Daylight was fading and the road was slick with a thick coating of icy snow. Inside the cab of a forest-green Chevy pickup truck, Clyde and I were on our way to keep an appointment with the powder monkey, a man who was well versed in all the intrinsic elements of black powder. It was dangerous work, drilling into a rocky ledge, filling the holes with a mixture of sulfur, potassium nitrate and salt peter, then blowing off the side of a cliff. You could lose an arm, leg or your life, but somebody had to do it. The high-risk job without a pension had already cost the powder monkey two fingers which made his left hand look more like a chicken claw. I suppose that's why he mostly kept it hidden in a pocket.
The powder monkey's cabin was ‘hidden deep in a valley among the pines’. There were ash trees and silver maples, too. It had snowed several inches that day, adding to the six inches already on the ground. Coated with a thick layer of white fluff the tall trees looked like columns supporting the night sky, a dark blanket dotted with tiny pinpricks of shimmering light. There was a deafening silence in the air so loud I could hear my heart beat. The immense beauty of Eternity's ceiling was like paying a visit to the holiest of cathedrals, maybe even the Sistine Chapel.
When Clyde unloosed the hounds from the pickup, his two prized possessions bounded off the tailgate and ran off into the darkness. The three of us stood, barely breathing, anxiously waiting and waiting until there came that familiar low baying. "They're on track, let's go," Clyde said, and started walking fast as the rough terrain would allow toward the sound of low wailing. Clyde and the powder monkey carried Coleman lanterns. I was given the task of porter, carting a pair of thick, padded welding gloves and three gunny sacks. There were no long-guns and neither Clyde or the powder monkey carried a sidearm. We weren't on the hunt to kill our prey.
When the dog’s baying stopped and became repetitive barking, there was no time to waste. With Clyde in the lead, we trudged through knee deep snow toward the sound. I was last in line behind the powder monkey, who some said carried blasting caps in his hip pocket. Huffing and puffing now, with Clyde out of sight. The powder monkey's up ahead and breathing hard. Finally, the three of us converge under a pine tree that had to be at least 30 feet tall. At the base of the tree two dogs dance on their hind legs, chew on tree bark, all the while keeping up their maniacal snorting. From above, a hissing sound.
“That ain’t no rattler,” the powder monkey announced.
“Rattlers don’t climb trees,” Clyde remarked.
Once the two Blueticks were pulled away from the tree and tied off, one question remained, "Who's gonna' do the climbin’?" The youngest? That would be me and I'm afraid of heights. The powder monkey? Are you kidding? The man's pockets are lined with black powder. If he fell, we'd all be blown to Kingdom Come, including Ricky Raccoon, who had scampered to the top of the giant tree, where he swung back and forth like a fuzzy Christmas tree ornament with a striped bushy tail. That left the oldest and the most agile among us.
Like he was climbing a telephone pole without the benefit of spikes on his boots, Clyde scaled that pine tree limb by limb until he was almost within arm's reach of his growling prey. Meanwhile, down below, the powder monkey held the Coleman lantern, while I slipped my hands into the welding gloves. Suddenly, at the tip top of the tree their came a screeching sound. Directly behind me, nipping at my heels, the hounds somehow kept up their incessant, ear-splitting yapping. It all got to be nerve racking, especially waiting for the varmint to drop.
From high in the tree came, "Look out below. Here he comes."
I took a stance like baseball catcher Yogi Berri, held my arms out, ready to take a speedy delivery, then Boom, I had a 25 pound snarling, stinking, splayed creature cradled in my arms. The sudden impact had knocked the wind out of the raccoon. But then Davy Crockett's coonskin hat come alive. I tried to bag the beast but he had latched onto my thumb. That's when a sharp incisor cut through the thick welding glove.
Every time I look at the scar on my left thumb, I'm reminded of that night more than sixty years ago. Needless to say, since I didn’t start foaming at the mouth the raccoon was not rabid. The animal won that round and escaped back into the forest.
On the night in question, we harvested two of the animals which would later be sent to counties in Missouri with low raccoon populations. Since they weren’t tagged there’s no way to know the ultimate outcome of the raccoons that were relocated, so it’s entirely possible that a few of them ended up as bush meat on somebody’s dinner plate.
