For five years, a nearly blind raccoon arrived every morning in the yard of a house in Illinois, United States. He bumped into things and was afraid of the wind, tall grass, and snow.
Eryn, the woman who had been feeding him since 2009, left him soft paste soaked in cream of chicken soup, since the little animal was missing his lower lip and couldn’t eat anything else.
One day in October 2014, right at mealtime, two black kittens appeared beside him. She thought they were only following him because they had seen her feeding him, but after a few days she noticed something different: when mealtime was over, the two little ones accompanied him back to the forest. One on each side.
That raccoon far outlived the usual lifespan for his kind. Raccoons usually live two or three years, and he made it to five, despite everything. “It was a miracle”, Eryn said. However, even though the wild animal was blind and old, he could still attack, but instead, he ended up becoming family to the two kittens.
Then, in June 2015, the raccoon stopped coming. Eryn doesn’t know how he died; she only hopes it was peacefully, in some corner of the forest.
But the kittens stayed. She had already been taming them, with plenty of scratches and patience, and they eventually moved into her home.
What she didn’t imagine was how much she would end up needing them, too. In just nine days, Eryn lost her mother and her 15-year-old cat, two blows that left a huge void in her life. Then she realized that those little ones had also come to keep her company during one of the most difficult times in her life.
It turned out I needed the black kittens just as much as they needed me
We’ll never know whether the raccoon was protecting them or whether they simply shared the food and the way back to the forest, but that unlikely friendship ended up changing the fate of all three and, unexpectedly, Eryn’s too.