When Brittany Cusanek says her pet raccoon fell into her life, she means exactly that: He fell through the attic, had to be cut out of a wall and quickly became a part of the family.
Now Leroy the raccoon accompanies Cusanek and her fiancé on hiking trips, serves as the unofficial mascot of the Arkansas bar they co-own, counts grapes and crackers among his favorite treats and garners attention wherever he goes.
"Everyone loves it," said Cusanek, a 29-year-old Fayetteville resident who chronicles the couple's unexpected turn as raccoon owners on Instagram. "I think that it was a weird thing at first. Now it's just Brittany and Jeremey have a raccoon."
It all started with some strange noises in the attic.
The couple first thought it was squirrels or birds. But Cusanek's fiancé, 37-year-old Jeremey Brown, researched online and found two things: The attic intruders were more likely raccoons and, though not the norm, they can be kept as pets, especially if adopted as cubs.
But accessing the attic proved difficult, and efforts to locate and remove the creatures were unsuccessful. Then one day in May, Cusanek first heard an "awful scream" and later whimpering from within a closet wall.
One of the raccoons had fallen from the attic and was trapped. Cusanek cut a hole in the wall, removed the small creature and sent Brown a photo with the caption: "Look what I found."
The couple contemplated reuniting the raccoon with his family, but it again proved a challenge to access the attic, and before long the sounds stopped. It seemed the rest of the pack had moved on.
"So we just kind of figured we'd keep him," Cusanek said with a laugh.
The couple named him Leroy, à la the title character of the song "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," and read up on how to raise him as a pet. They started him on de-worming medicine and tried to bottle-feed him with kitten formula, though it took two days before Leroy would take it without a struggle.
They also looked into regulations on the matter. While some states prohibit keeping a raccoon as a pet, or at least require a permit to do so, Arkansas law was more flexible.
According to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission website, residents can keep up to six raccoons per household. But it lists that fact beneath something of a warning: "Wildlife species make poor pets."
Brown and Cusanek, though, said they have experienced mostly the opposite. Leroy is occasionally territorial around food — especially his favorite, crackers — and at times he'll "play a little too rough" and bite the hands that feed him, Brown said.
But it's not so different from raising a puppy, Brown added, and the positives have outweighed the negatives.
The couple take Leroy on walks with their dog, have brought him by the bar they co-own — Nomads Music Lounge southeast of the University of Arkansas campus — and even take him along on camping trips.
Wherever he goes, there's a near-constant barrage of questions from stunned onlookers, the couple said.
"Everybody stops and wants to touch him," Brown said. "Sometimes somebody knows somebody who has a raccoon. For the most part it's fine, until you're trying to break down camp, and you've got people standing there asking, 'Is that a raccoon?'"
On a recent hike at Petit Jean State Park, Leroy alternated between riding atop Brown's shoulders or running along behind his owners.
He did, at one point, scamper up a tree, quickly managing to climb higher than Brown or Cusanek could reach.
"We kind of looked at each other like, 'Well, what are we going to do?'" Cusanek recalled. "So we decided to just start walking away."
Sure enough, Leroy, apparently not wanting to lose sight of his owners, climbed down and followed right along, keeping up with his owners as the hike progressed.
"He knows who his family is," Brown said.