THE EVERGLADES, FLORIDAGillian Hicks and her boyfriend, Michael Litersky, were sitting on the porch of Hicks’s apartment in Lake Worth Beach, Florida, when they noticed a strange animal slinking along the fence. It looked a bit like a raccoon, but its color was too mustardy, and a bit like a cat, but its tail flexed and gripped with remarkable dexterity.

A Google search suggested the mysterious beast might be some type of primate, maybe a lemur. Whatever it was, it was cute—with the big, imploring eyes and rounded ears of a teddy bear—and seemed friendly. The internet says lemurs eat fruit, so Litersky set out some watermelon. As the sun dipped into the Gulf of Mexico on that muggy summer evening in 2019,