could continue to study him.
He pushed open the screen door, which made the same screaky sound as
the one at the front of the house. He went onto the porch, hesitated,
then descended the three back steps to the yard.
The animal's dark eyes glittered.
When Eduardo closed half the distance between them, the raccoon dropped
to all fours, turned, and scampered twenty feet farther up the slope.
There it stopped, turned to face him again, sat erect on its
hindquarters, and regarded him as before.
Until then he had thought it was the same raccoon that had been
watching him from the front yard. Suddenly he wondered if, in fact, it
was a different beast altogether.
He walked quickly around the north side of the house, cutting a wide
enough berth to keep the raccoon at the back in sight. He came to a
point, well to the north of the house, from which he could see the
front and back yards--and two ring-tailed sentinels.
They were both staring at him.
He proceeded toward the raccoon in front of the house.
When he drew close, the coon put its tail to him and ran across the
front yard. At what it evidently regarded as a safe distance, it
stopped and sat watching him with its back against the higher, unmown
grass of the meadow.
'I'll be damned,' he said.
He returned to the front porch and sat in the rocker.
The waiting was over. After more than five weeks, things were
beginning to happen.
Eventually he realized he'd left his open beer by the kitchen sink. He
went inside to retrieve it because, now more than ever, he needed it.
He had left the back door standing open, though the screen door had
closed behind him when he'd gone outside. He locked up, got his beer,
stood at the window watching the backyard raccoon for a moment, and
then returned to the front porch.
The first raccoon had crept forward from the edge of the meadow and was
again only ten feet from the porch.
Eduardo picked up the video camera and recorded the critter for a
couple of minutes. It wasn't anything amazing enough to convince
skeptics that a doorway from beyond had opened in the early-morning
hours of May third, however, it was peculiar for a nocturnal animal to
pose so long in broad daylight, making such obviously direct eye
contact with the operator of the camcorder, and it might prove to be
the first small fragment in a mosaic of evidence.
After he finished with the camera, he sat in the rocker, sipping beer
and watching the raccoon as it watched him, waiting to see what would
happen next.
Occasionally the ring-tailed sentinel smoothed its whiskers, combed its
face fur, scratched behind its ears, or performed some other small act
of grooming.
Otherwise, there were no new developments.
At five-thirty he went inside to make dinner, taking his empty beer
bottle, camcorder, and shotgun with him. He closed and locked the
