Sponsor: Aeon Magazine

Only a handful of animals in the world can be tamed, but that can’t stop a homesick 15-year-old girl from trying.

In “A Raccoon of My Own,” new in Aeon Magazine, American psychologist and best-selling writer Lauren Slater recalls an exquisitely painful time in her youth, when, cast adrift from home herself, she adopted a baby raccoon. Her relationship with “Amelia” blossomed—one creature adapting to, and learning from the other. But Amelia’s wild instincts could not be contained in suburban domestic life, as Lauren was soon to realize.

Read it in Aeon Magazine—a new digital magazine publishing daily essays on ideas, culture and science.