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Greetings from the boiling hot Florida Space Coast, where Elon Musk shoots off giant rockets into space every night or two for the entertainment of the locals. From my sister's front yard, or what they call a front yard in Florida, we can see and hear them go up, and the recovered stages come back down with retro-burners thundering, to be reused over and over again. It's the ultimate in recycling.
Musk's rockets are not the only source of excitement here, however. I flew into the Orlando airport in early morning and soon arrived by shuttle at the Cape Canaveral beachside gated-community home in of my sister Queenie and her husband, Chippendale. On their doorstep I was surprised to find a mangled dead animal, which I soon was told had been a young raccoon. I live on a farm in West (By Gosh) Virginia, where the demise of raccoons is a frequent occurrence and always a cause for celebration. We are not, however, in the habit of leaving dead ones at the front door. (Some years ago we had two dogs who excelled at digging out and killing field rats. Thinking my neighbor could feed them to his pet snake, I gathered half a dozen and took them to his house.
Finding him not at home, however, I considered leaving them, but not having pen and paper at hand for an explanatory note, I was concerned about how he might interpret finding an unexplained bag of dead rats on his doorstep. I placed them on the backseat floor my car to deliver later, but forgot about them for four days. That is another story, and a stinky one.) The little raccoon on my sister's doorstep, I was told, may (or may not, as ye shall see) have been killed by Charlie, a neighbor's dog, in the middle of the night in a furious animal fight that awoke nearby households. In daylight, my sister Queenie visited the bloody scene of the battle and for unexplained reasons picked up the deceased raccoon and carried it home. She may be a retired university professor but inside she is still a good West Virginia girl.
Her husband opened the front door to find his wife holding up a dead raccoon by the tail. That explains why I found it on their doorstep when I arrived that morning. Among the things which remain unexplained are exactly what animal or animals Charlie the dog was fighting, what killed the baby raccoon, what bled so profusely as to leave quantities of blood at the scene, and what became of that wounded or deceased animal. The nice neighbor lady who owns Charlie said she let her dog out for a late-night call of nature, which we might say turned out to be a call of the wild, only to hear the sounds of an extended and furious fight, after which Charlie came limping home, fatigued, sore and covered with blood, very little of it apparently his.
Charlie is a sweet, quiet, obedient dog, a boxer mix. No one meeting Charlie would ever suspect him to be a tough rescue dog from the mean streets of Miami. I don't mean to imply that all the streets of Miami are mean, but some must be, and Charlie was found on one of them. We can reasonably assume that was where he picked up street fighting skills, judging by the outcome of the fight.
My brother-in-law, inspecting the fight scene, said there was too much blood all to have come from the little raccoon, and Charlie had only small cuts. His theory is that Charlie encountered a mother raccoon with one or more kits, that the fight was between dog and mother raccoon, and that the young one's death may have been collateral damage. Charlie's owner floated the possibility that there was an unknown third antagonist in the fight, a coyote, because coyotes are known to hunt raccoons. Perhaps, she said, the coyote was after the young raccoons, and when Charlie chanced upon this attack in progress, he jumped into the fray and actually was defending the raccoon family.
Despite the handy explanation this provides as to the vast amount of bloodshed and the lack of a large deceased raccoon, there is no absolutely no evidence for it. The Grassy Knoll Theory is more plausible than the Third Antagonist (Coyote) Theory. We reluctantly file it in the Unsupported Crazy Theory bin. What is incontestable, however, is that Charlie, bravely defending hearth and home, emerged the winner in a desperate, noisy battle with . . . something.
Charlie's owner now has him in doggy psychotherapy for PTSD. We wish him a full and rapid recovery. Incidental to this account was the comment from someone that, "We should not object to the presence of coyotes. They were here first." To which someone else replied, "No. They weren't." With that we conclude the story of Charlie, Florida Hero Dog.
(Fred Miller's third book of stories, "A Dead Carp on Shadyside Ave." is $10 and available locally at Calcutta Giant Eagle, Pottery City Antique Mall, Museum of Ceramics, Frank's Pastries, Davis Bros. pharmacies, Connie's Kitchen restaurant, and the Old Ft. Steuben gift shop.)