The setting: Arkie family house in the sticks, 9:45 p.m. Sunday night. Mama & teenage son are home; Papa is out of state and won't be home until the next day.
cast: Mama, son, Sadie (watchdog), Velvet (laid-back dog), Squirt (hyper mutt from working dog/hunting dog stock), Curly (Brittany spaniel – hunting dog), Blue (neighbor’s blue-tick hound.)
The scene opens with mama walking out the kitchen door into the unlit open garage. She's going to the barn to feed the dogs. Son is putting his shoes on so he can walk the dogs from their pen to the barn for the night.
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As I closed the kitchen door and stepped into the pitch blackness of the garage, I heard a definite “dash-for-cover” scurrying noise directly to my left along the floor. “Raccoon” screamed my brain.
“Oh crap,” I thought, “now what?.” I immediately turned around and went back into the house, turned on the garage light and got my teenage son to come outside with me.
“There’s something in the garage,” I said.
“Are you sure it’s not my cat?” he said, doubting my hearing.
“It’s not your cat,” I said, hoping it wasn’t his cat because then I’d look like a scaredy-cat. Glancing around and seeing and hearing nothing further, I went to the barn to help with the dogs.
Several minutes later, my son showed up at the barn with our dog Squirt-greased lightening on four legs-in tow. Squirt is always sniffing and looking for something to hunt and has been known to catch squirrels and cats.
“Nothing is in the garage," son announced. "I took Squirt in there and he sniffed all over the place. There’s nothing there.”
I wanted to believe him, but I knew I heard something and had a hard time chalking the noise up to nothing; especially since papa cleaned and organized the garage yesterday in preparation for winter. “I don’t want any mice problems like we had before,” Papa had said as he stacked things neatly in their places.
Within minutes, my son brought the other two dogs down to the barn, put them in the stall and together we went back to the house. My son immediately went upstairs to his room and I immediately got a flashlight and returned to the lighted garage to look under the workbench shelves for the mystery noisemaker. There, on the floor against the wall, disappearing behind the generator, was a long furless, rat-type tail…only bigger. Oh crap, what's that?? Opossum popped to mind…but then, so did albino snake. I went back into the house to get my son, (who was getting ready for bed) and dragged him out into the garage for his opinion about the tail.
“Does that look like an opossum tail?” I asked.
“Sort of,” he said. “Touch it to see if it moves.”
You want me to do WHAT!!!?????!!!!!!! Ok.
So, "Fearless" me, I grabbed a shovel and poked at the tail that was between cardboard boxes, plastic storage containers and the portable generator.
“Yep, it’s a tail alright,” son announced. “It moved."
Great(!) I think facetiously, where did it go?!!!
My heart started pounding as my imagination shifted into overdrive…a giant phantom tail is hiding in my garage and I know it will pounce onto me when I least expect it if I don’t’ get it out of there soon. I’ll never be able to go into my garage again!
“There it is,” son said, pointing.
Sure enough, there is the long whip-like tail lying on the floor in a small space between neatly stacked wood and toolboxes. Attached to it, sitting huddled against the wall, was a cute, pointy-nosed, grey & white opossum….with its hackles raised like a dog’s and its sharp white pointy teeth visible in its open mouth.
“He winked at me,” son said as the opossum sat staring at us and us at him. “Look... he did it again.”
Sure enough, as the critter stared at us, he’d blink one eye, wait several seconds and then blink the other eye – never both at the same time.
About that time, Blue, the neighbor’s hound dog, walked up to the garage to see what all the commotion was about. She often visits our old dog Curly and checks his food dish to see if he'd left a few morsels for her. (Blue and Curly sometimes hang together, but Curly’s hunting days are long gone, except for the occasional run at our cat.) Anyway, I looked out of the garage to see what our hunting dog was doing and guess what? He was laying on his back in the yard, ignoring both Blue and the fiasco in the garage. Great white-and-tan hunter he is NOT!!!!!!!!!
Blue sensed the fear/excitement/confusion in the garage and came in to investigate. She sniffed along the tiny pathway behind the tool boxes, chain saw, storage containers, etc…and knew something was hiding there.
“Get it, Blue!” I commanded. She looked up at me, wagged her tail and slowly sauntered over to me for a pat on her head. Then she returned to the corner of the garage where she knew the "monster" was hiding and inadvertently blocked its closest avenue of escape.
“Get out of here, Blue,” I said in a frustrated tone of voice. “Son, help me get this thing out of here!”
Son was sitting on our ATV, admiring the “cute little thing” (as he put it), and asked me what I wanted him to do.
“Help me,” I said, “and don’t get bit. These 'cute little things' are mean.”
During the next 30 minutes, my son & I used the shovel, a broom, pieces of pvc pipe, and long thin pieces of wood to try to chase the little devil out of the garage. It kept walking and climbing along the wall and hiding behind stuff that we eventually pulled out from under the workbench and shelves. We poked and prodded and received growling, hissing and baring of teeth in return.
Suddenly my son got a brilliant idea and said,“Want me to get my bb gun?”
I'm a true animal lover at heart, but by this time, the opossum had started to make me mad.
“Sure,” I said, hoping it would work better on the opossum than it did the time we had the snake in the barn. My son got his gun, pumped it one time and fired at the animal’s tail. It didn’t move. Son then pumped the gun twice and shot it in the hind end. The critter jumped, but didn’t leave its hiding place behind the snow skis, molding, a hoe and other long objects stacked in the garage corner. Instead, it stared at us pathetically.
“Maybe it will come out if we just leave it alone,” son said, falling for the sad look in its beady black eyes. We moved to the other end of the garage and waited…5 minutes.
Nothing. By this time, it was nearly 11:00 p.m. The night was growing longer with every tick of the clock, while my patience was growing shorter.
“I’m tired,” my son said.
“We have to get this thing out of the garage," I said emphatically. "Then I’ll close the garage door and we can go to bed.” I looked around the garage and saw an old broom propped against the far wall. “Let’s just try to sweep it out of the garage,” I suggested.
Broom in hand, I headed for its hiding place in the corner and suddenly my “hunter” son turned all soft on me.
“Don’t hurt it,” he said as he stared at it sitting in the corner. “Come here, little guy,” he said, trying to coax it outside with a long stick.
That didn't work either.
"Get the shovel," son said, "maybe we can push it onto the shovel with the stick and carry it outside."
Wrong! That brilliant idea made the animal start climbing the tall stuff in the corner. After we poked him back down into the corner with the broom and rejected the idea of grabbing him with a post hole digger, we carefully removed most of the stuff in the garage corner (to a great amount of hissing, growling and roaring from the “cute little guy”).
Our next idea was for my son to use my metal rake and and gently pull him out of the garage. This scheme began to work until somewhere along the line, the opossum grabbed hold of the rake's tines, at which point my son swung the rake out over the driveway knowing the centrifugal force would fling it off the rake.
As the rake completed its swing back toward us, we realized the opossum was still hanging onto the rake, staring at us in defiance! My son quickly swung the rake again and this time the “cute little guy” flew off onto the driveway apron and landed on his keister. We watched him turn around, glare at us for about 30 seconds, walk slowly across the driveway to the grass and proceed up the hill toward the woods. I looked at my son and at the complete mess we made by pulling things from their organized places just to get the opossum.
“I’m closing the door,” I said. “I’ll deal with this tomorrow, before papa comes home.”
As the garage door slowly closed, I saw Curly get up off his back, walk over to the driveway and start sniffing around the garage while the opossum leisurely disappeared into the woods.
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