Jerry Clower was quite a raconteur.
Around the time I got out of high school, Dad killed a mama coon going into a tree hollow. He shined a light into the hollow and noticed two babies whose eyes were not open yet, so he managed to get them out, kept one and gave one to a relative. He obtained a fur-bearing animal license to legally keep the coon as a pet, and we had Fred as a pet for more than a year. From firsthand experience, coons are very resourceful, dexterous, curious, and quite capable of holding their own against most other critters armed with nothing more than claws and teeth. Dad made Fred a harness that he couldn't get out of (itself a bit of an undertaking) and set up a line across the back yard with a lead so that Fred could climb a bit, as well as get to shade, food and water. Though Fred couldn't get his harness off, he soon figured out how to get the harness off the lead, and he would go missing for two or three days at a time until he went missing and did not come back at all. I can't really recommend coons as pets, but having Fred as a pet was certainly an experience.
After Fred went missing, Dad put up some signs in the neighborhood and got a call a week or so later from a lady with a coon in her garage. It ended up being a juvenile female so not the coon we were looking for. When Dad went to get the coon, he wore leather gloves. He successfully caught the animal and brought it home in a cage, though he did so with punctured gloves and fingers. Freda, as we called her for the few days she was with us, was the single most foul-spirited creature I ever saw. Every ounce of her three to four pound being was filled with vitriol. Any time she became aware of someone she would hiss and strike out in their direction against and through the cage wire. We relocated her pretty quickly.