At the beginning of the summer, we encountered a lone raccoon in our back yard one morning. His gait was marked with a limp, his ear nicked from a long ago squabble and he bore the other marks of a long life of adventures in the concrete jungle. He made a hasty departure from our backyard when we first met.
When we next saw him we realized that "Lumpy-Limpy" (as we now called him) spent his days sleeping nearby, usually taking up a position on the deck next to ours but one floor down (which our neighbour never uses) or wedged under an eavestrough of a further neighbour. It became clear that he was an older fellow without a family and did not have it soft at all .... So we had to adopt him!
We started serving him a bit of old fruit and vegetables, soon discovering that he would only eat soft things such as banana, mango and avocado (bad teeth?) and soon we had a normal routine of meeting him every other day or so in the backyard and giving him a snack.
Sometimes he would hear us while we were getting ready to head out on a bike ride and his face would suddenly appear through the bushes with a hopeful glint in his eye! Other times we would find him waiting for us in a chair or at the back door.
He never rummaged through the trash or caused other problems (some juvenile raccoons once got into a plastic bag of empty beer cans, we wonder if they had hang overs later!) and while he grew accustomed to us he still kept his distance.
Sadly we think his time has likely come. We check on his two sleeping spots every morning from the third floor deck and have not seen him since late July. There has been no sign of him in the backyard and the occasional pieces of banana offered in early August were left untouched.
We will miss Lumpy-Limpy.
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