Give the First Round to the Masked Bandit

Is it OK to feel manly now?

I’m not sure that’s acceptable any more-- it’s like admitting that you’d rather gut a deer than visit a sick friend--but I have to confess: I felt like a man’s man two weeks ago, when I went down to the feed store, rented me a raccoon trap and loaded that sucker into my SUV.

Since then, it hasn’t gone so well, manliness-wise.

Every night, I lay some bait in there--cat food, or a few times, chunks of the rubbery imitation crab meat that was going bad in the meat compartment. (In truth, my wife, Jane, baits the trap. She’s better with mechanical things than I am, but I can bench press a 50-pound sack of Science Diet, no problem.)

Every morning we wake up disappointed.

Dang! No raccoon!

We did snare a huge, mangy black cat, hissing over its faux-crab. But that’s it. Meanwhile, the raccoon, immense and ravenous, continues its late-night marauding. It snuffed the fish in my neighbor’s backyard pond and did in a tortoise he’d kept for years. One night, as I was standing in my kitchen wondering whether I was looking through the window or at the window, it squeezed halfway in through the cat door.

“G’wan!” I yelled, windmilling my arms like Popeye about to sock Bluto. “Yee-hah! Whoo-whoo-whoo-bam! Outta heah!”

The raccoon--Procyon lotor, to you Latin students--didn’t move. For what seemed like a half-hour, it stared at me, glanced over at the cat dish, then stared at me some more before stepping back outside. A while later, it again poked its miserable masked head through the cat door, gave me a smirk and once again backed into the night.

The next night it was back for more. God knows how many times it’s had the run of the kitchen late at night, when not a creature is stirring, except Procyon lotor, bent on Science Man Tries Diet, chicken bones, taco wrappers, whatever.

That’s typical, a Ventura County animal control officer told me.

“They’re brazen,” she said. “Their idea of the perfect day would be to kick you out of the house and sleep in your bed.”

So: The battle lines are drawn.

In my home, I maintain a firm zero-tolerance policy on natural wonders. Of course, that didn’t keep a possum from skittering around the kitchen last fall. It didn’t keep a large rat from making a most unwelcome, and ultimately fatal, guest appearance in the toilet. And it sure hasn’t stopped this hound-sized raccoon from colonizing my house, heedless of the special permission I have from people at Chase Manhattan Mortgage to say: “MY house! MY yard! MY kitchen!”

Patrick Musone, a longtime employee of Ventura County Animal Control, has seen it all before. He figures I have one of those houses that for some reason--as mundane as drainage, as mystical as being the Center of All Creation--is “a crossroads for wildlife.”

Terrific. I suppose I should be grateful to live in this suburban Serengeti, but I’d sooner run into a rhino in the kitchen than a raccoon.

“Raccoons are smart,” Musone said. ‘They have fingers. They can open safes and refrigerators.”

Safes? I asked.

OK, maybe not safes, he said.

But they are clever. And big-- the largest ever found weighed in at 62 pounds, the size of a healthy fourth-grader. On top of that, some of them carry rabies.

“Don’t feed them,” he warned. “Don’t play with them. If cornered, they’ll fight back. And don’t take them in. By the time they get snarly and bitey, they’re already ruined and can’t be put back in the wild.”

Animal Control fields raccoon calls at least weekly. Crews won’t trap them for you, although they will release your trapped animal in restful spots near streams or wetlands.

But there’s apparently only one way to trap a raccoon and I’m not doing it. Sure, doing away with the cat door is a sensible alternative--but then I’d have to do away with the cats, who would yowl for entry or egress from midnight on.

Musone suggested I scare the critter off.

“Go to a boat store and buy yourself an air horn,” he advised. “Then just blast it.”

Coyotes, bears, and mountain lions hate the air horn, he said. Sometimes, it takes just one good blast to drive them away for good.

Saving my block from the bears! What could be more manly than that!

Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com