A heartwarming story has surfaced about how a family in Finland adopted and raised an injured red squirrel they found and lived with it for 6 years.

Priami, a user on reddit, shared some photos of the little critter and explained how they found it. The user’s grandmother had thought it was dead at first, but when it showed signs of life as she tried to move it off the road, she handed it over to Priami for safe-keeping. They tried to release it, but it was incapacitated by its blindness in one eye, so they kept it and name it Arttu. The squirrel lived with them from 2007 to 2013.

For more about their story, read on below!

(h/t: Priami)

The baby squirrel was found injured by the side of a road

“When it seemed like he had recovered, we tried to release him back to the wild but he fell from a tree and hit a rock”

“He survived, but we realized that his eye would never heal completely and he wouldn’t survive on his own”

“His name was Arttu (pretty much the Finnish version of ‘Arthur’)”

“We were very surprised how ‘tame’ he became”

“He liked to have playful ‘fights’ with our hands (you know, like cats do) and he was smart enough not to bite too hard”

“He also liked to take naps in our pockets”

“He even recognized his ‘family’ and became very wary if there were strangers nearby”

“[We fed him] nuts, fruits, berries and mushrooms”

Even when they let him go, he always came back – “He stayed there for a while and then jumped back to my shoulder”

“Squirrel’s claws grow all the time so we had to occasionally cut them because he couldn’t wear them out naturally”

The flash in this photo reveals the glow of his good eye…

…while this one shows his gray and cloudy blind eye

“He died of old age. One morning I found him dead, curled up in his ‘nest’ like he was sleeping”

“We fed other squirrels all the food we had stored for him before he died”

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