The Masked Bandit

23 The Masked Bandit One day, our class went on a field trip to a mountain about five hours away from our school. It's not a very steep mountain, so we were able to walk up. But it was still hard work. We carried a lot of supplies on our backs: tents, food, dishes, tools, clothes and many other things. Each pack weighed 10 to 15 kilograms. We were going to camp at the top of the mountain. When we arrived at the top of the mountain, we pitched our tents and got ready to spend a night there. We were told to hang all our food in the trees. Why? The reason was simple. If we didn't, the bears would come for it. . . and we didn't want that! So that night, we had a big meal around the fire. Then, we put our food in a bag and hung it from a tree branch. When we woke up in the morning, we got out of our tents to make breakfast. But to our surprise, the bag with the food was gone!

We thought a bear must have taken it, but the branch was not nearly strong enough to hold a large, one-thousand pound bear. We were very hungry, but we had no food! We started down the mountain. And then we saw it-our bag of food was on the ground. We ran over to it and it moved. Inside the food bag was a large raccoon. She must have climbed up the branch, chewed through the rope and made off with the bag. The raccoon looked at us and made a frightening sound like a cat. Then, three baby raccoons came out of the bag, and they all walked away. We had been so worried about bears that we forgot about the other creatures. Our teacher said, “ Raccoons will steal anything. I guess that's why they wear masks over their eyes! " We all laughed. But it was a long, hungry trip home!