The Strange White Doves Read Free

for all the world like great white blossoms that had opened during the night. Our daily visitors included an eagle, several ospreys, herons of all kinds, and ibis—great flocks of wood ibis that would do precision cartwheels high overhead, often for most of a morning.
    In this semitropic abundance, Zan’s favorites were the raccoons. He tried to tame Mama Coon by leaving scraps of food out for her every evening. But not until he discovered her taste for sweet rolls and doughnuts did she finally overcome her shyness, and begin appearing at the screen door at suppertime with her family, now grown. If we were a trifle late with the bakery sweets, Mama Coon would summon us by seizing the edge of the door and banging it impatiently against the framing.
    Presently we discovered that we were feeding, not three raccoons, but five. Soon there were ten. And such was the amazing popularity of bakery sweets—leftovers that I began hauling by the bushel from every bakery in the region—that the ten raccoons soon became twenty, and finally thirty. At least I counted thirty one evening, though Alice says there were only twenty-five. And twenty-five were quite enough. The sight of that much wild fur swirling about the patio in the early darkness can never be forgotten.
    The big puzzler, naturally, is how all those masked marauders so quickly got the word that ambrosian goodies were being passed out in quantity—and in safety, which is very important—at a certain location on the coast.
    I wondered about it at the time, but on the seacoast there is so much to arouse wonder that many things have to go unexplained, so I accepted the presence of the raccoons, just as I accepted the curious actions of certain birds and fish. After our experience with the doves, however, the old questions rose again.
    Just how did Mama Coon impart the news to the others?
    There is hardly any doubt that the information came from her. Nor is it hard to imagine Mama and her family heading along one of the marsh trails one evening and being stopped by Cousin Nosey, who chitters curiously, “Hey, I see you going in this direction every night! What’s cooking?”
    And Mama, recognizing kin, would no doubt tell him to tag along and find out. All this is possible, for I have often watched coons meet and chitter at each other. Usually it seemed to be only a friendly warning, like, “You keep your distance, and I’ll keep mine,” though I have a strong feeling that at times certain basic news items were exchanged. Even so, such encounters would not account for more than a dozen of my patio visitors. They could not explain the many raccoons who came from a distance to join the feast.
    I am certain that they must have come from a distance, because they were inlanders, entirely different from the marsh variety of raccoons that lived around us. Mama Coon and her family were smallish brown animals with sharp, foxy faces. These inlanders were often twice her size—big, handsome gray rascals with broad heads and gleaming silvery fur that would have made a trapper’s eyes pop.
    On the Gulf Coast a raccoon doesn’t have to travel far to eat his fill. Every ebbing tide leaves a bountiful feast. The pickings are just as good for the inlanders, for there’s a year-round growing season. So it is not surprising that all our patio visitors had a well-fed look. Some of the inlanders were downright fat.
    The astonishing thing is that well-fed raccoons would travel deep into strange territory for food they didn’t need.
    The only way I can explain it is that some receiving portion of their minds picked up, from a distance, three alluring bits of information from Mama Coon. Not that Mama intended to broadcast it to all the world. More likely her joy was so great that she couldn’t contain it.
    The three bits of information were simply these: (1) an absolutely out-of-this-world kind of goodie was being given to all members