The Raccoon in the Glass Jar

The homeowner heard him first, bumping softly against the fence in her backyard in the dark, over and over, like something trying to find a door that was not there. She did the wisest thing anyone did that night. She backed away, kept her dog inside, and called us.

He was a baby raccoon, small enough to hold in two hands, and his whole head was inside a glass jar. He had found it along the lane behind the houses, tipped over with something sweet smeared at the bottom, and had pushed his head in after the smell, as any hungry young animal would. Going in, his ears folded and the glass let him pass. Coming out, the rim caught behind his jaw and his ears sprang open against the glass, and the jar became a helmet he could not remove. He could breathe, barely, through the narrow gap at his neck, but he could not see, eat or drink, and every attempt to shake it free only fogged the glass with his own frightened breath.

When we arrived he was stumbling in slow circles near the compost bin, bumping the jar gently against the fence posts, worn down to an exhausted patience. His front paws came up every few steps to pat at the glass, weak and uncoordinated, then dropped again. Through the fogged jar I could see his eyes blinking, half-closed. He had probably been inside it for hours. A trapped animal usually fights. He had mostly stopped, and that told us how much the night had taken out of him.

The first job was to hold him safely. My partner spread a thick towel over him from behind, the way you settle a bird, and gathered him against her chest with his paws wrapped so he could not rake at us or at the jar rim. Raccoon hands are clever and strong, and a frightened one can hurt itself badly against glass. I kept one gloved hand under the jar, taking its weight off his neck. He trembled in long waves, but he did not bite, and he lacked the strength to struggle for more than a few seconds at a time.

There was never any question of breaking the jar. People always suggest it, and people are always wrong. Glass breaks where it wants to, not where you want it to. The safe way is slower and duller and works. We used plain cooking oil from the homeowner’s kitchen, warmed in my hands, and worked it in small amounts around the rim, into the fur at his neck and over his ears, letting it creep into the narrow space between skin and glass. Fur that had bunched and caught began to lie flat. An ear that had sprung open began, slowly, to fold the way it had folded going in.

The complication came when he was nearly free. I was easing the jar forward a fraction at a time, his head turned at the careful angle we needed, while my partner held his body still and talked to him in a low, steady voice. Halfway, his panic came back in one last surge. He twisted suddenly, harder than we believed he still could, and the rim caught again at a worse angle, and his breathing went sharp and fast inside the glass. We stopped everything. Stopping is a skill in this work. I held the jar exactly where it was while my partner dripped more oil along the caught side, and we waited until his trembling slowed and his body went soft again with exhaustion. Only then did I turn the jar the smallest degree, fold the second ear down with one careful fingertip, and slide. The glass came off with a soft, hollow sound, like a bottle being opened, and his head was free in my hands.

He did not run. He sat in the towel blinking in the porch light, oil-slicked and stunned, looking smaller without the jar than he had with it. We wiped the oil from his face with a damp cloth so he would not chill, and offered him water in a shallow dish. He drank in long, desperate laps, paused, and drank again. At the clinic the vet checked him by lamplight: no damage to his eyes, only dehydration, bruising where the glass had pressed, and the deep tiredness of an animal who had spent a night inside his own mistake. They kept him two days, fed him, let him sleep, and watched him turn back into a bright, busy little creature who tried to open every latch in the recovery room.

We released him at dusk in the lane behind the houses, close to the old shed where the neighbourhood raccoons den, and he went up the fence in three quick bounds and stopped at the top to look back at us once, both ears up, entirely himself.

We named him Lo — the Vietnamese word for jar. It seemed honest: the glass jar tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that backyard sometimes, the fence, the compost bin, the porch light coming on in the dark. A jar on its side in a lane is rubbish to everyone who passes it, and a trap to exactly one hungry animal, once. And someone happened to be listening that night instead of turning the television up. And someone happened to call, and wait, and keep the dog inside, instead of reaching for the jar herself and pulling. He is back in his lane now, ears up, into everything. The jar went into the recycling, crushed flat, where it belongs.