Can We Keep Her? Please...

She stole our hearts by breakfast, but she was never really ours to keep.

Can we keep her? Please… please… she’s so cute.

You’d think that’d be my 9-year-old, or my 11-year-old, but that’s how my husband greeted me, running up the driveway as I stepped out onto the porch with my morning coffee. He’d trekked down to the driveway to get the mail and found an orphaned raccoon wandering in the road, crying piteously.

The night before had seen torrential rain, more than three inches in just over an hour, and a lot of flash flooding. This little lady was soaking wet, down by the culvert, lamenting her lot with no mama in sight. Our dog found her first, but my husband called him off and ran back up for me.

Our dog listens, luckily, but soon the neighbors will be waking up to walk their dogs, and they don’t all listen quite as well. This little lady is about to be in a world of trouble.

So I grabbed the pair of thick gloves I use for tending the woodstove, and scooped her up.

While it may be tempting to keep this cutie, she belongs with a wildlife rehabber, and that’s where I took her. She’s only 4-5 weeks old, with eyes that have just opened, and still entirely dependent on milk.

In the past 20 years living in Vermont, I’ve known more than one person who’s fostered baby wild animals, from raccoons to woodchucks to ravens, and plenty more.

My first home here was an 1850s schoolhouse, back when I was 22 and a one-room home on a hillside, insulated with what I assume was nothing more than straw and newspaper, suited me just fine. I’d take long walks up through the hills to pick blackberries in the summer months.

One time while out on the trail, surrounded by nothing but sky, birdsong, and blackberry brambles, two tiny raccoons came running right up to me. Before I could blink, one latched onto my ankle and started licking my sandaled toes. The other scurried up my leg and perched on my shoulder.

I’d like to say I kept my wits about me, but I was honestly frozen in shock.

A second later, my neighbor came around the corner, profusely apologizing about “her babies” making a nuisance of themselves. She scooped them up, and then explained that her construction-worker son had found them in the wall of a house and brought them home to her as infants. She’d had them for a few weeks, and they treated her like mama.

At least, they treated her like mama until later that autumn, when they hit their teen years. Then they turned back into the pair of feral trash pandas they were born to be.

They terrorized her house until she released them, and then they ravaged the neighborhood until one of the other neighbors trapped them and released them high up the mountain.

Some things are darn cute… until they’re not.

But for now, like any infant, this little baby is downright perfect. We had her in our care for about 24 hours, until she could be placed with a rehabber. Just enough time to completely fall in love, with all the positive feels and none of the long-term consequences of a raccoon in the house.

The flooding had knocked a lot of raccoons out of their nests and separated them from their mamas, so ours was hardly the only orphan in need of a place. The rehabber arranged to meet me at a park and ride, and when I got there, I wasn’t the only one who’d had to beg off work at 2 p.m. on a Friday to hand off a baby raccoon.

She loaded them in one by one, until her car became a proper raccoon clown car (a Subaru Crosstrek, because it’s Vermont).

While I waited for my turn to hand over my precious cargo, a bumblebee decided I was its life partner on the spot. I spent the better part of fifteen minutes trying to get this little guy off my hand and onto the flowers nearby, and every time I divested myself of him, he came right back and landed on my hand.

Everyone else thought it was hilarious and said I must be trading one baby for another, and that I’d be hard-pressed to make it into the car without him.

I realized later that I’d just washed my hands before leaving home with the new lemongrass soap I made… and lemongrass, it turns out, is a bee attractant. It mimics their mating hormone… so my amorous friend really did want to move in.

Still, there’s nothing more Vermont than waiting your turn at a park and ride to hand a raccoon off to a lady in a Subaru, with a lovestruck bee in tow.

While the thought of so many orphans is heartbreaking, there’s also a real comfort in that, too. She won’t be raised alone. All those orphans loaded into one heck of a wild carpool become a kind of foster litter, and she’ll grow up in a rowdy pile of siblings, wrestling and tumbling and learning to be a raccoon the way she’s meant to.

Raccoons are far more social than most folks give them credit for, and being raised alone is about the worst thing for such a sociable little being. By the time they’re released, she’ll have a whole band of brothers and sisters, and a real shot at a wild life.

My son named her Pie. Short for Cutie Pie, and this little slice of cuteness will forever have a piece of my heart.

Until Next Time,

Ashley at Practical Self Reliance