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Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.
1 CORINTHIANS 9:24 NIV
As Skeeter, Sharky, Golden Boy, and Ducky were weaned off bottles and onto solid foods, they needed more room to run and more exposure to life’s wild side. I set up a much larger play cage for them back in the woods, just beyond the border of our yard. It was far enough away from the house to remove the gang from most human noise and activity, yet close enough for me to hear them screech if any trouble arose. I also figured it was far enough away to remove them from getting into too much trouble around the house and yard once they started spending time outside the cage rather than in it (which would prove to be wishful thinking on my part).
Each morning I would bottle-feed the Ringtail Gang, stick them into pet carriers, and haul them out to the play cage for the day. At first they were a little taken aback, but soon they were peering out from the safety of their beloved hammock, which hung high up in the cage. With great interest, they began to take in all the sights and sounds of the wild world where they would eventually be released.
Midmorning and midafternoon I took pans of formula-soaked food out to the release cage. The milky raccoon formula on top of the edible offerings was meant to entice them into feeding themselves more, so I could take a break from the weeks of constant bottle-feeding and feed them by hand a lot less. Thankfully, it didn’t take long for the gang to begin to crave it all, from puppy chow to Cheerios to PB and Js. They started eating almost everything with great gusto, with the notable exception of vegetables. Anyone who thinks raccoons are raiding a vegetable garden just might be mistaken. The boys turned up their noses at green beans, lettuce, and tomatoes. From their expressions when I tried to offer them a carrot, you’d think I was the very scum of the earth.
Fruit was a different story. These guys were fanatically fruity! Fruit was all they needed in any form to make them totally, blissfully, completely happy. Applesauce, frozen berries, bananas, bananas, bananas. I had never purchased so many bananas in all my life. The store people got to know me because I was constantly haunting the produce aisles in my never-ending search for “red-tape” bananas. Every now and again a store would fill a grocery cart almost full of the deeply discounted bananas, and I would come in and buy the entire thing. The workers thought I had either lost my mind or had a serious addiction to banana bread. The latter wasn’t so much the case, but the former was arguably true by then.
Pinky and the Brain Revisited
Once the four gang members were highly mobile and had adjusted to being in the outside play cage in the woods, one rehab mentor told me to start letting them out for some wilderness survival training. That meant I was supposed to walk through the woods at a slow pace, and the kits were supposed to follow—or so the theory went.
At first I didn’t believe it would ever happen that way once I opened the cage door. I didn’t think it would be humanly possible to keep track of these four juveniles let loose upon the world. Yet I knew that if they ever were going to be released into the wild, I needed to take this next step with them. I needed to start taking them for walks on the wild side, as a raccoon mother would, and deal with whatever fallout resulted.
Raccoon kits follow their mommas through the woods all over the place, up and down trees, in and out of creeks, through the tall grass—all without getting lost. To my astonishment, these guys did the same with me. The theory that they would follow me as closely as they would have followed their own mother actually proved true! I tested it time and time again. No matter how tall a tree the four of them climbed without me, if I moved off in another direction, those four furballs high-tailed it down the tree to stick with me. That development was a huge relief when they were small, vulnerable to predators, and out on the loose for the first few times.
Of all the stages of rehabbing raccoons, leading them on woods walks became my very favorite. I spent hours leading these little softball-sized pipsqueaks around in the woods out back, often with Michael in tow just for fun. They had a glorious time exploring everything they could get their paws on, going up and down trees (and sometimes falling in this practice stage), and tasting anything and everything that caught their beady little eyes and looked the least bit enticing.
The walks also became the Ringtail Gang’s favorite thing to do, of course. As soon as I opened their cage, they’d stream out and fall in line behind me, a fearsome foursome bent on taking over the world. They reminded me of a cartoon my kids used to watch, Pinky and the Brain. The show was so funny I couldn’t help but watch it with the kids. The theme song talks about how one mouse is genius and the other insane. The genius mouse plots and plans all night every night, so that at dawn the two of them can take over the world. If that doesn’t describe the Ringtail Gang’s approach to life, I don’t know what does. It was a riot to watch them growing up and gaining confidence, as if they knew that there wasn’t much, at least in our part of the world, that would take on a male raccoon and win. The world was becoming their oyster.
The gang and I would traipse through the forest day after day on meandering explorations with me as their “teacher”—a loose term in this case for a substitute mother they could follow around who would also feed them at day’s end. I figured that on these walks I could, at the least, give them some early exposure to the new wild world they would occupy. At the most, wonder of wonders, they might accidentally discover for themselves something to eat along the way. That made the daily excursions worth the time and effort—and heat and bugs and spider webs and sweat (none of which bothered them; only me).
Watching Skeeter and the gang snake through the tall grass behind me or move at a good clip down the trail so they wouldn’t lose sight of “Mom” was hilarious. It was heady stuff that tempted me to feel as if I really had this mothering raccoons thing down. Overall, everything felt nicely under control in my new rehabbing adventure.
Battle of Wits in the Wilderness
Alas, feelings can lie. Things were indeed under control, but the question was, Whose control? The answer would depend on who would win the battle of wits that began on these wilderness walks. I had never expected at the start to wind up going round after round with raccoons, but I was only just beginning to comprehend the kind of stamina and strategy that matching wits with the gang would require. Because there came a day when these gangsters were old enough and large enough to look after themselves, theoretically. They were not so vulnerable to predators anymore, and my mentor said I should lead them out into the woods in the morning and start leaving them there on “day release.” The idea was that they would run around in our backwoods all day, exploring on their own and having whatever kind of raccoon fun they could drum up between the four of them.
The problem was, the thing that most appealed to Skeeter and the gang was to keep tagging along with me. I would lead them out to some enticing spot in the woods, and from the instant I tried to sneak away, they still followed me relentlessly. They simply did not want to sign up for the plan of staying wild and free all day without Mom. I had hoped to have my days free (read raccoon-free) and simply show up in the woods again in the early evenings to locate the boys and bring them back to the relative safety of their cage, away from any predators foolish enough to try to take on nearly full-grown raccoons. It seemed like a workable plan to one of the five of us, but I would have to go some rounds to persuade the other four. Our battle of wits went something like this:
Round 1—Lead the Ringtail Gang out back to the weather creek full of merrily trickling water, strew some PB and J sandwiches around as a snack, and run like fire for home, mistakenly optimistic that the boys would have so much fun eating their picnic fare and playing in the water that they would forget all about following me. Not so. By the time I approached the house and slowed down, they were all on my tail.
Round 2—Lead the Ringtail Gang to the tallest cottonwood tree way out back with the most branches to climb, let them get way up high to scamper back and forth overhead, and run like fire for home. I didn’t factor in that from their perch high up in the leafy canopy, they could easily scope out the lay of the land and see which way I was heading. I would approach the house and slow down to catch my breath raggedly, glancing back just in case… yep, all on my tail.
Round 3—Lead the Ringtail Gang to the swampy area out back, scatter enough Honey Nut Cheerios and bananas to feed an army of four for an hour, back myself out of sight around the nearest, thickest tree trunk, and run like fire for home. My hope was that beetles, frogs, bugs, and bogs would be more mesmerizing to them than I was. But before I could even get near the house and slow down to catch my breath, a couple of them would pass me by. By this time, they really needed to stay out in the woods and learn how to be wild. Instead, they just wanted to sit under the porch and wait for me to come out of the house and take them for a walk. If I didn’t come out soon enough to suit them, one or the other of the four would climb up the porch rail and jiggle the doorknob to see if he could come in and find me. That made it hard to get in and out of the house, for one thing. And it made the mailman and the FedEx guy think we were kind of strange, for another.
Round 4—This putting some distance between the Ringtail Gang and me so they could go wild was not going smoothly. I put in a call to one of my favorite rehab mentors. (I was consulting more than one by then because raising my first raccoon kits was making me feel less in control every day, and I needed all the advice I could get.) Our resulting conversation was less than helpful:
Me: Hello… about those four raccoons you’ve been helping me with. I can’t get away from them!
Mentor: That’s to be expected. You know they stay with Momma and each other all through the first winter? These little ones don’t have Momma; they have you.
Me (wondering why I could hear her laughing): But I can’t stay in the woods all day with them, and they won’t stay in the woods by themselves and let me go back to the house. I mean, it’s good for my health, I suppose, since I’m losing a ton of weight running away from raccoons on these blistering hot summer days, but I’m exhausted. What should I do?
Mentor: Keep running! This is why rehabbing raccoons through to release takes so much longer and can be so much more challenging than rehabbing almost any other animal. But they will eventually detach from you a little and stay out there with each other. Meanwhile, run!
Me (wondering why I could still hear her laughing): But they’re so fast that they catch me—and a lot of times they beat me back to the house and wait for me. No matter where I go, there they are!
Mentor: My advice is to make yourself some new escape trails. Never go the same way twice; take a different way back to the house every time. And if they keep following you, just go into the house, shut the windows and doors, and ignore them. Eventually, they’ll decide that playing in the woods all day is a lot more fun than waiting around outside your door for you.
My mentors were brilliant. Their suggestions were brilliant. I tried them all, in all their brilliance. Still, the doorknob rattled on rather frequent occasion. Without even looking outside, I knew who—or rather what (four whats)—would be there.
Mom, come out!
I tried to make the best of it. How many times in a lifetime, after all, does a person get to have a gang of raccoons knocking on the door? And to be fair, I had to remember that according to one mentor, juvenile raccoons typically remain with their mother through their first winter. I was asking these guys to let go of “Mom” early, so I’d just have to be patient in the process. Surely, I thought, they would grow to a point where the ring-tailed ladies would seem more enticing to them than I did. That was my theory, and I dearly hoped it would soon prove true. That day, however, was not yet…