Last week, a Texas woman saw a small furry creature by the side of the road. She thought it must have been someone’s pet lemur that had escaped. You know, those funny talking fur balls from Madagascar? It was by the side of the road in San Antonio. It must have been stunned. She got a towel, wrapped it up, and put it in the backseat of her car.
Not long after, the animal roused from its sleep. It was not happy! It was very agitated. The woman had to exit her vehicle. She called for help and, eventually, the animal control people extracted it from the car. They took to the Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Center where it is currently being treated for its injuries. The good Samaritan was shaken, but unharmed.
The captured critter was a ringtail and not a lemur. They are nocturnal cousins of raccoons. Their back paws look like feline feet and that is why they are sometimes confused with cats. Though they exist all over Texas, they are shy and rarely seen. The officers involved called the encounter, “a rare treat.”
I have only seen a ringtail in the wild one time. I was a little kid. My cousins had a lake house at Possum Kingdom and something electrical had stopped working out on the back porch. The dads were trying to get the power back on. The kids were roughhousing on the stairs. The dads took off a wooden panel to get to some wiring underneath and this "ring-tailed cat” (that’s what my Grandmother called it) shot out from inside. Unfortunately, it was surrounded. Kids on one side, Dads on one side, the house on one side, and the edge of the deck on the other side. It froze for just an instant as it tried to calculate a successful escape route.
I remember its frozen face, body taught with fear. I can see all the faces of my family. Wrestling cousins all stopped and stared. Moms and Dads fell silent and examined the visitor. Then silently, it slid through the crowd and back into the woods.
It's hard to imagine the world that we do not see, but it is there. People who live near us, but we have never talked to or met. Individuals who are struggling just down the street from us, but we don’t know. The unseen world is just around the corner. If we look closely, if we try every so often to slow down, to open up, and to seek, we might find a new friend, a person to help. It can be a “rare treat.”