The cage where the wildcat had been kept was still standing near the hen coop. They put the raccoon into the cage, and went back into the house. This time, when they went to bed, they fell fast asleep at once.
About midnight, when everything was still, the little raccoon, who had a very sore foot from the cuts made in it by the teeth of the trap, saw three shadows come creeping up toward his cage; for the moon was now shining faintly. They came closer and closer, moving softly and noiselessly over the ground. His heart gave a great leap when he discovered that it was his mother and his two brothers, who had been looking for him everywhere.
“Mamma! Mamma!” he began to cry from his cage, but soft-like, so as not to wake up the dog. “Here I am, here I am. Oh, get me out of here! I’m afraid! I’m afraid! Mamma! Mamma! Mamma!” The little raccoon was choking with tears!
The mother and the two brother raccoons were as happy as could be to find him! They rubbed their noses against him through the wires in the cage, and tried to stroke him with their paws. Then they set to work to get him out, if they could. First they examined the wiring of the cage, and one after another they worked at it with their teeth. But the wire was thick and tough, and they could do nothing with it. Then an idea came to the mother raccoon.
“People cut wires with files! Where can we get a file? A file is a long piece of iron with three sides, like the rattle of a rattlesnake. You push it away from you across the wire, and then you draw it toward you. Finally the wire breaks. Let’s hunt around in the blacksmith shop, and we may find one.”
They hurried off to the shop where the farmer kept his tools. Soon they found the file and came back with it to the cage. Thinking it must be very hard to file off a wire, they all took hold of the file and started pushing it back and forth between two of the wires. They pushed so hard that the cage began to shake all over and made a terrible noise. In fact, it made such a loud noise that Tuké woke up and set to barking at the top of his voice. The raccoons were frightened out of their wits; and for fear the dog might ask them where they got that file, they scampered off, with their tails in the air, toward the forest.
The little boy and the little girl woke up very early in the morning to go to see their new pet, who had been brooding sadly in his cage all night long.
“What shall we call him?” asked the little boy.
“Seventeen,” answered the little girl. “I can count to seventeen!”
And what did “Seventeen” have for breakfast? One of those hen’s eggs he had tried so hard to get the night before. And after the hen’s egg, a grasshopper, and then a piece of meat, and then a bunch of grapes and finally a lump of chocolate! By the end of the day, he was letting the two children reach their finger through the cage to scratch his head; and so pleased was he at all that was now happening to him that he liked being a prisoner in a cage almost as much as being a free raccoon cub on the mountain side. He was all taken up with the nice things that were placed in his coop for him to eat; and he liked those two yellow-headed children who kept coming to look at him!