All evening long we’ve been hearing a succession of thuds and clunks coming from the roof. “It’s either chunks of melting frozen snow falling off the trees, or we have raccoons dancing on the roof,” I told my wife. She laughed. If she’d seen the three ‘coons I saw last month, she might have locked herself in the bathroom instead.

Those were really big guys (?), and there were three of them. I’d heard some kind of clonking just outside and decided I had to look. You don’t always want to, but sometimes you should. Grabbing my Wal-Mart spotlight, I opened the front door and looked around. Hmm. Nothing there, then YIKES, about six feet away stood a trio of the biggest, bushiest, ugliest, brown raccoons I ever saw. “Mountain raccoons,” the kind that carry off small horses and cows. Come to think of it, they may have been pigmy buffalo or some such, they were that big and brown and raggedy. Whatever their species, they ambled off, but I thought of them again tonight, up there with the chimney soot and rotting elm leaves, trotting around in the slush.

I think they hang around where the stove pipe comes up out of the roof. When I walk outside after dark to dig a piece of firewood out of the snow, they stand up there warming their paws (hooves?) in the smoke and watching me with shiny dark eyes.