Night 2

Earlier, while we were making dinner, Kat had something of a catsup malfunction.  I think he shook it a little too hard with the lid open, but it splattered on the rocks and such smack in the center of our little crescent of hammocks.  We didn’t think much of it until later that night.  I had just drifted off to sleep when the first raccoon boldly brushed underneath my hammock and opened the book resting on the ground beside me.  Don’t know why he opened the book.  I doubt he could read and it sure didn’t have any food in it.   At the time, I couldn’t figure out why we had coons at all.  I mean, we didn’t have much food left – and it didn’t seem to matter much to them what was in the coolers.  The entire night, though, at least three (maybe more) large coons launched a dedicated raid on our camp.  None of the over-30 crowd ended up getting more than an hour or two of consecutive snoozing.  Kat and I would toss rocks at them and they’d just stare at us.  I tried to spook ‘em away by spotlighting them with my headlamp and I do believe the biggest one flipped me the bird.  Harley woke up once and loudly shook a pill-bottle to try and scare them off.   Nothing worked.  As my hammock sagged toward the ground that night, I got close enough for one to come over and pat me down.  All night long they tried to open containers and dig through bags.  They scattered rocks and skittered the gravel away.  Even if one of us did manage to ignore the coons long enough to get to sleep, one of the other two would get a knucklehead idea to try and run ’em off and wake the rest of us up.  Can’t hardly be mad at ‘em, though, for wanting a taste of catsup.

I guess.

The boys, though, slept like stones.   Bear Bait didn’t wake up until after all the pancakes were cooked and most of the camp was packed away.