I opened the gate, took a quick look around, and the coast seemed to be clear when suddenly the kind lady who has been hosting me appeared with a large sack and said, “We’re trying to catch a possum. Wanna help?”
The time crunch faded in importance—I was intrigued. I walked with her around to the back of the house to find a man putting on layers of gloves, clearly intending to reach into the wall of their shed and put a stranglehold on a possum. “This ought to be good,” I thought to myself.
I stood there and chatted with this man, curious what would happen were he to catch the possum in my midst. There was no need for me to ask questions; he filled in all of the gaps for me. Possums are protected in Australia, so he would have to refrain from “doing the nasty things” he would have liked to do to the vermin. He added, however, that possums are “quite nice to eat, as the New Zealanders have discovered.” Apparently possums were introduced in New Zealand to enhance the fur trade, and then they became a delicacy.(I have yet to check the truth of any of this, as the lore is just too good to be ruined by mere facts.)
The gloves were on by this time, and the man prepared to go to work, telling me that “all hell could break loose here in a minute.” The possum was allegedly the size of “a small bear”. I took that cue as a friendly reminder than my shower (and Dr. Phil) was waiting.
I went inside, but before taking my shower, I looked out the window to observe the dear lady who had been hosting me carrying a large sack toward the road.
Later that evening, we spotted a possum (pictured above right) on a telephone pole in Liz’s backyard. Whether or not the possum in the backyard and the aforementioned possum were one and the same remains a mystery.
3 comments:
Dr. Phil? David, I've lost all respect for you.
For your readers' edification, Possum is something quite different from Opossum. Though they are both marsupials, they diverged many millions of years ago, and Possums are a common name for 63 species native to Austrailia, including the largest at the length of a forearm.
Dr. Phil? David, I've lost all respect for you.
For your readers' edification, Possums are entirely different from Opossums, from which they diverged many millions of years ago. Possum is the common name for some 63 different species indigenous to Austrailia, the largest of which are the length of the forearm. The clearest difference between Possums and Opossums is that the latter has a long pointed snout, and the former a squared off blunt snout.
Yeah...I've made a few adjustments since those days.
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