Raccoon, p.1
Raccoon, page 1
Praise for Sean Kane’s Raccoon: A Wondertale
How can we live without Sean Kane’s inspired madness? His loopy intelligence, and the amplitude of his heart, provide necessary medicine for all creatures working for a collective swerve away from ecological catastrophe and finding themselves wounded by the battle. Kane’s cure-all goes by the name of laughter.
—David Abram, Senior Visiting Scholar in Philosophy and Social Ecology, Harvard University. Author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal
Prepare to be transported. Sean Kane’s Raccoon, like the animals at the heart of his story, is curious, mischievous, lovable, and fierce. A tale that uses the foundations of a children’s fable but builds upon it a fiction for all ages, and decidedly for our time.
—Andrew Pyper, bestselling author of The Residence and The Demonologist
Raccoon feels real and has bite. It has Sean Kane’s—but how does he do it?—grasp of where the imaginative and real meet. Everything in his story sparkles with that and because of that.
—Gordon Teskey, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature, Harvard University
Wonderful in the full sense of the word, Raccoon is an extraordinary work of fiction. Alive with incident, madcap excitement, quirky humour, and many poetic turns of phrase, it is at once a satire, a wondertale, and a thoughtful work of ecological commentary.
—Don LePan, Founder and CEO of Broadview Press and author of three novels, most recently Lucy and Bonbon
This account of a quest for an ideal Commonwealth is in the tradition of some of the finest animal adventure stories ever written. Sean Kane’s clear-eyed, beautifully written tale offers a critique of society as it is and a model of what it could be.
—Stan Dragland, C.M., novelist, poet, critic, founding editor of Brick Books, and Emeritus Professor of Canadian and Children’s Literature at Western University
Raccoon will be recognized as a classic of its genre. It joins all those currents of thought that see the creative imagination as the ultimate force that can reshape and somehow, some way, redeem the planet.
—Eugene Benson, novelist, literary historian, and playwright. As Professor of English at the University of Guelph, he co-edited the Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English
Contents
Cover
Praise for Sean Kane’s Raccoon: A Wondertale
Title page
Copyright
ACT I – Home Schooling
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
ACT II – To Seek a Fortune
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
ACT III – Freedoms and Responsibilities
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
ACT IV – Setback and Betrayal
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
ACT V – To Make a World
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Landmarks
Cover
Half Title Page
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
Dedication
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Copyright © 2023, Sean Kane and Guernica Editions Inc.
Afterword, Copyright © 2023 Margaret Atwood
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication,
reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent
of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.
Guernica Founder: Antonio D’Alfonso
Connie McParland, Michael Mirolla, series editors
Gary Clairman, editor
Cover design and interior design: Rafael Chimicatti
Ebook: Rafael Alt
Guernica Editions Inc.
287 Templemead Drive, Hamilton, ON L8W 2W4
2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, N.Y. 14150-6000 U.S.A.
www.guernicaeditions.com
Distributors:
Independent Publishers Group (IPG)
600 North Pulaski Road, Chicago (IL) U.S.A. 60624
University of Toronto Press Distribution (UTP)
5201 Dufferin Street, Toronto (ON), Canada M3H 5T8
First edition.
Printed in Canada.
Legal Deposit—First Quarter
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2023930327
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Raccoon : a wondertale / Sean Kane ;
afterword by Margaret Atwood.
Names: Kane, Sean, 1943- author.
Atwood, Margaret, 1939- writer of afterword.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230140092 Canadiana (ebook) 20230140149 ISBN 9781771837828 (softcover)
ISBN 9781771837835 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8571.A433 R33 2023 DDC C813/.54—dc23
For Graeme
ACT I
Home Schooling
Slypaws, a patient mother and single parent
Clutch, her senior son, a traditionalist
Bandit, her junior son, an aspiring alpha male
Touchwit, her precocious daughter, an artist
Uncle Wily (deceased), brother of Slypaws and Pawsense
Aunt Pawsense, Slypaws’s socially superior sister
Goodpaws, her head daughter and bossypants
Sensibella, second daughter, a romantic heroine
Friskywits, younger daughter and a clever subversive
Nimbletoes, the junior daughter and family messenger
Smartwhisker, father of the four sisters and Pawsense’s mate
Meatbreath, father of Slypaws’s three cubs, a deadbeat dad
I
The creatures living behind the wall of my study are in a quandary. As I sit at this desk, they are three feet away, at ear level, in a disused chimney. At the suggestion of milder weather, the whole family of them wakes up, and breaks immediately into hissing and snarls. Only one kind of animal is so full of anxiety and quarrel.
I put the stethoscope to the wall. The instrument is left over from my partner’s professional life. For no reason I can explain, it gives me the power to understand the speech of raccoons.
“Eeeuuw!”
“Ssh. Mustn’t wake up.”
“Eeeyowp!”
“Alright, what’s the problem?”
“It’s Clutch. He’s having another nightmare.”
“Clutch, honey. Remember what I said. Just tell it to Scat.”
“SCAT! SCAT!”
“Shove over. Your tail is in my face. I need to scratch.”
“It’s no good, Mom. It won’t go away. It’s about Uncle Wily. He’s staring up at me from the road.”
“Just think of something nice instead. Clams with honey sauce.”
“Uncle Wily went splat instead of scat.”
“That’s not very helpful, Touchwit. Your Uncle Wily died a noble death. Now go back to sleep. If you wake up, you’ll be hungry. And then what? The river’s frozen and it’s not garbage night.”
“I’m hungry.”
“We can eat Bandit. He’s full of Delissio pizza.”
“Sssh! The Idiot behind the wall is listening. I can hear him breathing.”
Silence.
Thus intimations of spring come to the Eastern Woodlands – in chance breaks in the Arctic cold, hapless stirrings and false awakenings.
2
As far as I can tell, the raccoons haven’t left the chimney. The snow has stayed, and now it is raining – bad weather for animals with heavy fur coats. But I can hear a rapid thumping: someone is scratching fleas. They’re awake and must be hungry after a long hibernation. I press my stethoscope against the wall and overhear them chittering …
“Mother, why can’t we go out and pop organic waste bin lids?”
“We require a clear sky and a warm Spring night” is the answer.
“When are we going to get a clear sky and a warm Spring night? The rain has been pattering on the roof forever.”
“You will get a clear Spring night when the Great Raccoon Ancestor has left his den and is high above the southern horizon.”
“He is aloft now, yet we see him not on account of the excess of clouds.”
That was the older brother speaking. A
“Time is truly askew if the Ancestor beckons his clan out of their burrows, yet the clouds contradict him.”
That was Touchwit. I’m coming to tell them apart now. The elder brother seems to be the one called Clutch. The younger brother is Bandit. Then the sister is Touchwit. Their mother is called Slypaws. They don’t talk about their father.
“The Great Raccoon Spirit withholds himself from our gaze,” Clutch said solemnly, “so as to keep us sheltered and warm, thereby sparing us the grumes, running gleet, the mumbles, and suchlike afflictions.”
“I’m not really up to theology first thing in the evening,” Mother Slypaws said.
“Theology isn’t the issue,” Touchwit said, returning to the vernacular. “The issue is that we are in a new time on Earth, and theology is as useless as plastic wrap.”
“Watch your speech, Touchwit. It is foolhardy to be heedless of the One in the Sky who eternally holds us in his paws.” That was Clutch. As elder brother he was surrogate family head.
“He’s not in the sky, is he? He’s not anywhere. Like Dad,” Touchwit said.
“Perhaps he reveals himself not because of the Abuses we have heaped upon his shoulders.”
“The Great Raccoon isn’t going to get us out of this mess. Have you smelled the scent of crab apple blossoms lately? No. That’s because they withhold themselves from gaze and reveal themselves not.” I can imagine Touchwit glaring savagely at her big brother.
“Touch is right, Mom. We’re living proof that time is broken. We were born out of season,” Bandit pointed out.
“That is true, children. You were born at the wrong time of year, when the leaves fall. I had little opportunity to street-proof you. So I stuffed you with Delissio pizza crusts for the hibernation and hid you in this chimney.”
“Street-proof us now, Mom. If the Ancestor can’t be bothered to guide us, then we’ll have to survive by our fingertips.”
The mother raccoon sighed. It was so like Touchwit to think she could face the world armed only with cunning and hand-eye coordination.
“Why were we born out of the love-season?” Bandit asked suddenly.
Tense silence.
Elder brother deflects the question: “We should ask, rather, where do Raccoons come from in the first place?”
Noise of shuffling. Mistress Slypaws is straightening her back and folding her paws in her lap. The cubs tuck their tails around their feet, arranging themselves for a story.
“It was the time of beginnings, and the Great Raccoon lay dreaming,” she said. “And he lay dreaming in his hollow. So vast is his hollow that it fills the southern sky, and its entrance is marked by the path of the Moon. And all that time it was winter, and rain fell upon the Earth.”
The cubs huddled closer together. Their chimney didn’t feel so small now, nor their time in it so long.
“And feeling lonely, the Great Raccoon Spirit said: ‘I think I’ll find a companion to warm my side.’ And he dreamed he was foraging in a stream, they say, and a clam was glowing furiously in the moonlight. The clam caught his eye. So he took it in his hands and he scraped the mud of the stream bottom and the tiny snails off the shell. Ever since that first night, Raccoons are careful to rub off the matter adhering to their food, though they appear to be washing their hands.”
At the mention of the Hand Acknowledgment, the three cubs automatically made washing motions with their hands.
“Then he blew upon the Radiant Clam, and cast it upon the stream. And it bounced once, and it bounced twice, and it opened and out of its shell stepped the first Woman. A Woman Raccoon! The Great Raccoon Spirit wondered at her. Now, all Raccoons are fluent and tactile, but of all the Raccoons in the land, none was more elegant of speech nor dexterous of paw than she.”
“Did he jump her, Ma?” Bandit said, breaking in.
“Oh, really, I don’t know where you get these vulgar thoughts,” Slypaws said.
“We get them from the Idiot behind the wall,” Touchwit said, giggling.
“I shall resume the story: Then they did … mingle, and lo! The first litter was born. Three smart cubs.” At this, Slypaws glanced lovingly at Clutch, her first born. There wasn’t a green bin lid in the neighbourhood he couldn’t pop. So wondrous a son who can so astonish a mother!
“This story is dumb,” Bandit said. “We happen to know Raccoons are born because the mom lets herself get jumped.”
Mother Slypaws sounded flustered. Not even the width of my study wall could muffle her embarrassment. “One has to recount the High Stories in their accustomed order before studying their practical applications.”
“I think Mom got jumped around Midsummer,” Bandit said.
Mistress Slypaws examined her tail. It was a bushy tail once. Now, after a winter in this soot-lined hole, it hung limp and bedraggled. “If you must know, he took advantage of the fact that the love season is askew in the general rhythms of things. He caught me at the end of a limb and made me great with cub. It was either that or a thirty foot drop into the rhododendrons.” Slypaws looked up grimly. “And you can bet the rings on your tails I’ll never get caught on a limb again … Ever.”
“Way to go, Mom!”
“Instead, I shall go to the fabled city under the southern sky that is called Raccoonopolis, where the Idiots have invented a green bin that can be popped in nine seconds.”
“Let’s all go.”
Touchwit had been quiet. She was going to say something crucial.
“That’s why you don’t want us to go out tonight,” she said. “You’re afraid of getting jumped.”
“I’m not thinking only of myself, dear.”
“I can look after myself.”
“Good luck!”
Again, the elder brother filled the silence with earnestness. “Who is our father then, if he isn’t the Great Raccoon Ancestor?”
“You will meet him in good time. When you’re big enough to hold your place at the end of a tree limb against a distempered, hormonal mass of raging stupidity. Until that night, you shall remain scarce in our chimney.”
“But, what’s his name?” Clutch insisted. “At least, tell us his name.”
“It doesn’t matter what his name is. He’s a jerk.”
“Mom, we need to know his name. He’s our father.”
“Your father’s name is … Meatbreath.”
“Our Dad’s name is Meatbreath. No way!”
At this, I tactfully withdrew my stethoscope from the wall. One hot Spring night, there was going to be a terrific confrontation, and it was hard to guess which of the cubs was going to be the one who would reckon with their father.
3
The first warm night of Spring. I expect the raccoons behind my office wall will venture out. Sure enough, a discreet scratching ascends the interior of the disused chimney. Probably the mother going up to check the weather. After a while, the scratching noise descends. I press my stethoscope to the wall so I can hear her report:
“A light breeze is blowing from where the Sun went into his burrow. The Ancestor is high in the southern sky. His light will allow us to see the silent vehicles before they come upon us. Once, they used to be noisy, which gave us a warning.”
“Eeeuuw!”
The cubs were remembering the late Uncle Wily. An amiable, harmless bachelor, he used to entertain them by recounting with glee all the threats he had outwitted. Then one wet winter night he was flattened by an electric car. It caught him while he was telling a yarn to the cubs by the roadside. One minute, he was a garrulous ball of fur; the next, he was staring at them from the pavement, both eyes on one side of his face like a flatfish and his teeth still grinning in mid-story.
“Since then,” Mother Slypaws said, “we have found that going around the neighbourhood from house to house and unplugging the vehicles diminishes the threat.”
“We shall continue to unplug vehicles in remembrance of Uncle Wily,” the elder brother declared.
Mistress Slypaws shook off the proposal. Sometimes the solemnity of her eldest son could be irritating. “Threats: Brief Review,” she announced. “After vehicles, what’s the number one threat?”
“Our Dad,” Bandit said.
“Get real. He’s hanging with the Dudes,” sister Touchwit said. “They’ve formed a men’s club. To protect their common territory, which means us, from other males.”
