Wild Animal Story

hhmm, I promised you a wild animal story didn’t I….guess I should tell you about it then….

Once upon a time, there was a family with 3 dogs (Micheal, a maremma, Tug, a jack russel/spitz and Spunky, a pomeranian) and a cat (domestic shorthair gray tabby, Loverboy), that lived in the woods outside of town. Every now and then different animals would wander into the yard and the dogs or cat would take after them and the family would have to go save them. Some times it would be too late, and sometimes the ending was happy. And sometimes they weren’t sure which of those it was….

Ok, so let’s just say that last Monday, the lady of the house stayed home from work to play with all the new toys she got from the Scrapbook Expo. And let’s say that first thing that morning, before she was even dressed, one of those three dogs was barking funny in the front yard. And let’s say that this lady went to the window to see what was the matter. and found….

Tug barking at a ‘possum! Ok, so it wasn’t the Biggest ‘possum in the world, but it was at least as big as Tug!

Now it is not unusual to have critters out there, but usually Trav (the man of the house) is home to handle things…not this time…he went to work. That left me….and as I mentioned above, I wasn’t exactly dressed to go wild animal taming. But something needed to be done, soon, so…in my flip flops and sleep shirt, off to the rescue I go. I grabbed the broom off the front porch on the way out and started hollering at the dog to leave it be (as I do not know the gender of our visitor I will hereafter refer to it as ‘he’ for ease of reference). Of course Tug ignored me and started really going at the attack and I was terrified that he would get hurt so I jumped right in with that broom and tried to separate them. That worked.-.sorta…every time I poked the ‘possum it

would show me ALL those teeth and gggrroowwll and that would set Tug off again!

Finally got Tug to listen a little and back off and so I started trying to herd that poor ‘possum towards the gate to get him to safety…once he figured out that I was pushing him in the direction HE wanted to go he stopped fighting me so hard and sorta ambled in that direction.

Things went quite well until….about 5 feet from the gate. At that point he decided that he wanted to go to the back yard (which is probably where he came in) NOT out the gate and turned on me….man, was THAT scary. Have you ever tried to keep an angry ‘possum at bay with a broom? and no pants on? and open toed shoes? I was feeling so exposed – more than I can remember in my whole life. But what could I do at that point? so I ran around him and opened the gate and then back to the other side to give it my best. Wasn’t enough, he managed to scoot by me and into the bush at the base of the tree that grows next to the front porch. And as soon as he did Tug went in the other side of the bush and Spunky thought it would be fun to get involved too!! I yelled at them both and Spunk backed off, Tug I had to broom again. Finally I got them to go in the house and I sorta locked us in.

I never did get that wild animal out of the yard, but by the time I allowed the dogs back out, he was gone. As far as I could determine, Tug was completely uninjured. The ‘possum had a couple of what looked like minor bite marks on his side, but nothing major that I could see.

And as far as I could tell, Michael never even woke up. Great watch dog, gotta tell ya. But given the choice of having him in that mix as well, I’ll take a grumpy sleepy mutt to an alert attack dog any day!

Did I live up to my promise?