Sometimes a cute story isn’t

Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation’s final law Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek’d against his creed —Alfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam A. H. H.” (1850)

One of the best things about living where I live is the proximity to the natural world. About a year ago, I was amazed to watch a dozen deer of various sizes cross the road a block from my front door. In the spring, there are rabbits everywhere. I once opened my front door to find a beaver squatting on the porch. (In the moment, neither one of us was amused.)

One of the things this means is that from time to time grim duties fall to me. The wonder of a nest of baby bunnies discovered in the backyard on Easter morning is offset by the horror of a darling terrier with one of those adorable bunnies clamped lifeless in her jaws. The natural world is a Hobbesian realm, where life is short, nasty and little fun. We sentimentalize it at our own risk.

What starts out a cute story too often has a sad end. I wish things had turned out differently with the racooon.

I had met him first the evening before, when our dogs (our girls) were making noise in the yard. I went out with a penlight to show them there was nothing there and found him, no more than three feet from my face, in a tree just over our back fence. He seemed sluggish, and I worried he might be sick or even dying—I couldn’t scare him off with noise, and I had to prod him a few times with the handle of a rake before he moved. (His first move, disturbingly enough, was toward me—for a long scary moment he hung upside down, like a sloth. Had he fallen he would have landed at my feet.)

But after a few minutes of negotiation, I convinced him to shuffle off, somewhat grumpily but none the worse for wear, away from my fence, in the general direction of Knoop Park. And I didn’t think much more about him.

Until the next evening, when, after we returned from our evening walk with the dogs, I found him sitting in a corner of our sunroom. He’d come in through our dog door while we were out, and it was only luck that had prevented our dogs from discovering him first. (For some providential reason, they hadn’t rushed inside before us as they usually do after our walk. They were probably sniffing around the spot where our intruder was last seen.)

I screamed. (“Like a man,” as Robert Griffin III might say.) Karen wanted to know why, and I directed her attention to the beast in the corner, as I slid the dog door shut.

Karen didn’t scream. She calmly asked what I intended to do about the problem.

Now, I do not consider myself a hapless person—I can change a tire. I can parallel park. I have in my time dunked a basketball, been shot at, built my own electric guitar and free-climbed Pão de Açúcar. But I don’t know nothing about eradicating raccoons from sunrooms.

But I found out two things rather quickly: Firstly, having a raccoon in your sunroom does not rise to the level of a police matter. Secondly, the good folks at Animal Control aren’t interested in critters that happen to be in your house—there are professional services you can call.

Or, if you’re us, you can call your genuinely great neighbor Larry Roberts. Who will show up with a rake, a plastic garbage can and thick leather gloves.

To make a long story short—you can read about the particulars, and see pictures on my blog, blood, dirt & angels—Larry and I were eventually able to coerce the raccoon into the bottom of the garbage can. We draped a tarp over the top, covered the tarp with a folding chair and then placed a heavy rock on the folding chair. And then Karen said we should give him some food. So we took it all apart, and she poured some dog food—which was the reason he’d shown up to begin with—down on top of him.

We had to make a prisoner of the raccoon because I was stupid. Before Larry had shown up, I’d attempted to throw a thick towel over the raccoon, so I could pick him up and carry him out our front door.

Now I realize how stupid this sounds. But at the time I was impressed with how docile the animal seemed. Both Karen and I came within a foot of him without his drawing back into a defensive posture. I thought if I could get the towel around him, I could make a sort of strait jacket of it—that I could bind his (scary, prehensile) claws to his body at least long enough to bum rush him into the front yard.

But while I really respected the claws, I didn’t give much though to his teeth. Which proved a mistake. I’m lucky he didn’t bite my finger

off.

As it is, he just gashed it pretty good. It bled and bled. (And I screamed again. Like a man.)

I really wish the situation hadn’t escalated. But because he bit me, I was aware that we’d have to hold on to the raccoon so he could be tested. Even though I knew it was extremely unlikely the animal was rabid (according to the Arkansas Department of Health: “Rabies in raccoons is rare in Arkansas and has only been documented once”), my very first impression of him was that he was sick.

But the next morning, when Animal Control came to get the guy (they were only interested in him because he bit me), I could see that he was actually pretty heathly. He was fiesty and sleek—and probably a little overweight. And I realized that what I had perceived as sluggishness was actually just his failure to be impressed.

He wasn’t scared of me, because he wasn’t scared of humans. Because he probably once had been somebody’s pet.

After a day or two of telling the story, sometimes to people who know about raccoons, I’m pretty confident of my theory. At my doctor’s office, someone told me that a lot of people who have pet raccoons get tired of them after they reach maturity—that the beasts “get mean” when they get to be about three years old. My guy seemed to be a young adult; his teeth were very clean.

So someone dumped their pet raccoon, and he’d been hanging out in our neighborhood, dining on dog food and whatever else he could find. He was not wild.

I have no illusions about what will happen—what has happened— to him at animal control. I do not expect them to run non-destructive tests on the critter. I sincerely hope tests show that he was healthy, that my tetanus shot will suffice to get me through this small trauma.

But I am so sad and sorry for our invader, who was so badly used by our species. If there is something to forgive us, I hope it will.