The masked intruder broke into our house, and wanted to stay here. She wanted to raise her babies here, in the attic! I had seen her around here before, in the garden, under the bird feeder, just hanging around. I knew she was bad news from the first night that I saw her. That darn raccoon was a pest. She knocked over flower pots, tried to catch the goldfish in our garden pond, and now the raccoon had made herself at home in our attic.

Last week we noticed that something had pulled loose some vinyl siding on the overhang of our roof, leaving a hole there. I later saw a starling go in the hole, with some nesting material. I naturally thought that the starlings had pulled the vinyl loose, until we started hearing footsteps in the attic.

“What was that?” Marilyn said as we were trying to get to sleep. We could hear noises in the attic.

“I don’t know, I’ll check it out tomorrow,” I told her.

The next day I went into the attic to investigate, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary and was starting to leave when I heard some noises. They were odd sounding, kind of like squeaks or cries. I pointed my flashlight in the direction of the squeaks and saw two glowing eyes, the eyes of a large raccoon. She was standing next to her babies, the source of the squeaks. “It’s a raccoon, and it has babies!” I yelled down to Marilyn.

I retrieved a long pole from the garage, headed back to the attic and began poking at the animal. I yelled and poked, poked and yelled. I hit her with the pole. “Get out of here,” I screamed at the raccoon as I poked at her. She stood her ground at first, then suddenly picked up one of her babies and headed toward the hole, heading outside. She was gone. I went over and looked at the babies. They were very small, about four inches long. I figured they must be no more than a couple of days old. I called to Marilyn, “Come up here and look at these.” But right then I heard the mother climbing back up the downspout and entering the hole in the siding. She picked up another baby and left.

Marilyn looked at the baby raccoons and said, “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know, lets see what happens.” We left the attic for an hour or so then checked again. The other babies were still there. The mother never did come back for them. We scooped the babies into a plastic bucket and put them outside. The mother did not come to their rescue, the remaining babies all went to Raccoon Heaven, or wherever raccoons go when they die.

We fixed the hole in the overhang, nothing can get in now. “Do you think they’ll be back?” Marilyn asked.

“I don’t think so, I hit and poked her pretty hard. I think she’ll find somewhere else to live,” I said. “And besides, we’ve fixed the hole.” I think I convinced Marilyn that they were gone for good, now if I could only convince myself. We’ll see.