In the last episode of Wild Neighbors, we read about a cougar that checked itself into rehab, a deer plucked from a watery death, and a three-legged bobcat that keeps on chooglin’.

This week, Sara Penhallegon, director of the Center Valley Animal Rescue in Quilcene, shares more true-rescue stories.

Raccoons, she says, are nothing if not rugged. Case in point: The raccoon that was shot in the head with an arrow near Poulsbo. 

It was a typical spay-and-neuter day at CVAR when the state Department of Fish and Wildlife arrived with the “cranky” raccoon, as Penhallegon put it. 

The arrow’s point had sailed through the critter’s eye socket and lodged against the back of the skull. 

Veterinarian Robert Nathan was relieving cats and dogs of ovaries and testes when he was asked to extract an arrow from a raccoon.

“I won’t be able to do as many spays and neuters,” Nathan replied, delivering a seldom-heard line.

Had the victim been a dog, it likely would have retained its eye because it would have received eye drops eight to 10 times a day, Penhallegon said.

“But I don’t know anyone who could have put eye drops in this raccoon that many times a day,” she said, “so removing the eye was the only option.” 

Rocky lost an eye but was soon on the mend. However, before he could be released back into the wild, he had to pass several live-food tests.

In Rocky’s case, he was initially given rolls of toilet paper containing worms. He needed to remove the worms and eat them. Next up was a test involving live mice.

Rocky passed the tests and was returned to the woods a month later, thanks to Nathan and Penhallegon.

If raccoons are battle tanks, bunnies are delicate flowers.

“Bunnies just like to die,” Penhallegon said, stating a conclusion she reached after observing many abandoned or slightly injured cottontails quickly give up their will to live.

Sometimes a bunny comes in injured by a weed wacker or a lawn mower, receives treatment, seems to be recovering just fine, and then — poof — it’s an ex-bunny.

Penhallegon said that baby bunnies that should have been left alone are frequently brought to CVAR. People encounter them, mistakenly believe they have been orphaned, and try to “rescue” them.

Before moving the young ones, Penhallegon advises people to spread a wide line of flour around the bunnies’ burrow. Often, mom isn’t absent from the scene; instead, she comes and goes. Evidence of her presence often shows in the disturbed flour within a day.

As Penhallegon spoke, a bunny with a tiny splint in another room was recovering from a cat attack. It’ll be a little hopper again soon if all goes well.

Moving onto a big hopper, Penhallegon recalled the rescue of a 200-pound buck that jumped an 8-foot fence in Port Townsend and got itself trapped in an empty water reservoir.

“How this buck got in there, I have no idea,” she said. He was located at the bottom of a steep concrete basin and could not climb back to the fence. Penhallegon brought a dart gun with her and handed it to a WDFW officer she knew was a better shot than she was.

The officer plugged the buck with one shot. The animal went down, apparently sedated. “I approached and thought I was going to put a blanket on him,” Penhallegon said, “and he jumped up and kicked me right in the chest.”

Undeterred, she stuck him with a pole syringe and administered more sedative. The buck went down and stayed sedated long enough to be removed from the reservoir and released. The lengths to which some people go to save animals never cease to amaze me. I panic when I find myself in tight places. Penhallegon? Not so much.

A couple of years ago, someone stayed in a Victorian home in Port Townsend and hired a trapper to catch a pair of river otters that had been spotted entering the crawl space.

The trapper caught and killed the otters and plugged the hole to the crawl space with a stone.

Eight days later, a new group arrived at the house and heard chirping noises coming from beneath it. This time, Penhallegon, not a trapper, received a call.

She was relieved to find that the crawl space seemed spacious, about four feet high at first, but she couldn’t see any animals. She noticed several paths and chose to follow them.

The house was built on a slope, and as Penhallegon crawled forward on her belly, the space grew increasingly snug. All the insulation had come down, restricting her view. It was the stuff of nightmares for a claustrophobic.

“It gets narrower and narrower and narrower as I go,” she said. “I’ve got my headlight on. I had a pillowcase, so if I found him, I could put him in a pillowcase and pull him out.”

“I’m getting farther and farther back, and then I found one,” she said. The baby river otter was “alive but not really conscious. I put it in my pillowcase, and I’m thinking there must be more.”

She continued the search and found another otter. “It was nonresponsive, but alive, so I put it in the pillowcase,” she said.

By this point, Penhallegon was wiggling more than crawling. To her horror, she realized she could not turn around.

“I’m trying to weasel backwards,” she said, “and I was getting quite stuck. I was thinking to myself, ‘I’m going to have to call in a rescue team to pull me out. This was really a bad idea.’ “

“But I did get out. I got the otters out. I got them to my vehicle. I got dextrose into them right away. I brought warm, injectable fluids and got them into the otters immediately. And then I rushed them back here,” to CVAR.

The otters were slightly more conscious when they arrived at the animal hospital. They were in horrible shape, nearly dead, with collapsed veins. Penhallegon resorted to injecting fluids and medicines into their bone marrow, a highly uncommon move that had the desired effect.

“In no time they were moving around,” she said. The otters required six months of rehabilitation but made a full recovery. “They were released to a beautiful pond that empties into saltwater.”

Scott Doggett is a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times’ Outdoors section. He and his wife, Susan Englen, live in Port Townsend.