EMRY TRANTHAM ON “THREE RACCOONS”

Three baby raccoons.

They were in my backyard, they were unafraid, and they were orphaned. We ascertained that much by the second day. They were also impossibly precious – tiny woodland things with curious eyes and a toddling gait. I looked for them when I woke up in the morning, when I returned home in the evening, and again before bed. I went out and photographed them, their whiskers beautifully crisp against the bokeh of late summer leaves. They delighted me.

What I wanted to do: keep them forever. Put them in a box with a warm towel, give them scraps and treats, bottles if they’d take them.  Love them until they loved me back. They would have, eventually. They followed me around the yard as it was. But I had three dogs, three children, and a small house, not to mention the anxious temperament of a lifelong rule follower. There could be no successful taming of raccoons, no matter how I longed to mother them.

There was no one else for the job, either. There are few wildlife rehabilitators period, even fewer licensed to handle raccoons (often rabies vectors), and not one I could find. A local woman who had cared for many a squirrel and possum offered her backyard to them – if we could catch them, we could release them on her property. 

Would that have been the right choice? Maybe. At the time, I couldn’t imagine trapping them and moving them to a place they didn’t know. Our backyard was at least familiar to them. They slept in a hole beneath a rotting stump, curled up like commas. We had abundant acorns, light traffic and a few neighbors’ trash cans to pillage. And there was always the hope, however dim, that their mother would come back for them. What if she came back, finally, and they were gone? Their mother’s presence was their best chance for survival.

And yet: If I’d taken them to the rehabilitator’s backyard, my hound dog wouldn’t have leapt the fence and injured the smallest one. My daughters and I wouldn’t have had to watch in horror as she shook the squealing kit. I wouldn’t have had to place it in a box and watch it breathe, staring at me, for the next hour before I handed it over to the officer who would kill it humanely.

If the first one hadn’t died, would the others have?  It’s likely they were too young to survive without a mother, regardless of their numbers. All I know for certain is that they left us, one by one, and I felt a little more responsible for each death. I could have done something. I should have done something.

I wrote “Three Raccoons” a month or so after the raccoons came and went. They left me heavy; guilt, shame, sadness – it was all tangled together in my throat every time I thought of them. When my throat is too constricted to speak, of course, I write poems. The feelings become untangled and visible, so that I might inspect them from a distance.

I sat with the poem for a long time. My question was still: What should we have done with three orphaned racoons? I didn’t feel as if the poem had answered the question.

This summer, our youngest dog caught a baby possum. My husband pulled the fuzzy baby from the lab’s mouth and handed it to me. This time, the answer was simple. I took it inside, dried it off, warmed it up, and gave it food. I let it rest for a few days, then released it.

During the process of caring for the possum, I began to research wildlife rehabilitation. Maybe I could become a person to take in the animals and care for them without feeling as if I were doing the animals a disservice. During my research, I came across the lines that would become the epigraph of my poem. Most species of wildlife have evolved ways of compensating for very high annual mortality. Interference by humans to save any one individual will do little for the population one way or the other. In other words: Let nature take its course. An orphaned racoon is nothing, and nothing multiplied by three? Still nothing.

The opening of the poem was the last piece I needed. Finding the epigraph marked its completion – not a defense, exactly, because it didn’t absolve me of my choices. But it succinctly made the argument I was trying to interrogate in my poem. It was one simple answer for the question my poem asks, and I hope that in my poem it is clear that though it is an answer, I still don’t know if it is the right one.

And that’s okay. Sometimes there is no right answer. There is only the one I already chose.