By Ma. Eugenia Guerra

"EspÈrame. I’ll just be a minute," I told the raccoon in the hen house, he who had for several nights running massacred a good number of my favorite hens.

I ran back to my house and returned loaded for bear -- .410 in my arms, .38 in my pocket, ridiculously heavy magnum flashlight under my arm. I walked back to the hen house, half hoping the little bandit would have scampered on. No such luck. He waited for me, his hissing, snarling little self pressed into a furry ball on a rafter.

Understand that over weeks I had already patched the chicken house everywhere I thought he and all his relatives had wormed in to destroy my flocks. I had also religiously set out the Have-A-Heart trap so that I could capture him or any of his co-conspirators and set them free elsewhere on the ranch. Like it might be fun to load hissing, snarling, perhaps rabid animalitos into the truck. "Be sure to wear gloves, Mom," I remembered the remote control instructions for The Raccoon Relocation Program, which would have been my first choice. As the score mounted, however, to Racoons 20, Rancher 0, I did what I had to do.

A few weeks earlier in the brush I’d had occasion to fire the shotgun and made note at how many paces the weapon destroyed a stand of prickly pear behind the coyote at which I was firing. I didn’t want to blow a hole that size in the chicken house, so I wanted Mr. Raccoon to move out before I dispatched him to eternity.

There was a great calamity in the chicken house. Any place the raccoon moved, the chickens moved ahead of him in a flurry of dust, feathers, and alarmingly scandalous cackles -- not the best circumstances for a steady aim in the tiny circle of the illumination of the flashlight.

I felt the danger of the moment, not just being in close confinement with a frightened wild animal, but also in the hour at which my reflexes in the handling of loaded weapons might not be at their prime. Imagine what the raccoon felt.

I took the .38 out of my pocket and set it down carefully. I considered that if I used it, the report of it would resonate with me for hours, as opposed to, by comparison, the more agreeable "ka-bloom" of the .410.

In the stalling of my lecture to myself on gun safety and in the little pep talk I had to rally myself with, remembering each and every favorite clucker lost to varmints, Mr. Raccoon had every opportunity to escape. We must have had the thought simultaneously, for he scurried out of a hole in the wire I had not seen and was now on the part of the pen that is roofless except for the wire mesh and rafters.

Reader, I’ll spare you the gory details. Suffice to say the scattershot found its mark.