In the still of a summer night

In the still of a warm summer night, after all should be asleep, you can hear it. Cracking the peace with a vile screeech. No one is quite sure where the hideous song comes from – most don’t want to know.

One man who had heard it, described it as a “creature struggling to stop itself from erupting.” Another said, “If you mixed a cat fight and a hyena scuffle you’d have a peaceful flavor of the sound.”

I heard it myself one night. We were up late talking and enjoying a few cold ones, when through the window burst the foul stench of a noise. It was close – it was very close. We leapt to our feet and fumbled to turn on the outside lights – it was gone, and so was our cat. We heard a brief tussle in the woods, but couldn’t see anything. Two of us shared a flashlight and found a couple good sticks – just in case.

Just in case – we weren’t sure for what, but we wanted to be ready. Hearts pounding and wishing we had another light, we made our way down to the tree line. The weather had been bad all weekend. The day before, the angry sky had unleashed its wind and rain over the area. The cold clouds spit balls of ice into the woods.

They always said that in the cool summer air was when it was the most alert and active. As we walked through the darkness the old legends I’d heard as a kid raced back through my mind: the ice giants of the north, trolls, ogres, valkyries – banshees. One pop of their voice could kill a dozen men. Late in the summer nights villagers throughout could hear the moaning scream echo across the hills.

We surveyed the ground and small trees in front of us – nothing obvious. Moving the light up the trees my brother-in-law spotted something. Just a quick flash of yellow eyes peeping back at us. They looked more curious than frightening. The squirrel pounced up to a higher branch – out of sight.

That’s not what we came down here to find – and its certainly not what made all that noise 10 minutes earlier. I glanced back at house for a second when the tree just in front of us shook under the weight of something up in the top branches. It was bigger than that squirrel – no question.

My hands clinched the stick as my eyes strained to see through the blackness.

“There – diiju see that?”

“Nah – where?”

“Back there – in that smaller tree.”

I tried to focus my eyes through the leaves and branches in the way. Then I saw the brown fur climbing. It’s head pivoted to peer back at us. Orange glowed these eyes. A few more rungs up the tree and we could see the rings on the big coon’s tail.

“It must have been that coon fighting something else that made all that noise.”

Yeah, probably,” I said.

We walked back up to the house trying to convince ourselves that it was the coon, but we both knew better. We had to tell the others something, or no one would sleep that night.

In the morning our cat came back up to the house and pawed on the door. She sprinted to her food, and then under the bed. She stayed under that bed all day.