prairie point

riki's story

Most of the people I work with would say I live "downtown", or at least in the "inner city." But there is still a lot of nature left here, and actually not as much concrete as there is in some of the new suburban developments. Partly that is because there is a good size creek not so far away along with some estate-sized wooded lots.

One day as I was approaching home at the end of the day I saw a red-tailed hawk on my neighbor's lawn with a squirrel in its talons. I pulled on in to my driveway and rushed inside for the camera, but as I went running back the hawk flew away still holding the squirrel.

On a winter night a couple years ago we looked out the back door to see a raccoon gobbling down the cat food Tricia had left on the covered back porch. With the light on inside we could stand close to the glass and watch unobserved. We saw that the raccoon was terribly injured. The right back leg was splayed out at an extreme angle and it walked very slowly. Every few steps its bad leg would give way and it would go sprawling. I have mentioned before what a soft heart Tricia has for anything in distress. Of course there was food out every night after that.

We wanted to help the raccoon but we did not know how. We contacted a rescue site we found on the internet but they wanted to put it down. They thought the symptoms sounded like a disease, and in any case it was a poor candidate for rescue. By this time the raccoon had been named Riki and we were feeding it with the back door open. The cats and the raccoon seemed not to mind each other. The cats would walk out the back door without a glance and Riki would not even look up from its dish. As it got colder Tricia fixed up a place for it to stay warm on the back porch.

I am usually the first to get home in the afternoon and Riki got to waiting for me in the front garden. Once or twice I would leave the door open as I went in and Riki would follow. The cats did not like that however. That was crossing into their territory. Riki grew plump and almost tame.

Then we started seeing less of her and realized that she had some pups somewhere that she was nursing. She would arrive just at dusk for food and then hurry off. Before long she started to bring the pups with her, and all that spring we watched them grow. There were four of them each with its own personality. There was a really friendly one whom Tricia dubbed Rascal who would eat out of her hand. There was a big male who liked to arrive by climbing over the roof. There was a small female and a shy one with a very white face. It was funny to watch them all follow Riki because with her limp she was the slowest of them all.

As the summer wore on we got to seeing less and less of them. They didn't always show up together and often did not show up at all. By Winter we were not seeing any of them. Of course we knew that wild raccoons had been living in our midst all along but we had become emotionally attached to these and we worried about them. Some of our neighbors did not look as benignly on them as we did, and there are a lot of other dangers for them, cars and dogs in particular.

In early Spring Tricia called me to the back door again. There was a raccoon on the back porch. She thought it looked like the small female. I wasn't as sure. We did not see her again. But it made us feel better.

Posted by Bill Hopkins on May 7, 2003 08:53 PM