This house has a big front porch, and my window overlooks the porch roof, so it’s an easy climb both up and down. Once I’m sure Mom is asleep, I pack my camera and tripod into my backpack, slide open my window, and climb out. There’s a big, sturdy railing within easy reach of my feet from the porch roof, so yeah, this should be easy. I’m wearing my coat, but as soon as I’m on the ground, I wish I’d worn my hat. My room is going to be cold when I get back.
My very favorite nocturnal animal is the bat. I love bats. I have a copy of the picture book Stellaluna; it’s the story of a little bat that gets lost and adopted by birds, who are happy to let Stellaluna join their family but insist that she has to stop hanging upside down. School always makes me feel like Stellaluna, like I’m a bat who’s being told she has to act like a bird. Although Rachel also seems a little like a bat trying to live with a bunch of birds. It’s why I already like her.
My second-favorite nocturnal animal are raccoons. Raccoons are sort of like cats, if cats had opposable thumbs. Raccoons will use their little hands to yank covers off garbage cans, and they can sometimes even unscrew lids if they’re not on too tightly, and they have very cute faces even if they’re nuisance animals that will make a mess and have no respect for human property. Also, unlike bats, they sometimes hold still so I can take pictures of them.
The way you find raccoons is you find somewhere with food in trash cans that aren’t secured well. Every small town has a little restaurant and at least one bar (sometimes it’s two or three bars), and anywhere that serves food probably has raccoons hanging out in the back. Unless the trash was just picked up. New Coburg has a main street strip, and I’m pretty sure that’s where the diner is. The only town I’ve ever lived in where people were consistently diligent about securing their trash had black bears that would come and raid unsecured Dumpsters. It was a lot harder to find raccoons there.
The diner is between the hardware store and an empty storefront with a faded New Coburg Dairy Days display in the window. There’s an enormous papier-mâché cow, once carefully painted, now covered in dust.
I make my way around the corner and behind the building. It’s clear and cool, and I can hear the buzz of the streetlight on the corner. I’m in luck; a half dozen raccoons are raiding the trash. I quietly take off my backpack and set up my tripod and camera.
You don’t want to use a flash for night photography; you want to use a long exposure time. Flash is basically the worst for lots of reasons, but if you’re taking pictures of animals, it’ll scare them and they’ll run away. The trouble with a long exposure time is that it works best if you’re taking a picture of something holding very still, like a building. This is why bats are so hard to take pictures of. Bats move very quickly while they’re hunting. In pictures taken with a long exposure time, they look like little extra-dark streaks across the dark sky. Raccoons are more likely to hold still for you, but as I sit down on the gravel to adjust my camera angle on the tripod, I mostly get pictures I know will be a blurry mess.
It’s a family of raccoons: a mom, I think, and four kits. The kits are smaller than the mom but not itty-bitty raccoon babies. They’re in and out of the Dumpster and squabbling over whatever it is they’re finding inside and moving far too quickly for any good photos. The mom finally snags herself what looks like a half-eaten piece of fried chicken and clambers down to the ground with it to gnaw without her kids trying to steal it from her. One of them follows, anyway. Maybe these pictures will turn out?
Then a door slams, and all the raccoons scramble away out of sight. I pick up my tripod and camera and try to retreat into the shadows, only to back right into a man who’s coming out from the house on the corner with a bag of trash. I was really expecting someone to come out from the diner—I wasn’t looking in the man’s direction. He looks down at me, startled, and I feel a surge of terror. Gripping my tripod, I sprint across his yard and out to the street and run not toward my own house (because what if he’s following me?) but in the other direction. After a couple of blocks, I turn back. No one’s there. I stop to catch my breath. I’m outside the bowling alley.
It occurs to me that I could have just said, “Excuse me,” instead of running away like a housebreaker. I was doing wildlife photography; there’s nothing illegal or wrong about taking pictures of raccoons. I’m not the one who left the Dumpster open. And the fact that I ran away like that might have actually made him think I was up to no good. I lean against a wall, trying to calm myself down, and I fold up my tripod, stuffing it into my backpack.
“Hey. Steph?”
I jump about a foot in the air, even though it’s a girl’s voice, and the first thing I see when I turn is the fluffy little dog she’s walking. The person holding the leash is Bryony, the biracial girl from lunch.
“Yeah. I mean, hi,” I say.
“I think you freaked out my dad just now,” she says. “What were you doing lurking behind the old Annie’s?”
“The old what?”
“You know, the closed-down store.”
“I was taking pictures of the raccoons raiding the trash,” I say.
Bryony looks genuinely surprised by this,
