left behind. Like its tracks. A cluster of frozen remembrances. In this case, saying, “I was here, even though you didn’t quite see me.”
So, I am not totally sure that there is a raccoon at Draper Preserve. There are, however, some muddy little tracks that are somehow as important as knowing.