Book Review: Rascal

Title: Rascal

Author: Sterling North

Date: 1963

Publisher: Penguin

ISBN: 0-590-44671-1

Length: 189 pages

Illustrations: black-and-white pictures by John Schoenherr

Quote: "We dug out a den of raccoons, and here is the one we brought home."

Sterling and Oscar thought their dog Wowser was digging into a groundhog's hole when the dog dug up the raccoon family. Three of the baby raccoons escaped with their mother. The boys caught one little raccoon. Sterling was allowed to keep the animal for a pet. He called it Rascal. Considering the way the boy Sterling admits he first got his hands on Rascal, he hardly deserved to have the little animal survive and mature into a lovable companion; raccoons become less lovable when they're full-grown, but for that first year Rascal followed Sterling around and trilled and snuggled just like a bigger, cleverer kind of cat.

This was in 1918, a bittersweet year for young Sterling, he recalls, writing as a mature man.  His mother was dead, his siblings grown up and moved out; his brother was in Europe, fighting the war. Wartime censorship kept Sterling, his father, and his sisters from realizing how much danger brother Herschel was in. Sterling was earning his own money by trapping and skinning wild animals, mowing, weeding, and so on, and was considered "a very competent eleven-year-old." He would soon be crippled by polio, but didn't know it yet. He had some other pets, including a crow and a skunk family, and a remote but sympathetic father who let him do things like build his own canoe in the living room. His father seems to have had more money than most of Sterling's friends and relatives.

He had some of his best childhood experiences that year, he tells us. Reluctant to lock Rascal in a cage while fresh corn was ripening, he was allowed to spend two weeks camping beside Lake Superior with his father and Rascal. His friend's horse, who was a friend of Sterling's and Rascal's too, won a horse race, and Sterling almost won a timed pie eating contest but was disqualified because Rascal helped. Ordered to keep Rascal on a leash with a collar, he visited a local craftsman and had real works of art custom-made to fit Rascal's half-grown neck. He helped save an uncle's tobacco crop in cold weather.  When the new catalogue from the trap company featured a picture of a raccoon caught in a trap, Sterling renounced trapping and hunting. And when Rascal was about one year old, a female raccoon came to visit, and Sterling took Rascal on a moonlight boat ride around the local lake...and came home alone.

Flash-forward...When I was the age of Sterling and Oscar, my parents didn't go into Gate City more than was absolutely necessary. Once or twice a month they'd let us leave school early and hang out with one of the older relatives who'd moved into town while our parent or parents shopped. I remember the afternoon Dad came up to Grandma's house, very pleased with himself for having found a copy of Rascal in a secondhand store. "As good a book as I can remember," Dad raved. "Meaning I won't like it," I thought. Sure enough it was a story about some old boy who didn't even have a sister...but then I started reading it, anyway, and I did like it. So did my brother. It became one of our favorite books.

We never attracted a raccoon, although we thought we wanted one, during my brother's lifetime. Chickens were still mostly free-range in our neighborhood and raccoons, possums, and otters had been shot on sight for many years. By 2007, when someone had a sweet but misguided idea about fostering chickens at the Cat Sanctuary, raccoon populations had recovered enough that I trapped and evicted three chicken-eating raccoons.

Then there was little Rackety...Regular readers remember the sad end of the sweet, polite little girl raccoon, Rackety. The cats and I liked and trusted her for a few years, and then she started killing kittens.

In recommending Rascal to readers I think it's obligatory to say that of course kidnapping a raccoon out of its nest is a mean, cruel thing to do. In the book Sterling didn't realize what a bad thing he was doing, but he does some growing up in the course of the book. You know that if you can afford to let baby raccoons live anywhere, you want to let them live with their mothers.

This of course means that they may become very friendly animals, in their way,but they won't be pets like Rascal who curl up on your bed at night. If encouraged an adult raccoon may hold your finger in its adorable tiny hand. Then since the raccoon's instincts are telling it to assert its territorial rights, it may chomp your finger by way of saying "I'm the boss." One of Rascal's cute tricks was grabbing a hen by the neck with each little hand--again, more of a dominance display than even a food craving. Adult raccoons can kill adult cats, and eat them if hungry. They can kill dogs, too; North says "if cornered," and the "pleasure" of a raccoon hunt is watching a big male raccoon fight a whole pack of hounds, but raccoons sometimes start these fights. If a raccoon thinks you are its private caterer, it may attack other animals who rely on you for food too. Most carnivorous animals don't actually like the taste of humans and won't kill human babies unless they're rabid or starving, but raccoons aren't wired for respectful relationships and, if encouraged to lose their fear of humans, are likely to bite even the humans who feed them.

Generally, lovable though these animals can be, everyone is best off when they don't become real pets. Some people coexist for years with raccoons who keep about ten feet away from humans and our pets, but then, if those raccoons have multiple families...Raccoons can be spayed or neutered if you really want to keep them as pets; they're less aggressive when not raising families. (This is not, however, a recommended option when raccoons have grown up wild; it wasn't something I could seriously consider for poor little Rackety. They're neither stupid enough to forget nor affectionate enough to forgive.) They are as vulnerable to infections as domestic animals are, and more vulnerable to food poisoning since they eat a wider range of foods--and non-foods. They have to be kept in cages or on leashes at all times. They can use their clever little hands to twist off lids, open locks, take things apart, and generally destroy any part of a house or garden in which they're not watched. Few if any other animals seem to be as capable of cruelty for its own sake as some humans are, but some raccoons come close; they do knowingly kill and destroy just to assert their claim to a given territory. They really are "bear-cats" that can display some of the worst qualities of both bear and cat.

But they're just so dang cute...people probably will always want to bond with raccoons, even though the happiest possible ending to those pet stories is that, like Rascal, the year-old animal may just bound off into the woods and never look back.

There's another layer of happiness to the ending of Rascal. During his year of friendship with an animal most humans consider a nuisance to be killed and skinned, Sterling learns more about the animals his generation are pushing to "endangered" status. He's looked forward to easy money from another year's trapping, but when the new catalogue advertises a trap with a picture of a raccoon caught in it, Sterling turns against the fur trade--forever, he tells us. He becomes more mindful about hunting, too. 

The real T. Sterling North survived polio and became a writer, mostly about animals and naturalists. The Wikipedia article about him needs improvement. Hoping to learn more about this author, I found an article that's not even complete; where's the list of those "many other books" he wrote, in addition to The Wolfling and So Dear to My Heart, none of which I've never found?

Rascal has been reprinted and translated many times; a Japanese version (Arasukaru) is credited with creating a market for raccoons as pets in Japan (where they're non-native and somewhat dangerous), and I personally have a Spanish edition (Pillastre). If you're not particular about which printing you get, English editions are fairly easy to find. To show support for this web site, send $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment to the appropriate address at the bottom of the screen. Up to four books the size of the original hardcover edition, or eight the size of the "pocket" paperback, will fit into one $5 package.