I was hurrying along outside Vanier yesterday evening when I saw what I thought at first was a dog-sized squirrel in the middle of the pavement. A split-second thought reminded me that squirrels are not that big, so perhaps it really was a stray dog — and then I saw its stripy tail.
Raccoon.
It was turning around in circles on the pavement and I couldn’t walk around it. Having never seen a raccoon in person before, I side-stepped behind a giant rock and watched it from a short distance. I didn’t want to provoke it by accident. (One of the scenarios we got during first-aid training this weekend was, funnily enough, a raccoon bite.) From the safety of my rock, it was very easy to admire the raccoon — and then another one emerged from the bushes beside it. Two raccoons! I didn’t know there was a nest of raccoons right here on Vanier.
A car passed by, they hid inside the bushes again and I continued to walk on. Unless you knew, you would think that rustling was just another squirrel (or a rat — I’ve seen one of those at Vanier too), or even the wind. But no one else saw them. I never knew they could be so big.
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