10 
FOREST AND STREAM 
January, 1920 
A RACOON EXPLORES NEW COUNTRY 
HOW ONE OF THESE PIONEERS VISITED A CAMP ON THE SOUTH 
SHORE OF LAKE SUPERIOR AND WAS ENCOURAGED TO REMAIN 
T YPICAL of the faunal changes often 
wrought by an increasingly favor- 
able environment, is the advent of 
the raccoon along the south shore of 
Lake Superior. 
When I first went to this region in 
1870 and during the more than twenty 
years following, I never heard of a coon 
excepting one which was shot in 1885, un- 
der the belief that it was a timber wolf, 
as its gray body was partly exposed on 
the top of a log and this, the local hunter 
was unable to identify without assistance. 
Originally the Lake shore, swamps and 
water courses were marked by dense coni- 
ferous forests, while the deep snows, long 
winters and absence of suitable food, 
made such a locality an undesirable one 
for certain animals and birds. On the 
cutting down of the forests and the 
building of lumber roads in every direc- 
tion came second growth thickets, with a 
variety of wild berries and nesting birds. 
Later on homesteads and rural settle- 
ments meant cornfields and poultry yards, 
so that, from time to time, some more ad- 
venturous coon found its way north from 
the Lake Michigan shores or lower Wis- 
consin. In certain places these thrived 
and multiplied. 
How one of these pioneers visited my 
camp, fifteen years ago, and how he was 
encouraged to remain despite his attack 
upon the poultry, is described in the fol- 
lowing notes from my diary. Other coons 
came in later years and furnished many 
By GEORGE SHIRAS III 
a flashlight picture, but the first one, it 
seems to me, deserves the special men- 
tion usually accorded adventuresome ex- 
plorers in a new country. 
“story of an itinerant coon” 
“White Fish Lake, August 21, 1903. — 
After arising and before I had breakfast, 
Jim came from the barn with the an- 
nouncement that all the young chickens 
had been killed during the night — some 
60 in number. The various broods were 
more than half grown, and for several 
weeks had been consorting together at 
night by huddling in a narrow recess be- 
tween two adjoining buildings. Jim hav- 
ing noticed that they were not about the 
yard in the morning, found them dead in 
the narrow space referred to. Pulling a 
few bodies out with the aid of a rake, he 
found the throats had been cut by some 
predaceous animal, and proceeded to in- 
vestigate. 
“I recalled a somewhat similar tragedy 
several years before, when a large num- 
ber had been killed by a half-grown 
skunk. Jim, however, said it was a coon 
in the present case, and the statement 
excited some doubt on my part, since 
this animal was unknown in the region. 
His conclusion, it appeared, was not a 
matter of guesswork, for he found that 
the bodies of a number of chickens had 
been torn open and the liver eaten — a 
coon trick, according to most observers. 
“He further found that the animal had 
entered the poultry yard by removing 
some heavy flat stones from beneath the 
wire fence — a thing that neither a fox, 
skunk, nor weasel was capable of doing 
— while the concluding evidence became 
invincible when he pointed out, in the 
moist ground around the water-trough, 
an imprint that in miniature resembled 
that of a bear or child; so this planti- 
grade track must have been made by a 
coon. This was a most interesting dis- 
covery, especially as we thought the ani- 
mal would return again that night. 
“The damage having been done, I re- 
quested Jim not to set the steel trap, but 
to leave some of the dead chickens out- 
side of the fence for the animal’s tempor- 
ary entertainment, that I might, in a 
night or two, set out a flashlight after 
returning from a several days’ trip to 
the houseboat, where I was about to try 
for a shot at a pack of timber wolves. 
“On the way up the river in the after- 
noon I noticed the ripples caused by a 
swimming animal under the alders, and 
supposed it to be a mflskrat until the 
gray body of a coon suddenly crossed a 
foot or two in front of the canoe. And 
although I had a chance to disable it with 
a blow from a hard-wood paddle, I let 
it go, for the same reason that withheld 
the setting of the steel trap. 
“Returning to the house-boat after 
dark without having gotten a shot at a 
wolf, though one howled dismally in a 
dense covert not 50 yards from the 
canoe, we were surprised as well as 
A line of bait extended from the shore to a log in the lake and the coon following it came in full view of the camera 
