Good Doggy

If I've ever said anything bag about my dog (and I know I have), I take it back! Lady caught us a possum!!

Now here's the whole story...

It all started when Noah, my six year old was sliding across our wooden floor like it was an ice skating rink. Not all of our floor is varnished so well and he caught a piece of it and jammed it in his heel. He managed to get a good size sliver. Now, normally I enjoy digging slivers out of my family's body parts (yes, I know it wierd), but this one was too deep and too big to torture him anymore than I already had. So, instead, we doctored it with potato pulp, honey, some black drawing salve and stuck a bandaid on it.

Well, on day number 2 of the sliver saga, Noah insisted that he couldn't walk out to do his daily chore of collecting the eggs. Seems to me, if we were going to walk to get ice cream, he'd find a way to make it work... Anyhow, his sweet little sisters volunteered to do the egg collecting for him. Here's how it went when they came back in...

Ellie: "Mom, there were 5 eggs, and I think there's something in the chicken pen"

Mom: (distracted while checking my email) "Oh, yeah? What?"

Ellie: "It looks like a racoon with a long, pointy tail and I think it eats chickens"

Mom: BOYS!! GRAB YOUR COATS! WE GOT US A POSSUM IN THE CHICKEN COOP! YEE-HAW! (I didn't really 'yee-haw', but it fits in with the hill-billy scene)

On the way out (after grabbing a baseball bat, of course), I saw our cat come out of the chicken coop with a menacing grin and for a moment I wondered if that was the "racoon" that Ellie had seen. It was kinda dark in there after all. But, just a few steps into the chicken coop confirmed her report. There was a possum sitting on top of the nesting boxes facing the wall with the tip of it's tail chewed off (thus, the smirk from the cat). We dodged back out to get anything we could find to catch or kill the thing. We came back armed with a live animal trap, a bucket, a rope, a baseball bat and a pipe. I didn't know how or what we were going to do it, but we were going to do something.

As it sat there, I contemplated whacking it with the baseball bat... but I'm just not that cruel. As I was trying to think of something else, it crawled down the back of the nesting boxes (that used to be an old bookshelf) and wedged itself between the wall and the back of the box. I tried pushing it with a shovel, but it's kind of a gross, creepy feeling when you can't see what it's doing, and the thought of it climbing up the shovel handle kept popping into my mind. We tried to make a lasso type thing with the rope and pipe, but that only made the egg-eater slide further down the wall. At the bottom of the wall was an escape route to freedom, so I had the boys standing guard on the outside of the coop while I tried in vain to get it to climb into a cage on the inside. All this time, our dog was going nuts outside the fence, and finally, one of the boys got the brilliant idea of letting her in to do the dirty work...

And work she did! She dug a tunnel right under those nesting boxes and pulled that nasty farm menace right out. She carried it around by the nape of the neck like a little pup. That is, until it gave up the fight. Then she played with it like some sort of chew toy. The boys and I were grossed out by the crunching sounds, but Lady did what dogs instinctively do and made sure it wasn't going to go anywhere. Go Lady!!

Now, that's not the end of the story... the infamous dead possum is sitting on our porch in a cage. Seth begged to be able to skin it. Guess we'll have to do some homeschooling research on that one...