On another occasion, Higgins had pounced on a lady's bag at a workshop and made off with her cigarette pack. He can decimate a pack of cigarettes in seconds flat. I guess she wasn't too crazy about the theft. Tom now feeds Higgins only one meal of dogchow on alternate days. He looks fat and healthy, so he must be finding plenty of food on his own. Tom saw him investigating an outdoor stone barbeque chimney recently. A mouse suddenly shot out from underneath the fireplace. This suggests that Higgins knows full well where the mice live, and keeps tabs on them. He still eats lots of insects, grabbing them out of the grass and undergrowth. He feasts on crabapples.He had a fight with another raccoon earlier this month, which resulted in a torn nostril. The white scar is still visible. He also had a lump of matted hair under the left front leg as though from a cut that had bled and healed. The injury to his left rear foor turned out on close inspection to be a painful-looking one. He had a chunk of flesh missing from the ball of the foot and numerous cuts on and between the second, third, and fourth digits. It did not look like an injury caused by another animal, the cuts were slices not clawmarks, and the chunk gouged out of the pad had irregular tears around the edges. It looked raw, but was quite clean and not infected. The foot was also swollen on top. He may have slipped while climbing a rock or some such thing. It did not seem to bother him too much when I examined the foot, and he did put his weight on it when walking on soft mown grass. _Otherwise, he seemed hale and hearty. His teeth looked very white and clean, his eyes bright, his posture perky. The faint seventh black ring at the base of his tail is still apparent..;l\Higgins and I went for a walk near the lodge. He sniffed the ground every inch of the way. At one point we were down by the junipers bordering the entrance road. This is the general area where Tom says he lives. Two men with fishing poles arrived, chatting as they walked in. Higgins promptly dove into the cattail marsh behind the junipers.It is a thick tangle of foliage and stems at about three feet and higher above the ground, but at ground level there are plenty of runways for an animal his size. The marsh is fairly dry at present, even around the cattail roots. Higgins reemerged from the clumps of purple asters around the junipers and cattails when the visitors had passed. He caught and ate a cricket. I noticed him turning to look down several small but distinct runways among the asters, all of which seemed to lead into the cattails. They looked about the right size for raccoons, foxes, and rabbits. i,He was just as playful as ever. On our walk he stopped to wrestle with my arm in our old game of "monkey on a branch" in between catching insects and eating berries. When I picked him up, he showered me with raccoon french kisses. This wasn't too tasty, as he'd just been poking his nose into the soil after insects. I got a fair amount of grit in my mouth. He kept poking his paws down my throat as if he thought I were hiding goodies in my esophagus. He pawed at my pockets and tore the top off a cigarette pack in one of them. 7As he has now found his own little den in the juniper-cattail thicket and no longer uses his cage with its ideal raccoon log, I brought the log home with me. Who knows who its next inmate will be
Monday 5 November I called Tom today to ask after Higgins. He hasn't been seen since a month ago. Tom checked with all the neighbours living near the preserve in case they had seen any road kills or other sightings. Nothing.
Higgins has gone into the wild.
Being the daily notations of the wonderful person who raised Higgins.
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