Lord of the Flies

Having been a mother for more than two decades, I would have thought I had seen it all by now. And I would be completely wrong.

Our boys belong to a very "manly", politically incorrect Boy Scout Troop, for which we are deeply grateful. The range of activities and experiences available to them because of this troop has helped make sure they are extraordinarily well rounded. Once a month during the school year, there is a camp out with differing themes. They go canoeing, skiing, backpacking, orienteering, hunting and anything else they can think of. During the summer, there is a week long extravaganza that covers dozens of merit badges and skills, all while living in tents.

Caleb received his Eagle Scout rank last year, while Josh and Ben have been in Scouts only a year or two. In scouting, the older scouts help lead and teach the younger ones. For each of the camp outs, patrols are set up. Each patrol is made up of some older and some younger scouts. They eat, sleep, work, and play with their patrols.

The last trip they went on was the backpacking and orienteering camp out. The scouts are expected to be able to use a topographical map and a compass to trek through the wilderness and find the points on the map assigned to them. Their hike was 10 miles long, carrying their backpacks. 
Josh and Ben were in a patrol with a couple other scouts not much older than themselves. The patrol leader had planned the meals and assigned each scout a list of things to bring. You can imagine how hungry these boys become after a day of hiking. They decided the food they had brought was not going to fill them up so they thought they would try and find something to supplement the menu.

(Thankfully, I found out about all of this after they were safely home.)
They can climb almost anything, and so Ben was up a tree when he spotted a raccoon. To them, it seemed a perfectly sane, rational task to use this raccoon to round out dinner.  They tied Josh's pocketknife (yes, our boys own knives--really big ones) to the end of a stick and Ben's plan was to use it like a spear on their poor victim. 

The raccoon didn't think this was such a great plan and so he was pretty uncooperative. Ben worked and worked and worked at trying to stab it, but finally decided he would have to knock it out of the tree. Not an easy task, either. The battle raged from one tree to another to another. Persistence did pay off in the end, however, and he dislodged the coon from it's perch.
Josh, meanwhile, was waiting below with a shovel. When the raccoon landed, he conked it on the head sufficiently to daze it. While Ben scurried down from the tree, Josh succeeded in pinning the raccoon with the shovel. Ben then swooped in with his "spear" and swiftly dispatched it. They accomplished all of this without ever coming closer to it than the length of the shovel or spear handle.  

Thankfully, one of the adult leaders suggested it would be poor eating so the original menu did not include a new meat course.

The hide is in the freezer waiting to be tanned.

Of course, my first question after picking my chin up off the floor, was, "Did it bite you or scratch you at all?"  They assured me it never even touched them.

Lord of the Flies was fiction, wasn't it?