Professor

We have a silly little neighborhood magazine here that asked me to write a little story.  The following is what I submitted.  Thought you would be entertained...

          

  We brought a Blue-Tick Coonhound with us from our little house on acreage in Texas when we moved to Omaha two years ago.  His name is Professor.  He is a hunter by nature, but poor old dog is confined to our yard and does the best he can with any little creature stupid enough to wander in.

            It was a normal Wednesday, and my full day of staying at home with the two little boys had me feeling beyond done for the day.  My husband, Shawn, had offered to take this evening as his turn to wrangle the boys down for bed and I had quickly taken him up on it.  Before sitting down to a little wine and some worthless reality tv, I decided to take the trash out.  It was completely dark outside and as I opened the back door, Professor bolted out and immediately began letting out his classic hound dog bark upon reaching the grass.  I didn’t think much of it, however, because the bark that traditionally means he has found something stopped as quickly as it had began.  I threw out the garbage and began calling his name as I walked across the porch toward the door.  I saw Professor’s silhouette as he came trotting out of the darkness and I didn’t give him a second look as I opened the door for him to come in for the night.  As he passed me onto the rug in the dining room, that is when I noticed it.  The dog had something in his mouth, and it wasn’t little.

            Professor proudly strutted across the hardwood to the middle of the room and set down the fruit of his labor…the biggest opossum I have ever seen.  He looked up at me with eyes that begged for recognition of the job that was clearly well done.  We did, after all, have a dead opossum in our house before the end of the day. 

            My choices at this point boiled down to one of two things: I could either scream for Shawn to come and help and then take over bedtime routine with the two kids that resemble wild animals or I could simply remove the actual wild animal from the dining room myself.  And of course I picked the easier of the two…I would remove the opossum from the dining room. 

            Despite being larger than I could have ever imagined an opossum to be, the thing was dead so I figured this couldn’t be too hard.  I grabbed an empty plastic Hy-Vee bag and put my hands inside to use as a kind of buffer when I made my attempt to pick it up.  There was no blood, so I thought this should be fairly easy and not too far away from some of the jobs I am used to raising two small boys.  You see, Coonhounds are not killers by nature.  They are finders.  They will only fight something until it surrenders, or dies, so that the dog can bring it back to their owner.  We have seen this time and again with various raccoons, squirrels and bunnies in our yard.  Professor manhandles them enough to get them to stop moving and then guards their corpses all day in the yard, proud as he can be. 

            As I got down on one knee to scoop up the latest victim and got my plastic bag laden hands under his meaty little large body, I giggled a little to myself about how ugly and fierce this little creature looked and how if it were alive I would probably be freaking out.  And then it happened.  That opossum opened his beady little eyes and locked with mine, which suddenly were filled with terror.  It turns out that the whole “playing dead” thing is a real opossum strategy…one that had clearly fooled the dog and his owner.

            The opossum began hissing while showing his mouth full of sharp teeth.  It was when he reared back to try to bite me that I dropped him like a hot potato, back onto the hardwood floor of the dining room.  He didn’t run, he didn’t squirm…he just lay there.  I looked over at Professor, and he simply looked at me like, “ummm…I did my job.  This part is ALL YOU.” 

            Once again I found myself faced with the same two options I had grappled with just a few minutes prior: yell for Shawn and take over bedtime or handle this animal.  The stakes were a little higher this time, of course.  It was apparent that the animal was indeed not dead at this point, which made me lean toward bringing in the husband recruit.  However, I knew that I didn’t have much time before this critter decided the hardwood wasn’t the most comfortable spot and relocated somewhere even more problematic like anywhere else in the house.  I had to act fast.

            So I did what any normal housewife living in Fairacres would do.  I ran like a bolt of lightning to the garage and grabbed a snow shovel and proceeded to use my tennis shoe clad foot to hoist that opossum up into the snow shovel as best I could while avoiding his snarling and biting which were back with a vengeance.  As soon as I had him leveled out on the shovel, I shuffled as quickly as one possibly can while simultaneously holding a giant possum at the end of a shovel as far away from her body as humanly possible all the way to the back door.  Once open, I transformed into an Olympic javelin hopeful and threw not only the creature, but also the entire shovel as far as I could out onto the back deck.  Perhaps it was shock, or possibly just another round of “guess whether I am alive or not,” but that opossum laid completely still after landing with the shovel at his side.

            Back inside, I paced around the kitchen replaying the last ten minutes over and over in my brain.  I heard Shawn walking down the stairs, probably anticipating finding me curled up on the couch with my red wine and a tv show.  I met him halfway with a crazed look in my eye.

            “There was just a live possum in the dining room.”

            *long pause*

            “I don’t even know what that means.”

            I took him by the hand and led him to the back porch to show him the evidence, and all that was left was the shovel.