If you know what is good for you never try to outsmart any wild creature, but if you are dumb enough you will try your hand pulling one over that snicky doublecrossers but so lovely raccoons that deserve the prison stripes they wear for being the thieves they are! ! !

Autumn came smearing all its beautiful colors on the tree leaves that after a couple of freezes started to go down like the shares in 1929 stock-exchange crash.
If you are one of those that “loooves” autumn I will bet my last dollar that you are not the one in that household the pilot flying around with a rake trying to collect the damn things with a wind on playful mode messing with your little piles.
The few trees in my backyard will lose their wigs on my ground, and bless its soul the wind, always blowing from the west around here will take every one of them and deposit the colorful menagerie on Grumpy Benson, my next house neighbor.
Although I wasn’t too thrilled with my other next neighbor, Willard, that had came to the same conclusion as I had, to let the wind do the job for him…into my backyard!
So, when the strong winds at last arrive, Grumpy Benson will curse (non expletives, mind you, he is of a religious persuasion) and armed with a monster rake will attack the leaves as they were the Devils red little pieces of paper with ungodly messages.

Marty, my buddy ex-Marine, had purchased from the back of a van a few pieces of king-size fleece-blankets’ you won’t believe how warm they were.
Wrapped in one of those a sunny afternoon but on the chilled side, we were rocking back and fort with only a gloved hand outside the fleece against cold wind armor holding a couple of Coors.
Marty had brought a big bag of walnuts which we crushed two and two against each other in our fist.
Drinking beer and eating walnuts with a cold wind trying to get into your exposed ear wouldn’t seems smart, we could have got inside and do it in front a TV, never mind if it was ON or not.
But we were looking at Grumpy Benson engaged in his yearly Battle of Turmoil (the wind being smarter than him, that was a battle with only one winner because…)

The people neighboring Benson’s lot were, “God help me!” not married and living in sin and even had three children!
So he had put a solid thick wood planks fence almost eight feet high from the front of the house all the way to the forest line of trees, so he wouldn’t be “exposed” to the works of…damn! who cares?!
But that fence was an effective barrier for the leaves that otherwise would have been blown clean over to the sinner’s property.
“Want to have some fun?” Marty asked me.
“More fun than looking at that fool?”
“Oh yeah!” he said with a devilish smile, “look there, by the forest trees, what you see in the ground?”
I looked and couldn’t see a thing at first, and then I remembered that Marty’s position, when we were bad dudes (they play dirty the Congs will say of us) fighting a war, Marty was always Point Man.
Some have 20/20 vision; I will swear that Marty had at least 200/200 vision with a zoom capable to see the religious denomination (like way out around Jerusalem or Pharaoh’s Pyramids) of a Middle-East mosquito.
Then I saw them, because it was more than one, raccoons! just having fun has they were looking at the berserk man with an oversize comb on a stick trying to tame the leaves that even the most stupid raccoon knows that’s impossible.
Marty freed his right arm and fetching a walnut from the bag expertly threw it, as Grumpy Benson was with his back at us, to land about ten yards from the raccoon noses, which momentarily withdrew, then we saw that the less chicken of them and with a 20/20 vision of his own recognized the walnut that had came from heavens and retrieved it faster than you could say fetch!
One by one the raccoons heads cautiously appeared looking up, no more entertained by the berserk man with a big comb fighting the leaves riding the wind.
Marty waited until old Benson was again with his back at us trying to collect the dead leaves from the rows of perfect lined late flowers beds, and, with the intention of not giving away our position to the little washing bears he launched an handful of nuts with a softball throw, high and to the left of busy Benson smack in the middle of the almost cleared flower’s beds like rain from the clear skies.

Just then, under the walnut’s rain, Benson “Junior” not a teenager anymore but looking more the likes of his own Grandpa by a “debaucher’s life,” like his father would like to scream in outrage at the top of his voice to the entertainment of the neighborhood I suppose from miles around, went out by the back kitchen door, bare foot wearing long-johns that hadn’t seen a washing-machine for a long while and a T-shirt with a hole in the side like the ones made by an howitzer hit.
Old Benson didn’t saw the fruit of his loins or The Stampede of the Hungry Raccoons towards the just landed walnuts from Heaven, but in a marijuana induced stupor, Junior did, not the walnuts, but the stampede apparently coming in is direction like a bad downer hallucination, and with one “I need to stop smoking that shit!” he turned around and went back inside the house.
Suddenly, “leaves/wind/leaves pissed off Benson” caught sight of The Charge of the Striped Thieves and his rage went up a few notches toward apoplexy.
A old enough man living next door to the outdoors should had found long time ago that you can’t outsmart a raccoon, nor win a hundred yard dash against them, a old enough man living next door to a forest with all kind of creatures that have survive more perils than the man trying to catch them, should by now be wise enough to let them alone, take whatever they come for and get his blood pressure as low as possible before keeling over.
Old Grumpy Benson wasn’t a wise man.

Anyone with a little of common sense will recognize the fact that a garden rake ain’t suitable as a golf club, too encumbering, and that raccoons by no means could be confused with golf-balls.
After a few swings at the scampering creatures that were missed by a mile but not a few of his most “take with excessive care” premium plants in full blossom, my church-going better-than-thou neighbor started screaming words at the fleeing creatures that would have shocked out of his socked a drunker sailor in Shanghai or a pissed off of his mind trucker just getting cut over in the highway by a schmuck in an SUV towing slowly one of those hated by everybody looking at the back of one of those camping trailers.

Then Marty did the unforgivable, this time he took a real handful of walnuts and elegantly tossed it between the chasing Benson and his house whit a real shingle on the metal roof racket and that only an enraged Benson couldn’t had heard but that even the raccoons from Alaska did, because suddenly, the running away creatures wearing prison stripes and the Lone Range mask turned one hundred and eighty degrees without slowing down or stopping, running back, around left and right of Benson that got taken aback by the sudden wave spilling from the forest with the same expression that Tonto will have had falling from his horse for no reason.

Thinking that the enraged expletives were directed at him, Benson Junior came out again from the kitchen and he saw perhaps two or three psychedelic colored exemplars of his father, menacingly turning around his head a lasso with teeth and after having warned him about kicking his son once and for all, got the help of thousands of furry striped snakes wearing Raybans eyeshades.
A corralled deer is a corralled deer and if it want to escape from the trap he most run or jump, but confronted with thousands of furry snakes that everybody knew cant climb fences, Junior took off and being impossible if you didn’t see it with your own eyes, elegantly went over that almost eight foot fence without disturbing a wood splint from its top and was gone.

One handful of walnuts weren’t like five fishes to feed five thousand (there weren’t five thousand raccoons) but enough to bulldoze any flower plant still standing and started to quarrel with each other for a measly walnut, all the time moving like berserk little monkeys, with in the middle, an undecided Benson about whom to strike first.
When he did the raccoons were ready for him, he went weed whacking like a desperate, demoniacal going amok golfer trying to hit the $.*&# ball out of the rough!!! The uninvited were jumping up and down evading the blows as they were retreating toward to forest like Bouncing Raccoons.