McDevitt Mutts
Possum? Hoss 'em!
Lily ~ Maverick
Adult dogs at last.
Lily & Mav enjoying the summer weather and some good chew toys.
Can you tell where the dogs get most of their exercise in the backyard? Tag! You're it!
For future reference, sometimes when you try to eat bees, your face will puff up and I'll have to force little pink allergy pills down your throat.
Who's that? It's Sera, visiting at work! And doing a very nice little dance for the camera.
This is a possum. Or an opossum, if you prefer. Either way, it is an ugly marsupial-slash-rodent that does not belong in my living room.
Let's back up a few days. Lily woke me up at 2:30 one morning barking at the back door. Douggie must have gotten out earlier because he was on the porch waiting to come in. So I open the door and Lily rushes out there and all hell breaks loose. Barking, running around the porch furniture, and something that looks like a giant rat scampering around. I finally drag the dog back inside and there it is. A possum. I've never seen a possum up close and personal before, and wasn't even sure what possums looked like, but somehow I knew it was a possum. It was squished up into the corner of the porch, standing on its front paws, with its back paws up the wall behind it. It seemed to be OK so I just left it there and went back to bed. It was gone in the morning.
But re-appeared two days later in the backyard. There was a lot of barking and it was very dead. I thought about throwing it over the fence, but all three neighboring yards also contain dogs, and I didn't feel the need to share the experience with my neighbors.
OK, back to the present. This is a possum under my couch. Not the dead one. This one turned out to be very alive and didn't mind the camera at all. I had lots of time to take pictures because it really wanted to stay under my couch. It did hiss at me once and that's when I found out that possums hiss, and that they have a lot of teeth. That kind of surprised me, so unfortunately there is no picture. Oh, did I mention that this possum was probably under my couch for nearly 24 hours before I found it? No wonder the dogs were spending so much time (and barking) in there. It even urinated under the couch. I called Ryan and told him there was a possum in our living room and that it peed under our couch. Then, after a lot of couch maneuvering, I finally caught it and let it out the front door, and it stopped for a second on the edge of my lawn and then wisely ran for one of the few houses on my street that doesn't have any dogs.
From now on, the back door stays closed and only the dogs can go in and out. Not Douggie. Douggie can stay inside and not do any more late-night hunting, and the Possum Patrol can continue barking in the backyard, so if they see any more possums, at least they'll keep them OUT of the house.
So, why did the possum cross the road?
To escape the McDevitt Mutts, of course!
© 2006 Cathe McDevitt / mcdevitt@gmail.com / The Cast