Animal Terrorism

The bugs are entering my house from somewhere, and it’s the middle of the night again. My pale white legs extend from my fancy underwear. Little pink pigs stand backwards with their curling tails standing out on the brown fabric. No. I’m not gay. There is a laughing cow on my turquoise t-shirt, and a health cocktail made me sick hours ago. I thought of the brown buffalo, and painted my own red picture on pale porcelain. Moths are attacking my paintings and I’m peaking out my windows like some paranoid speed freak. The police don’t concern me, and I’m mostly sober, but I’m looking for the bears.

I’ve double checked the locks on all the sliding glass doors, closed the windows, and locked the front door. I’ve learned that one can’t be too careful around here. Living by the river is grand, but the wildlife makes it a true adventure. Aspen is not cheap, but included in my extravagant rent is an adrenaline wonderland of furry invaders. I live alone, but every night new friends come and visit. I hear them outside, plotting their next break-in.

Just before I fell asleep tonight, I remembered I’d left the window in my office open. I hurried down the hall and shut it with gusto. A simple screen is no sort of barrier to a bear. Raccoons are smaller, but can still cleverly navigate a screen door with their greasy claws.

The first invasion of my now popular kitchen was executed by just such a beast almost two months ago. But this was no ordinary raccoon. I’ve named him Napoleon, and he left his mark upon my kitchen floor, as well as on a leather bound book of Spanish Flash Gordon comics. His fish oil paw print was all the evidence I needed to conclude that it was he who had gobbled the leftover salmon from next to my sink. There, astride that leather book, he proudly ate the finest fish off a greasy salmon skin, which he conspicuously left as if to say it wasn’t good enough for him. Then with gathered paw grease from that skin, he painted footprints on the 50 year old book. The intruder proceeded to knock over my trash can, leaping onto it off the counter like Indiana Jones. The noise of the falling trash can greeted me just as I opened the front door. I made a great deal of noise, startling the perpetrator who promptly abandoned the scene.

That was the beginning of the summer, a time of animal innocence and naivety. That was before everyone was talking about the bear problems, back when I left my sliding glass doors open and assumed the closed screen theory of safety. Napoleon had simply clawed into the screen and slid it open. Not being a total fool, I began closing my sliding glass doors after that. As an old Aspen kid, I never imagined that it would be necessary to lock them.

About a month later I was slumbering in my comfy bed, lost in dreams. Suddenly I was pulled from sleep by a loud crash in the kitchen. Remembering I was in this little mountain town, where people don’t rob people at 5:15 AM, I quickly realized there was a bear in my kitchen. I jumped up and started roaring at the top of my lungs. “I am the king of this house!!!” I spoke loudly, yelling into the space outside my bedroom, using not only every ounce of primal volume insanity that poured forth, but also English, and a parade of aggressive swearing. My feet were lifting off the ground, the adrenaline pumped me up to the size of savage gorilla, and I rushed into the hallway roaring. Thankfully, like Napolean the raccoon, this new perpetrator had retreated.

The doors of the refrigerator and freezer were wide open, and light shone from within, illuminating a huge pile of half-eaten food and trash all over the kitchen floor. The sliding glass door was open, proving the prowess of a motivated paw.

Like Napoleon, this invader left me with a keen impression of his personality. The coon was a snob and a vandal, who insulted me with his suggestion that my salmon skin wasn’t good enough for him to do anything but paint with. The bear on the other hand was not so unjustly picky. He came to eat, and eat he did, but with bearish delicacy. He did no damage to the sliding glass door on his way in, and he opened both the refrigerator and the freezer without doing even the slightest damage to them. I even had three ceramic vases sitting on top of the fridge, all three of which were still standing after the incident. I was also impressed by the bears’ healthy food choices. He ate lots of fruits and vegetables, and cleared me out of veggie burgers. He even took a few items as take out. After all my yelling, he must have strolled out on two feet with his hands full. Out on my deck I found a half eaten bag of carrots and an empty box of veggie burgers. I think this was one of Jerry’s bears. Mid-summer lesson: lock the sliding glass doors.

It’s been a pretty tight ship here ever since. Except for my kitchen and bedroom windows, both of which I regularly left open. They are both well off the ground, and the kitchen window is only about 15 inches in width. So the other evening when I walked into my dark house at 10:30 at night to the sound of a familiar crash in the kitchen, adrenaline came rushing through me along with the thought that like an idiot I must have left a sliding glass door unlocked. First I leapt into the air like a startled school girl, then began the roaring and yelling again, ran back outside, leapt in my car, drove into the yard, around the side of the house and shone my brights into the big windows in my living room, and honked my horn spastically until I noticed in the light of my high beams that all the sliding glass doors were shut. I didn’t see any big animals inside, and I began to wonder if it was indeed a person who had made the noise this time. I drove back around and entered my home ranting and raving. “Who’s there?” I yelled, along with some more roaring and screeching just in case I was dealing with a non-human species. Hearing nothing, I proceeded down the hallway. I turned on a light and entered my kitchen stealthily, clutching a broom. Again the trashcan was knocked over, but the fridge and freezer were closed. I turned on the kitchen light and viewed the mayhem. The small kitchen window screen had been pushed in. The various decorations in its path were strewn around the sink and on the floor.

Almost instantly I concluded that it was the work of the dreaded Napoleon. The malice indicated by the disrespectful placement of a picture of my deceased grandfather, which was lying face down on the kitchen floor amongst scattered trash, suggested the conniving raccoon and not the health conscious hippy bear. I closed the slightly broken window, cleaned up the trash, and prayed that the little bastard had escaped the way he came in and was not hiding out in my house. I pranced around loudly and heard no more evidence of the intruder, so I went to sleep.

When I woke the next day I went outside to find out what clever stool Napoleon had stood upon to reach my kitchen window. The window is four feet above the ground, too high for the sinister raccoon to reach without some assistance. There was nothing but the vertical wall of my house in either direction which that savage little warrior could have used in the break in. My nemesis raccoon was innocent this time.

A bear had squeezed its fat ass through my kitchen window. The claw marks in the wood beneath the window, far larger than even the largest raccoon could make, told me everything. I think it was a mother/cub team, and they may have been schooled by Napoleon himself. It could not have been a large bear who squeezed through that little window, but I believe that the small perpetrator had an accomplice on this job, and that accomplice may not even be the mastermind of operations. It’s time we face the reality of our situation.

The facts are clear enough in their suggestions. Raccoons and bears may be working together now. We must be vigilant. We may have to raise the Bearor Level to dark orange. I have Napoleons’ footprints. Like Michael Chertoff, our Secretary of Homeland Security, I have a gut feeling that the level of attacks is going to rise. If you can keep your minds off the imminent collapse of the Maroon Creek Bridge for long enough, I suggest you remember to close your windows and lock your doors.