No, no reindeer this time; just a puffed up Scotty barking wildly, defending her territory from a hissing and snarling opossum……….like so many times before! It is 5:30 AM, not even light. I’m barely awake—that pseudo state wherein you are not quite conscious. I’m just going through the motions of ambling to the door after a wet cold nose tapped me repeatedly on the elbow as I was soundly sleeping in my bed. These are dog communications, as if to say, “Get up, I gotta pee!” Yes, Maisey, I’m coming. I let her out and within three minutes all hell had broken loose on the front lawn. Oh, not again! Why didn’t I learn from the last time? I’m so dumb in my old age! Put the dogs on the porch until it gets light. Give the nocturnal wildlife that visits every night to eat time to clear out and go back to their dens.……..
There is barking and hissing, shaking the shrubs and bushes, waking up the neighborhood. Mickey, my other “ferocious” twenty pound Schitzpoo, is screaming a high pitched yelp and howl, cheering at a safe distance from the fracas. Now Kathy is out here on the lawn yelling, imploring Maisey to cease and desist—like that’s gonna deter an enraged dog. The dog has tunnel vision—kill the intruder! She brings out some expensive dog treats, then a weiner from last night’s dinner, trying to lure Maisey away, distract her from the opossum. (I would have to say that this sight of her trying to entice Maisey away with a weiner just set off the extreme bizarreness bell in my head and struck me as insanely funny. It reminded me of when we were kids, we got little work books, some of which had pictures and were captioned “What’s wrong with this picture”? You had to spot the things in the picture that were unrelated to the theme of the picture. A butcher shop weiner certainly was out of place in this situation. What universe did I now just accidentally step into? — File that scene away, suppress it and think about it later). Maisey, of course, immediately stopped barking, took a break from the fracas, grabbed and ate the weiner. Then she resumed the fight.
I get Mickey into the house. Now it’s just me, Kathy, Maisey and an angry and scared opossum. They have gotten into the box hedges shaking them wildly. Here we are, two 76 year old people, both of whom have trouble walking, one carrying a fishing landing net in hopes of catching something, the other wielding a walking cane in hopes of…what….stopping this commotion? You wanna talk about bizarreness. A snapshot of that scene and us would have made the National Enquirer.
As is inevitable, both animals clash and fight to the end. The opossum lays motionless, Maisey shakes it a few times, nothing. Either it is dead or playing possum dead. But I notice two small mouselike creatures scurrying away from the body heading for the bushes. Oh Lord….babies. Maisey takes note, investigates, and brings one softly over to me in her mouth. Isn’t it odd that animals have an instinct to protect the very young? Yes, Maisey is a six year old female obviously with maternal instincts despite her inbred abilities to fight rodents, snakes and small animals.. Now what? Maisey, I will help. At length I scoop up the tiny creature who is struggling immensely in this situation reaching out with its little hands. Take it away from the battle site and place it in the weeds hoping that it will scurry away. Then I go back to the battle site. By now the opossum has regained aliveness, disappeared, apparently with the other baby. Oh Lord! In retrospect I should have gotten Maisey into the house and left well enough alone. The possum may have collected both babies and taken off. But no, old soft Skip couldn’t let this struggling creature, this live animal reaching out just lay there to die. I go back to the weeds where I put it. It hasn’t gone anywhere, just curled up to die where I left it. I can’t do this! I cannot do this again. Too many precious things in my life have died under my watch. I cannot, will not, do this.
I scoop up this little body and bring it into the house, put it in a small box, then hold it. It is alive and seeking the comfort and warmth of my hands. I melted. Kathy, talking about maternal instincts, gets a heating pad and puts it under the box. We fill a jelly jar with warm water, put it in the box with rags and towels to bury itself in. It does so immediately, going to the warm jelly jar. Kathy gets a small syringe, and we fill it with water and put it to this creature’s mouth. At first he doesn’t recognize this plastic contraption but when we squirt a little bit of water he sort of opens his mouth a little and appears to take some. What to do now? Kathy says, “ Let him get warm, offer more water.” Get on the internet and find out what to do with an orphaned opossum. Call my daughter, she’s the internet guru. Carrie, save me! She’ll know what to do. Listen to Kathy, she’s a mother. She’ll know instinctively what to do. What am I good for? Confounding everything.
By Monday I have a plethora of internet sites and resources to investigate. I start to read them. Probably the opossum is 8-9 weeks old. It is 5 inches long from base of tail to snout. At this point you could introduce foods like pieces of fruit, soft kitty chow. Milk………you should get some @#$%&*@# milk especially for wild animals. Good luck with getting that locally. Well, you could use regular homogenized peoples milk if you dilute it half and half. The animal is hungry. It is taking 3-4 gulps of the milk fed from a plastic syringe every four hours. And according to the articles you have to then massage it’s sexual organ site which makes it pee—very important—and possibly poop. So now we have an animal that is successfully taking it in on one end and pushing it out at the other. Now about finding it a wildlife person, station that can take care of it, feed it the right wildlife diet and prepare it to be released back into the wild.
There are about 25-30 places listed on the internet that take orphaned and injured wild animals in our area (Northern Ohio). Over the course of two days we have called, investigated, left messages, texts, you name it to all these places except the ones in California(Why on earth do they list these for us locally I’ll never know). Half of the local places no longer have working numbers or means to contact them. Several said they were too understaffed to take on these orphans and referred us to numbers that no longer exist. One even suggested to Kathy that the animal be euthanized because there are far too many of them being orphaned this time of year anyways. It is a very good thing that this was not said to me because I would have exponentially raised the number of obscene words in this person’s vocabulary.
We do not kill baby animals. Even my dog instinctively knows that!
There were, however, several sites and people that were extremely helpful, including the Lake Metroparks Penitentiary Glenn that referred us to Hiram. Danielle Pentulla of Wild Things was willing to help. And there was Fran Kitchen of Operation Orphan Wildlife Rehab near Akron who was willing to take him. Ultimately Rebecca Moore, curator of the animal Program at Barrow Field Station gladly took in Mr. Opossum. She had four other orphans about the same age, maybe a bit older. This is exactly what their field station does. She examined Mr. O, pronounced him healthy and a great candidate for rehabilitation and eventual release into the wild. She asked if I might follow his progress in articles in the paper and possibly some other of their animals. Of course, more than of course, I am ready to help out. Kathy felt elated that she had done a great job in resurrecting, caring for, and getting Mr. O to eat, drink and poop. I am of course, thrilled beyond words that I had a part in saving this little soul. All of us creatures on this planet have souls and an obligation to protect each other.
