An Unexpected Guest

Icing my black eye, I took time to reflect upon the possibility that my wife may not always appreciate my sense of humor. You see, I had come downstairs to drink my morning coffee and sulk for my traditional thirty minutes before heading off to work. But when I got to the bottom of the stairs I saw a large pile of what appeared to be dog shit. So I yelled upstairs, “Damn it Bridgid! Did you shit on the floor again?!” She was not amused and, after showing her appreciation of my joke, asked what the hell I was talking about.

There, on the living room carpet, was the aforementioned excrement, surrounded by several brown stains. This was odd, because we only have cats. And they usually hit the litter box quite reliably, or at least get damn close to it. But this was a few rooms away from their box. Looking about further, it became evident that all the kitty’s dry food had been eaten up. And their water dish was almost empty and there were several pieces of dry cat food deteriorating in what was left of the water in the bottom of the dish. 

We realized that an intruder must have come in overnight. We have an automated cat door which allows the cats to come & go as they please. It’s triggered by ultrasonic signals emitted from special collars that they wear. But if the door hits something on its way down, it opens up again for a little while. So we theorized that some animal must have come in this way, trailing closely behind one of the cats. Then we both thought no more about it & went off to work.

That night, I wondered if the trespasser had been a raccoon. And, I idly wondered, if so could it still be here? Then I went upstairs to change out of my work clothes. One of our cats followed me to my closet. He poked his nose in and froze - it was like he was pointing at something, like a dog might. I slowly slid the closet door open and looking up at me, with a most malevolent glare, was  a huge raccoon!

I gingerly shut the closet door, then got myself & the cat out of the room and shut its door. Then I hurried downstairs to tell Bridgid. It turned out she was involved in a phone call which I was reluctant to interrupt. So after she finally finished her call I told her, “There’s a fucking RACCOON in my closet!” After we were both done freaking out, we Googled “animal removal” or something similar & luckily found a company who would come out right away and catch the little bastard.

The animal remover guy got here in about a half-hour, took his implements & went upstairs. Shortly thereafter we heard an ungodly shrieking and about fifteen minutes later he came back down with this enormous, very annoyed raccoon in a cage.

He carted the animal off to be disposed of. And we shut off the cat door!