RASTUS EARNS HIS SLEEP 267 
before he eats it. You may wash it almost to 
a pulp for him, but he will grab it from your hand 
and rewash it himself before eating. 
The wild ’coon, of course, has all these traits. 
I have lain by the shore of Lake Drummond, in 
' the heart of the Dismal Swamp, when there was 
a heavy blanket of night fog four feet thick hang- 
ing over the water, and heard the ’coons washing 
their meat, or fishing, close by me, but quite in- 
visible under the fog veil. In the morning I 
would find in the mud the print of their feet by 
the shore, the hind paw marks uncannily like the 
print of some shriveled baby’s foot. If you could 
have watched Rastus at night, you would have 
seen him, when ranging the woods, get up on 
every fallen log and run along it, poking his paw 
down into crannies of the bark, feeling for grubs. 
When something glittering caught his eye—a bit 
of quartz, a piece of tinfoil dropped by some 
hunter from a cigarette package, you would have 
seen him approach it, look up into the trees, pick 
it up on his forepaws and thus investigate it. 
You would have seen him climb up trees, too, and 
poke his hand into holes where chickadees or 
