Bring me your furry, your potentially rabid…
The kitten… the feral one? That hung onto my hand with its teeth after I picked it up, because it was so terrified? The one I had to have “just in case” rabies shots for? It’s back… And David says I’m not allowed to touch it. Not even a little bit.
Now in cat adolescence, it was following its siblings across the bottom of the yard. I must have drawn in my breath in that kitten-there-is-a-kitten!! sound and s/he spooked and instead of running after its siblings through the east side of the fence, it turned tail and ran a good 20 feet to the west fence and disappeared. A couple of minutes later it tried to cross again, and even though I was NOT making the kitten-there-is-a-kitten!! sound, (because I was purposely holding my breath) it looked at me, spooked again, and ran back under the west fence.
And really, of course it would, because I was the crazy human who picked it up and refused to throw it down when it bit me. In the feral cat world, I am now an urban legend. “Don’t go in THAT yard. The crazy lady lives there. She mauls and traps kittens and then makes coats out of them.”
Then the other morning? The kittens – ALL THREE OF THEM – were playing ON OUR DECK in the sunshine!! I held my breath at the back door, trying to look inconspicuous so that I wouldn’t spook them, while calculating whether I could open the door without it making its tell-tale creaky noise. Not that I was going to go pick up the kittens or anything, I just wanted to door to be open. You know, just in case they decided that they wanted to come in the house and spontaneously… cuddle. As feral cats often choose to do.
Sadly, I have not seen the kittens in a couple of days. What I did see yesterday evening after dinner, while my friends were over, was a young RACCOON!!! The neighbour’s dogs had chased it from their yard to ours. It climbed up our play structure and hung out in the tree.
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| Sadly, this did NOT happen last night. But I wish it had. Picture from http://anothernortongirl.blogspot.ca/ |
We weren’t sure, but we think that that raccoon might have had… issues. Intellectual issues. Perhaps rabies issues. It was severely uncoordinated for a raccoon, had a rough time navigating the tree and looked like nobody had taught it how to climb down the tree headfirst, which raccoons can totally do.
The other thing that made us feel like maybe the raccoon wasn’t altogether there, was that after it left the play structure tree, it then came over to the deck, not 8 feet away from us, and nonchalantly climbed one tree, then shinnied down, then climbed the next tree, then walked on the deck railing, then climbed the next tree and shinnied down then climbed the NEXT tree to that had small branches touching the roof and then tried to make its way onto the roof where it looked VERY confused and gave us the “Can you give me some help here?” look.
Either the animal had major depth perception issues and couldn’t tell that the first trees were nowhere close to the house, or its brain was already completely scrambled from the rabies. As it was trying to get onto the roof and looking like it might fall, I may have stood under it with my maxi skirt held in front of me like a rescue net they use for potential suicide jumpers. David told me that if I got bitten he was not going to take me to the hospital for my second series of rabies shots, I would have to drive myself.
We are used to raccoons being on our roof. Last spring we had a mother and her 5 kits living in our eaves. We enjoyed an elaborate game of Watch-the-raccoons-leave-put-up-the-extension-ladder-screw-in-boards-to-cover-the-raccoon-holes for several nights, thinking we had finally purged our freeloading tenants, when in fact there was still that raccoon scrabbling sound (okay now I’m imagining a family of raccoons playing Scrabble, perhaps enjoying pink lemonade with cocktail umbrellas) in the eaves, and then we’d have to climb up the ladder and unscrew the boards and then slide them out of the way, because I couldn’t bear the thought of potentially murdering a family of raccoons in our eaves.
One night, we thought we had done it. THEY WERE OUT!! We did our happy, raccoon-free dance. Then, the next day, the mother raccoon was back. In the day time. Climbing the ladder to the roof and walking around. Not that weird in itself, except for the fact that we were having our chimney re-built at the time and there we two dudes with mortar and bricks and a very loud radio on the roof. She was walking around and going up and down the extension ladder – and let me tell you, watching a raccoon descend headfirst down a 32-foot ladder freaks me out.
One might well ask: “Why would a raccoon be out in the daytime, hanging out with the masons??? It seems so odd!” Until I heard her kits crying for her. Because we had boarded them up in the eaves!!! This realization made me nearly puke with anxiety.