Trash Pandas

     It was the screaming, not the scurrying, that jolted me awake at four a.m.
     It sounded like a puppy. It was definitely not a cat, thanks to Gatos Diablos I know the sound of cats in distress. And thanks to the mountain lion that lives in open space, I know that a mountain lion sounds like a child crying when it kills a deer. The deer make no sound at all. Creepy? Yep.
      So at first I thought that the coyotes I had heard earlier in the evening, or the fox I keep hoping will appear, had caught one of the Diablos outside my bedroom window. It sounded like a child screaming at first.
      I shot up, and was fully awake enough to register that A) the motion sensor had not turned on the light on the side of the house and B) that was the victim screaming, not the attacker.
      Quite logically, I then chose to bang on my screen window and bellow "Hey, knock it off."
      The motion sensor light had not triggered, which made me feel eerie.
     When they did not knock it off, I ran to the spare room's window. G had crashed there after a late night of summer shenannegins, and my yelling into the darkness on the side of the house woke her up, even though she had been home less than an hour. I convinced myself that it was a fox pup, and it sounded more and more canine, but what in the world would kill a kit? Not the Diablos, they have a contract with any fox family that lives within four houses. They agree to kill the birds and mice and leave them for the skulk, in exchange for protection.
       You are undoubtedly impressed by my grasp of the fox vernacular. I would like to take this moment to thank google.
       I took off down the hall yelling to all of the nobody assembled "Count the cats, where are all the cats?" That got G out of bed like a rocket, she immediately started calling for Poe. Jim remained asleep, as he is wont to do in these situations.
       I ran into the backyard, barefooted, assuming whatever was going on would cease when a human came schlepping outside. It did not, primarily because I was in the back  yard and the murder was taking place in the side yard. I had to go back through the house and out of the front door to get to the side of the house. I did not have shoes, and therefore was not going through the back yard and deal with our ghetto fence, which would simply fall down if I touched it, smashing all the animals not quick enough to run away. This would be the second time at four a.m. that I applied logic to this event.
       G joined me out the front door, and we stomped to the side of the house. I could hear scrambling and the crying was more faint---I think the victim was being dragged into the back yard, where I just was. It made no sense unless they were dragging the victim over the fence. Who drags a dying animal over a fence? The motion sensor light continued stubbornly to not turn on, so G turned her cell phone flash light into the darkness. We saw a fat thing waddle away, and G said "It was cats?"
        I know that fat waddle. I know these guys.
        The guys Harper calls "Trash Pandas".
        Raccoons.
        I hate raccoons. Raccoons once broke into my house. They have power tools.They probably disconnected the motion sensor on the light! Years ago, they multiplied when they got into my kitchen, and they do not exit the same way they enter. They hiss and snap and are defiant. I had to open the kitchen door with a broom from several feet away, the broom handle hovering over their nasty beady eyes. They had broken in through the screen but were having none of going back out that way.
         I see you, Trash  Panda.
         As we stood trying to listen, another Trash Panda lumbered down the tree, gave us a dirty look, and slowly climbed up the neighbor's exterior wall. Not in any kind of a hurry at all, he was the size of a lab puppy, or a really fat corgi. When he looked back at me I heard a voice in my head "I know it was you Fredo."
         It was raccoons. Trash Pandas. "Bandits" to those who think they're cute.
         They are not cute. They are giant rodents. They are the real ROUS'.
         But what did they attack?
         We did not see a body. Or fur. Or blood splatter.
         We came back into the house, all four cats and the dog accounted for. Poe immediately tried to dart outside to see what all the ruckus was about. Being the youngest, (her gangsta name is "Smol"), she is also the boldest. Or perhaps "the dumbest", as in "too stupid to know there is danger".
         We couldn't see clearly in the dark, and in the morning there was no sign of a corpse.
         All four Diablos were in the house, sound asleep when the attack occurred. Unlike the Diablos, the Trash Pandas do not leave a corpse behind for me to hose off of my patio. So this is not about me, then, is it?
           I sense a turf war....

6 June 2017
non fiction