My sister and I were tenderhearted children and loved animals enormously. We were allowed rafts of pets, remarkable because our parents, with hearts and temperaments already too inflexible for the chaos of family, were not inclined to invite dirt, noise, slobber, the whole echhhk, unpredictable wildness of animal into the house. But we were allowed nearly anything we wanted, within reason: frogs; gerbils; dogs; newts; hamsters; cats; a raccoon and eventually a horse.

You would think that would be enough, but we were always bringing home additional finds, an egg from an abandoned nest, a dazed lone baby bunny, a newly-hatched tiny grass snake. One day, hanging out at a nearby stable, I found a barn cat terrorizing a baby mouse. The mouse was unhurt, but cornered, and easy to scoop up and take home.

I showed it to my mother, who declared it was not a mouse, but a rat, and not allowed into the house. I could keep it, but outside only. So I made it a nice home in a terrarium and put it near the raccoon’s pen. The raccoon was an awesome pet, with her own language of soft clicks and chirrs, a wonderful smell, a delightful way of playing and interacting with us, the cat and the dog.

What do you remember about raccoons from watching Wild Kingdom? Aside from having the oddly charming habit of washing all their food before they eat it, they have nearly opposable thumbs, making them amazing escape artists from any kind of containment. As members of the bear family, they eat what bears eat—sweet things, like fruit, berries and honey. Also high protein things, like grubs and worms. And meat. Since raccoons are not really built for hunting success, this means mostly small game: frogs, crawdads, mice.

You can see where this is going. And it did. Too tempted, too curious about her new neighbor, she found yet another way to slip out of her pen, and I caught her in the act, with her soft, black cushioned paws in the terrarium. The mouse was mortally wounded and I snatched it away and ran to my mother, hoping that somehow it could be made better.

She declared that there was no way to make it better, and that I needed to take it out of the house and do what had to be done. I looked at my little pet, wriggling in my hand, a pink loop of intestine poking from a puncture in its tiny belly. I went outside, to the field across the street. I found a flat rock and placed the mouse on it. I found another flat rock, lifted it above my head, and did what I had to do.