Sometime during the next day the raccoons returned, and packed themselves at the opposite end of the cellar, one old creature with a tattered tail staring at me all the while. The rustling was faint, but it was enough to wake me and make me roll an eye around the darkness, looking back at the animal.

Remembering Dracula commanding wolves, I tried a little whispering.

“Stop looking at me. Not hungry.”

The old raccoon hunched down, stamping slowly on a pile of shattered tiles and dry gravel, avoiding small pieces of glass from a broken jar. That could have been normal behavior, for all I knew, but raccoons could not speak: they could not extend their lower jaw far beyond what should have been possible into a ghastly stretched face. This old coon did just this, staring at me, and from the dark wide maw there was a raspy male voice, from far away down an impossible cave behind that expanded jaw of worn and yellowed teeth.

“You killed a deer.”

Hm, I thought to myself, weighing the options. I couldn’t start calling things hallucinations now, could I? And this felt like no dream, apart from the talking animal. I whispered back.

“Yes, I did.”

“The Woman will come for you.”

“Which woman?”

“Deer Woman.”

“And you would be … Raccoon Man?”

“That name will serve. I am not named in your tribe.”

I was guessing that the spirit meant ‘white people’.

“So you’re … a native spirit? Micmac, Iroquois?”

The jaw stretched wider, and the voice growled. “Older than those newcomers. You are all newcomers.”

“But you were once a living human?”

The spirit did not answer this question. The creature rolled its head around, seeming to decide a thing before speaking next.

“That’s beyond today’s work. You broke the Deer Woman’s rules, killing one of her wards as a … night monster.”

“I’m not certain what the most vampire-like thing would be in this mythos,” I replied coolly, studying those glimmering black eyes. Could the spirit see through all raccoon eyes, and speak through them if it so chose? “I did light reading on that sort of thing, believing none of it. But I know that down in Nevada there are stories of skinwalkers. Up here there are stories like the wendigo-” 

“Silence!” Raccoon Man hissed. The old coon’s fur bristled and it scrambled closer. “No more of that name!”

“Fine.” From what little I knew, I would rather have encountered werewolves and zombies before a wendigo. “But I assume that I am in a similar category of … foulness. Uncleanness, evil, whatever. So I shouldn’t be eating deer. Any other rules I should know?”

Raccoon Man made its avatar’s fur settle a little. “Give me a vow and I will grant you some wisdom.”

I thought, easily guessing what promise a guardian of raccoons would want. “Wisdom. Anything more specific?”

“Without my wisdom you will die very quickly in this world as a young monster,” the voice from the stretched jaws said. Straight to the point of things.

“Very well.” The transaction seemed fair enough … and I didn’t want to discover the guardian’s other abilities so soon, if it should be angered by a refusal. “I will never feed upon any raccoon.”

“Never feed, and never kill.”

I repeated the words. That seemed to satisfy the spirit, which made the old coon sit upright and begin its a quieter, slower speech. I listened hard.

“In two more days you will be caught, no longer. But you can use that time to reach the Becancour River to the north and east. That river is the boundary between the hunters in this land and another tribe of guardians. Newer guardians, the ones who live inside cathedrals. There is often little love or trust between the guardians who arise from different tribes with different prayers and spirits, and at this river neither may come too close.”

I thought: Romulan Catholic Neutral Zone. The creature seemed to scowl briefly, then continued to channel the spirit through its unhinged jaw.

“The river will rise no higher than your knees as you wade, and you can wade up to the Lake Waposwa. Neither tribe guards that lake – the spirit there is a part of Nanabozho. He is frivolous and eccentric.”

“Wait. I’ve heard of him,” I said. As a child I had gone to Bon Echo Park in Ontario, and that was the most famous pictograph on the lake’s long granite wall. “As Nanabush, the rabbit trickster. Does he guard rabbits?”

“Yes and no, that is always the way with him. So if you will live or die, the answer will be yes and no, who can say? But if you cannot get there you will certainly die, by the hunters who chase you now of the Micmacs or the Romulan Catholic hunters across the river.”

So it read minds, or part of my thoughts.

“How will I wade running water?”

But it seemed that I had been gifted enough for the price of my vow. The raccoon seemed normal now, the darkness lessening inside its mouth and eyes, but I mumbled a thanks and turned away to finish my sleep, worrying.

The red fox stared back at me, the nose hovering millimeters from mine. I twitched, and I swore that the damn thing smiled.