Several weeks ago, I started hearing scraping and rustling noises in my bedroom. They seemed to be just outside the walls or where the wall met the ceiling. Maksim heard the noises too, and they scared him a little.  I figured a raccoon was prowling around on the roof at night.  The noises became more frequent, though, until I'd hear them every day just after sunset.  They were louder and more unsettling now.

I was about to call the landlord about it when a guy with a ladder showed up and climbed up to the roof.  He set a big wire cage up there.  I went out to talk to him, and that was when I noticed a big hole in one of the false dormers above the roof's crawl space.  The ladder guy said there was probably a raccoon living in there and we needed to catch him.

Two nights went by, and both nights I heard the scrambling and scratching noises.  Maksim was really freaking out, despite my reassurances that the raccoon couldn't get in and that it was only sniffing around.

On the third night just after dark, I heard a loud metallic crash from the roof.  I dashed outside to look up and saw what looked like 40 pounds of pissed-off raccoon in the cage.  This thing was huge!  I know raccoons can get big, but this thing was the linebacker of the fuzzy world.

It was freezing outside.  I called the landlord and left a message to have the cage guy come in the morning and hoped that the raccoon would be okay until then.  The cage offered no shelter against the wind, and he'd be up there all night.  I felt bad for the animal. He had to live somewhere, and had no way of knowing this was a bad place.  Now he was trapped in a freezing cage.  There was no way I was going up there to retrieve the cage.  Not only was it dark and slippery, I didn't have heavy gloves or anything else to protect me if the raccoon tried to claw me while I lifted up the cage handle.  I felt bad, but not =that= bad.

In the morning, the raccoon was still there, alive as far as I could tell.  I called the landlord again when the office opened, and they seemed to have no idea I had left a message.

As I was driving home at the end of the day, I passed the office, which had an animal control truck parked in front of it.  On the back was the raccoon cage with the raccoon--alive--in it.  It looked even bigger in daylight.  The animal control guy said there shouldn't be a mate--raccoons don't do the family thing in winter--but just in case, he'd plugged the hole in the dormer with newspaper. If the paper was broken or gone tomorrow, he'd know there was another animal to trap.  And then the landlord could fix the hole.

The linebacker raccoon would be taken elsewhere and released.  I haven't heard any scratchings since.