When I left off part one of the tale about raccoon in the chimney, Integrity Pest Control had just pulled in the driveway. The chimney sweep had returned to the roof to once again to remind himself that he couldn't believe how bad it smelled. Before I continue, I think I should say a little bit about how these circumstances came about.

The city of Bellingham sprawls out over several hills much like ancient Rome, only with fewer inhabitants and worse drainage. We have the active volcano, Mt. Baker, looming over us, occasionally venting steam to remind us of possible doom. This remote corner of the Washington rain forest has few residents, most with little or no good reason to live in this miserable climate. But it's our miserable climate and we take comfort in bragging about it.

As the city's population grew, residential neighborhoods climbed Alabama Hill straddling the rugged valley of Whatcom Creek. Because of the terrain, hundreds of acres in the middle of town were left as scrub. Jerry and I bought our house in 1986 long before anyone thought that a tangle of ferns, firs and brambles would eventually be turned into Greenway, nature's path from the mountains to the bay.

In spite of living in town, we thought we had few neighbors. We forgot that where people weren't, animals would be. In the first few years that we lived here a chucker, which is a chicken-sized wild game bird, crashed into our patio window. A flying squirrel visited my bird feeder. We learned that plants that deer wouldn't eat, slugs would. Rumors of cougars and pictures of visiting moose were printed in the newspaper. We lived on the edge of a wild kingdom. Still the raccoons caught us off guard.

There were raccoons in the chimney long before I realized there were any around. Even though one January morning delicate, fairy-like footprints traced through the snow. Even though throughout the spring I was awakened to the sound of something galloping across the roof. Then there was the terrifying caterwauling outside the bedroom window one night that I knew wasn't cats because of the volume and intensity. Even several years later after I had seen the little bandits scurrying across the yard, I didn't realize that they nested in our chimney.

There were clues. Late one evening, after Jerry had gone to bed, I heard a alarming gurgling and rustling in the living room fireplace. Bats. It had to be bats. Why weren't they outside doing nighttime bat-stuff? Why were they fluttering around in the chimney above the damper? Were they looking for a different way out? Were they trapped because they couldn't fly in that tight of a space? As I tried to come up with a good explanation of why bats would be in my chimney, I couldn't forget the disgusting descriptions of what the floor of bat caves smelled like.

Along with the fireplace came a fireplace magnet placed on the fireplace screen that read damper 'closed.' Pretty clever way to help people to remember not to smoke up the house when burning wood, but with those noises in the chimney I had to be sure that 'closed' meant sealed off. I reached into the black hole to tug at the lever in what I hoped was the right direction. The commotion above the damper ceased, at least for a few minutes, so I knew they hadn't left. What if they tried to crawl out after I went to bed? I propped a sheet around the screen, just in case. Apparently I thought the sheet would stop them from coming into the living room where metal and mesh had not.

A short while later a quiet cooing emanated from the shrouded fireplace. Maybe it wasn't bats after all. Maybe it was pigeons or doves. At least they wouldn't crawl into the living room. I decided it definitely wasn't bats so I took the sheet down and went to bed.

The next day I called a chimney sweep to find out how to get birds out of the chimney.

“I could send a sweep over,” the man on the phone said.

“How would he get the birds out?” I asked.

“He could probably use his broom to pound 'em down.”

With an image of mashed feathers and gore fresh in my mind, I decided live birds weren't all that bad. I was relieved that most of the noise had stopped except for occasional rustling. In a couple of weeks, even that stopped.

By this time, I was used to seeing raccoons around, mostly at dawn, but one sunny spring afternoon, a raccoon lay prostrate on the deck steps, either lounging in the sun or deathly ill. I was relieved to see it finally lumber away.

A few weeks later, I figured out what it had been doing there. I was in my dining room when I saw a tiny raccoon shimmying up the trunk of a fir outside the window. I went outside to the deck to see a full grown raccoon urging a second kit from the roof to the overhanging fir branch. I watched, charmed, as she tried to wrangle the second kit on to the fir branch and down the tree trunk. After the second kit was on the ground, the mother started back up the tree. The kit that first caught my attention tried to follow her. She patiently ushered it back to the ground and started up the tree again. When the kit followed her, she turned around and knocked it from a branch to the ground, went back to the roof, waddled to the chimney, and crawled inside. She reappeared with a third kit. Now I understood why she had been laying on the deck steps- it was the closest the mother of triplets could come to time-out of the nest.

It took her a long time to move her kittens away from the nest. She would carry one down the road by the scuff of its neck, leave it on a branch in a fir tree, then come back for a second only to find that the first one had tried to follow her back up the road. When she finally managed to get them a block away, they began to follow her farther into the forest.

Now all the pieces fell in place. The galloping across the roof, the noises in the spring that ceased after a few weeks. I knew that raccoons were clean animals, so like most mothers, it would keep the nest clean. Then when the kits were old enough to climb, she moved them into the woods.

Raccoon kittens are adorable beyond description. When I told Jerry about them, we made a foolish decision to ignore the raccoon nest above our damper. We even thought it was a delightful story to tell our friends about. We thought it was fun to have pets that took care of themselves. Instead of doing something to prevent them from coming back, we did nothing. At least not until it was too late.

The next spring at about seven o'clock in the morning, a teenager knocked at our door in a panic to tell us that he had seen a raccoon go into our chimney. He listened wide-eye, incredulous, as I told him, “I know. She raises her kits there.”

But I was getting nervous about the situation because it was getting pretty late in the spring, but she still hadn't left. Her young started to fight with each other, causing a commotion during the day. I waited patiently for her to move out, but she didn't. It was sure taking a long time for them to mature. Or else she was just being lazy. By the end of July, I decided to urge them along.

First I put a smelly potpourri in the fireplace, thinking the strong odor would drive them out. When there was no sign of them budging, I lit a candle, hoping the flame would scare them. I burned an envelope to add smoke to the mix, then I waited.

A week or so later, I noticed a kit, all by itself was at the base of the tree. Relieved that they were moving out, I left them to move away in secrecy. That was before I realized that the kit was on its own. And before I found out what happens when a raccoon dies in a chimney.