Seriously? Again? Why are they called carnivorous felines, if they don’t protect you from rodents and vermin!?
A few years ago during home renovations, our house inspector, one of our Silver Persians, Myster E., discovered a violation - three not permitted baby possums in the
house!
Once found, he sat like a police drug-alert dog quietly and curiously observing each of them. None of his catzillion years of feline instincts “engaged” in play.
Baby possums are omnivorous marsupials with long snouts resembling a furry shark’s face full of teeth, who are adorned with a hairless rat-like tail. When threatened, they instinctively “play possum” - looking authentically dead.
The
next year, we blamed our innocent cats for tinkling on the floor before learning that we had an another unexpected guest - a ‘tinkling’ baby possum. It was discovered when Myster E. casually walked up to the TV console, sat nonchalantly looking through the glass doors as if he was waiting for me to change channels. I went to investigate, fully expecting to see his mother, Miss Wings, napping on the DVD box.
Just like the nursery rhyme “Little Red
Riding Hood” my mind tried computing the oddities of the small white animal I was seeing in the dark space.
Persians eyes are the largest of any mammal, but I thought, “My! What beady little eyes you have!” Totally confused to ‘why’ Miss Wings' huge eyes were suddenly small? Then my brain thought, “My! What a long nose you have!” Why was her flat Persian face suddenly elongated like a Greyhound’s muzzle?
“It” blinked
its beady eyes and my mind focused. It was not my small white cat! A baby white possum was staring back at me!
While “our guest” remained snuggled on the DVD player, I ran hiss-terically hollering for my “hero” catch-anything-chase-anything-out-of-the-house husband.
Did our cats think the little-white-albino baby "thing", with a no fur skinny tail, was another version of our fosters or rescue cats/kittens and given it the royal family welcome!? It
hissed as it ran out the front door, probably mad to lose the air-conditioned house and the easily accessible food.
It was only by Myster E. sitting placidly in front of the glass doors watching “little Snowflake” that were we alerted to their "new friend."
Night(mare) #3 of owning a pet adventure began at 2 a.m. For 30 minutes Myster E. and his sister, Whyspurr, were speed running out through the cat door, along the tunnel, into their
outside enclosure, stampeding up our senior kittys’ handicap ramp, barreling through the tiny window, leaping over my husband’s head, onto the bed, and then back around the speedway again and again. He assumed they were playing nighttime kitty tag.
“The first night,” said Mr. Angel Scribe, “I woke up because the cats were jumping on me as they burst through the window. I was about to close the window when they knocked everything off a night stand, and the
bedroom exploded into a frenzy of FUR-ther activity!
In the moonlight, I sensed the cat’s pattern shifting to chasing “something” in the bedroom. A closer sight inspection was needed, so I turned on the bedside lamp and saw that my arm was covered in poop! So was the bottom of the bed! Just then I saw a skinny hairless tail disappear off the end of the bed.”
“Luckily, I was out of town at the time,” said Mrs. Angel
Scribe.
“As Whyspurr cornered the baby possum,” said Mr. Angel Scribe, “it ‘played possum’ making it easy to drop a towel over the fuzzy marsupial, bundle it up, and gently place it in the front yard.
What a sight when I returned and took inventory of the room! POOP CITY! Every where! It was on me, the window, window sill, bed, floor etc.”
“Luckily,” reiterates Mrs. Angel Scribe smiling, “I was out of town at the
time.”
“I stripped the bed,” adds Mr. Angel Scribe, “activated the washing machine, scrubbed myself, and sanitized the window, floors etc. All the while, my two feline helpers curiously searched for ‘something’ and Miss Wings slept through the entire adventure.
The next night, I woke up with Whyspurr sleeping next to me. I turned on the reading light and noticed that she had an odd expression. I followed her gaze and THERE
SLEEPING, curled up, at the bottom of the bed, surrounded by poop, was baby Snowflake again!
I don’t know if it purr-posely walked in by itself, or a cat brought it in, but when it jumped off the bed, Whyspurr retrieved it and hopped back with it, like a mother cat carrying a precious kitten by the nape of its neck, straight to me. I once again delivered Baby Snowflake, who is four- inches long with a five-inch tail, safely onto the front lawn, before washing the
bedding again.
Has Snowflake lost her mother and thinks our white cats are substitutes? Do our cats think it is a new kitten we adopted! Hopefully we will never find out because I now keep the bedroom window closed!
Do our cats paws-ibly want their ‘own’ pet? If they keep bringing home baby possums, I am going to have to break their hearts and tell them we can’t adopt Snowflake because we have to comply with city ordinances that
state ‘possums are not an approved urban livestock’. But, you can investigate possums as adorable house pets!
www.Possum.us
Thank goodness Mrs. Angel Scribe was out of town, or there would have been some added human hiss-teria, because the possum and cats all landed - on her side of the bed!”
Appreciation for Tips 'n' Tales