A Raccoon Tale

The incident of the two baby raccoons who tumbled from a roof on Allen Street last week reminded me of my own experience, many years ago, with a pair of orphaned raccoons.

It was my senior year in college, and I was asked by a favorite professor to house-sit for her during spring break. I had no travel plans, and the prospect of spending a week at her house on Lake Michigan seemed idyllic. The request, however, came with responsibilities: caring for an assemblage of animals that included three Labrador retrievers, an unruly Daisy puppy (who belonged to another professor), four or five cats (one of whom was very old and frail and required a special diet), and two young raccoons.

The raccoons had been rescued from the woods in northern Minnesota the previous spring, orphaned when someone shot their mother. They had been named Lillian and Timothy, and at that point, they were about a year old. In the summer, they would be returned to the Minnesota woods where they'd been found, but for that week in early April, they were still in Michigan and in my care. They lived in a cozy enclosure beside the house. My job was to give them food and fresh water twice a day and to dose Timothy regularly with Kaopectate.

The first few attempts at giving Kaopectate to a wild animal went surprisingly well. Often more Kaopectate got on Timothy's fur than in his mouth, but I still felt I'd achieved something. A couple of days into the week, though, Timothy was on to me. When I opened the door of the enclosure to enter, he scooted past me and headed for freedom. 

Fortunately, I'd been clued in to Timothy's passion for marshmallows. (I used them to distract the raccoons when I entered their pen--unsuccessfully, that time--so a bag of them was at the ready.) I set out a trail of miniature marshmallows from the edge of the driveway where Timothy had disappeared into the woods back to his pen. After a few anxious moments, during which I frantically wondered what I would do next if my plan didn't work, Timothy reappeared and, following the marshmallow trail, ate his way back to captivity.

Years later, here in Hudson, I would employ a similar strategy, this time involving a can of mackerel, to coax my terrified cat across a plank spanning the void between my neighbor's roof, where he'd gotten himself stuck, and my balcony, three stories up.
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