The other night I discovered that we had not one raccoon living near our dumpster, but seven.

I love raccoons. I really do. I once found two orphaned raccoons by the roadside and braved rabies, parasites and God-knows-what by walking up to them, picking them up, and putting them in my car. The two babies were skeleton thin and hungry. I kept them in the bathroom and called every wildlife rehabilitator in the area and pleaded with them to take the two little ones. I finally found one who would, on the promise that I would volunteer for a year so that she would keep them.

Yep, I am that crazy.

So me and the two little raccoons got in the car again and wandered away into the wilds of Western Massachusetts, where I met an extremely kind and giving lady who ran a wild animal orphanage out of her own home, on the edge of a state park. She was half-Apache and had moved to Massachusetts 10 years previously, and it was extremely interesting working for her. Under my care for that year were various foxes, a pheasant, opossums, White-tailed deer, skunks, a woodchuck and many, many raccoon babies.

The rehabilitator hadn’t been kidding when she said she was overrun with raccoons at the moment. She had 26 orphaned raccoons, and it was hilarious watching them at feeding time. They would run up to you in droves screaming for food and then their eyes would roll back in their heads as they greedily sucked on various bottles in absolute bliss and raccoon-abandon. They would grow up we knew, and get ornery as their hormones kicked in and would be better off in the wild…but for now these cute little ring-tails were our babies and we fed and cared for them as best we could.

Working there was an interesting year. I saw all sort of animals, and the beauty of the area was a thing to behold. The rehabilitator didn’t have any close neighbors, and the silence and beauty of the woods of Western Mass filled me with a certain and much needed peace I lacked while at school. My two babies grew up and the next summer came the day when we released them into the wild. They went boldy, quickly, instinctively off into the wild…as if they had been waiting for that day since I had picked them up. As perhaps they had.

I remember that winter bringing the feed buckets out, and I turned quickly as I heard something approach me rapidly through the snow. I was surprised to see a full-grown White Tail doe there, sticking her head in my feed bucket. It was one of the fawns I had raised earlier in the year, back to pay me a visit. It was pretty cool, having a free creature of the wild choose to run up to me, give me a lick, steal the food out of my bucket, and then return back to her secret ways in the woods.

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