This past weekend, on Saturday morning, Younger Daughter headed off to work. My daughters are the co-managers at the no-kill shelter in a town about half an hour from where we live. She had just pulled onto the blacktop road and was beginning to pick up speed when she glanced to her left and thought she saw fur in a ditch full of water. We’d had three straight days and nights of rain. At the end of that stretch, the temps fell dramatically. It was still raining Saturday morning and it was very very cold. Younger Daughter wasn’t entirely sure that she had actually seen fur, but she knew she had to find a place to turn around and go back. She headed back in the opposite direction and pulled off the road beside the ditch. And there, sitting in at least two inches of water, was a cold, wet, bedraggled raccoon. Of course there was absolutely no reason for any animal to be sitting in water – freezing water at that. Something was obviously wrong. Her immediate thought was that the raccoon had been hit by a car and was maybe stunned or injured.
Now you can’t just walk up to an adult raccoon and reach down to pick it up. It doesn’t work that way. But Younger was pulled off on the shoulder of the road, she had jumped out into the cold rain and there was simply nothing to do but to go for it. I do not recommend that people grab adult raccoons. But my daughters have lived this way nearly their whole lives. They’ve watched me do it, and since they’ve been adults, they’ve done it themselves. We’ve grabbed animals (raccoons, opossums, feral cats) that we had no business grabbing. Younger had on her steel-toed boots so she tromped down into the ditch and carefully nudged the raccoon with the toe of her boot. It did not move. That’s all she needed to know. She reached down and scruffed it – holding it by the back of the neck, she raced back up and out of the ditch to her car. She wasn’t far from home, and she knew she only had to get it to Older Daughter’s house. Holding the raccoon with her right hand, she started back home, driving with her left hand. She still couldn’t imagine what exactly could be wrong with this raccoon. It should have been tearing her to pieces. Then just as she turned off the blacktop and onto our gravel road, the raccoon must have had a spurt of energy. It reached up with both of its little hands and grabbed the hand that was holding it. It then reached both of its back feet (which are like another pair of hands) and grabbed Younger’s shirt. She started wondering if maybe this wasn’t an injured raccoon at all. She was carefully driving our gravel road, wondering if she should just stop, open the car door, and release this guy. But it made no sense that it had been sitting in a ditch full of water. She kept driving, hoping she could keep holding on until she pulled up at her sister’s house.
She made it, came to a stop, and used her left hand to pull out her cell phone. She dialed her sister’s number. Older Daughter came charging out of her house, and there stood her sister – standing outside in the rain, with a grown raccoon dangling from her grip – all four feet attached to various places on Younger Daughter. She raced over and threw a towel over the raccoon and then burst into a fit of laughter. Through the hysteria she told Younger Daughter what a sight that was, and that made Younger Daughter start laughing, too. They took off to one of Older Daughter’s outdoor enclosures with the raccoon - dripping wet and laughing all the way.
They got the raccoon into the enclosure, and Younger Daughter raced off so as not to be late for work. Older Daughter got the enclosure fixed up with fresh straw in a little house, food, and fresh water. The raccoon, a male, was letting Older Daughter touch him and maneuver him around to investigate what could be wrong. This was definitely not normal raccoon behavior. One of the first things Older noticed was that all four paw pads were badly pruned from being in the water for what must have been quite a while. She looked for obvious signs that maybe he had been hit by a car. She couldn’t find any blood or noticeable injuries. But then as she was feeling along his limbs, she found that one of the front arms was swollen and puffy. As she squeezed on the arm, infection started dripping from an opening. Oh dear. Not good. That was a massive amount of infection. She estimated his weight and went in to get an antibiotic injection prepared. She got that in him and hoped he would crawl into the house and rest until he felt like eating. He didn’t seem interested in the food but she later found him in the house. So she set the food in with him and he nibbled a bit.
The next day she found this guy up on one of the logs in the enclosure. He still isn’t eating much which is concerning. But he is nice and dry. He has a warm house of straw to sleep in and access to food and fresh water. He is one lucky raccoon. A Christmas raccoon. (Definitely the kind of Christmas we would expect in this family – smile.)
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. See you next year.