I had (yet another) unpleasant wildlife encounter last night. I opened the door that leads into the garage to take out the recycling. As I began to step out I looked down and saw that I was about to step on a raccoon. A big raccoon. I jumped back and slammed the door but not before I saw our cats walking around, nonchalantly, near the raccoon. So I cautiously opened the door a tiny bit and frantically tried to call the cats to come inside the house. The cats, clearly not understanding my concern stared blankly at me and appeared to wonder what I was so freaked out about.
I got one cat inside – Bitty – who wants to be a house cat anyway so he was all over it. Tut, the other cat, seemed to be just fine where he was. I turned my attention back to the raccoon and I noticed that he really didn’t look right. He was moving slowly and his fur looked patchy and unhealthy. I opened the door again, just enough to stick my head out and there he sat just looking at me.
I said to him, “Now you get out of here and leave my cats alone. Get! Get!!” No response. I tried again, “You get out of here NOW!” I shook my finger at him for good measure. At that point he actually turned back to the sour cream container and continued licking it. How very rude.
Joe was out for the evening as he is whenever I seem to have these “Why is Nature in My Living Room” moments but I knew he’d be home soon. I texted him to tell him that we had a clearly rabid raccoon in our recycling bins and that he should be careful in his dealings with it.
Silly me, I assumed he would be dealing with it. When I heard him pull into the garage I had my eyeball right up to the peep hole in the door so that I could witness the attack should it occur. He about jumped out of his skin when he pulled the door open and I was practically attached to the handle.
“What are you doing?” he said, clearly startled.
“I’m watching for the raccoon!! See? Don’t you see its tail sticking out of that bin.” I’ll admit that my voice had a bit of an “edge” to it and might have been a few octaves too high for a normal human voice. Joe was not nearly as concerned as I was nor as concerned as I thought he should be.
“All right, hold on,” he said. “I’ll go get a firecracker and scare him out.”
“A firecracker?” I asked. “It’s 11:00 at night. Don’t you think that might wake up the kids? Or scare the neighbors? Or set fire to the garage?” Did I mention that he had been at the pub with a few friends...
It was obvious to me at that point that I would have to come up with an alternative. So I started barking orders at him. “You’re going to need to go in through the garage doors and sneak up on him. Take a big stick or something, I think there’s a rake on the front porch, and keep it in front of you at all times in case he lunges for you. Once you get in there you can poke him out of the bin with the rake. Or, we could lure him out with some cat food? I’m not sure. What do you think?”
It was clear that Joe had stopped listening to me right after I said “You’re”. He opened the door and started banging things around. The problem was this. He had the door half open with one leg in and one leg out. I had visions of a rabid raccoon rushing through the open door and careening through the kitchen and on down the hall to gnaw on the kids’ faces.
Apparently Joe had not considered this. Seriously, do I have to think of EVERYTHING? So while Joe was tearing things apart in the garage I went to check on the kids and I didn’t notice Max walk by and head to the garage. I heard him call me and then I noticed he was in the kitchen. Apparently “Bitty” had come into his room meowing and had woken him up and he came out to see what was going on.
He looked into the garage to see his father dancing around and yelling obscenities at some unseen object. Good Lord. We’ll just add that to the list of items to discuss with his therapist. I hope that therapist has lots of kids because we’ll probably be sending them all to Yale or Harvard.
All’s well that ends well I suppose. The raccoon was gone this morning when I left for work. At least I think he was. It was kind of hard to tell because I was running to my car really fast…
No comments:
Post a Comment