“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The comical series of events involving Floyd, one of his sons, and another helper had started this noon: “Hell, Rob, it’s a coon!” a surprised Floyd called down to me from the roof of the house, after the beam from his flashlight had illuminated the black mask across the animal’s face and made its eyes shine as it crouched at the base of the fireplace chimney. The raccoon had evidently picked the site as a secure, heated refuge from the winter weather to come. The three men vainly tried several methods to coax the half-wild, half-tame creature back up the chimney. Finally Floyd opened the damper a bit and lit a sheet of newspaper in the fireplace: The smoke immediately sent our very upset tenant scrambling up the chimney, across the roof and into the hemlock tree growing at one corner of the front porch. Then while his two helpers stood guard to keep the raccoon in the tree, Floyd lugged a very heavy flat stone up the ladder and planted it across the chimney; he’s going to cement a wire mesh in place as a permanent seal against animals and birds.

I pushed Jane in her chair out on the porch, as close to the hemlock as we could get behind the floor-to-ceiling glass; we looked up at the chattering animal from only three feet away. We’d seen raccoons playing in the tree a few times, and Floyd, who lives on a farm, sees them often. This one was fully grown and bore a heavy coat of mixed black, brown, and gray hair; the colors exactly matched those of the tree trunk. In the gloomy day we couldn’t see eyes in the black face. We couldn’t tell the animal’s sex. [I read later that females and the young live in groups, the adult males usually alone—perfectly suitable accommodations of consciousness for raccoons!] “Coons can’t run fast,” Floyd told us, “and big dogs will attack ‘em if they catch them out in the open in the daytime. But that coon could kill even a big dog, if it got cornered.” He added that if we heard a loud thudding noise on the roof tonight, it meant that an animal had managed to dislodge the stone cap on the chimney. And Floyd had been right: The raccoon stayed in the tree until dusk, then descended and ambled into the woods in back of the house.³

1. Jane typed this entry for her journal while sitting at a card table in our glassed-in front porch: