no really, we live in town, not the appalachian mtns

In addition to our Giant Cat and a temporary rottweiler, we have a possum. It's not wanted. It has taken up residence under the floor and in our walls (ah, the joys of buying a 50-year old house) and is very noisy. Being a nocturnal creature, it scurries around in our bedroom wall at ungodly hours of the night and it is not a small possum (we've seen it sneaking in and out of its hidey-hole), so imagine a 20 pound creature scaling a wall and you've got an idea of the kind of sleep we've been getting. Creepiest. Sound. Ever. My being in the middle of a Stephen King book isn't helping matters, but i refuse to let the vermin run my life. When it's not in our wall, it's zooming around underfoot and you can hear it through the floor-mounted hvac vents. This is preferable, because we can sleep through it. Except, oh yeah, THE ROTTWEILER. Ever heard a full-grown rottweiler's 'i'm gonna kill you, possum!!' bark? It's a deeply scary sound and your blood just skids to a stop in your veins. So, when Cap'n Possum isn't heaving itself through our wall and conjuring up all sorts of eerie nightfrights, we sleep blissfully until The Death Howl rips the silence and a hundred pounds of canine muscle tears through the house snarling and trying to eat the floor.

i told my boss and coworkers, assuming these blue collar gents had dealt with such problems before. One wondered why we didn't just send the cat after the possum: "You haven't met my cat," i said, "he's never killed so much as a gopher." His answer? "Stop feeding him and he will." But i don't want to send Cosmo down into the Dark to fight a wild and possibly-rabid animal (although if it lives in my house i don't know if it'd be classified as 'wild'). i would end up with either a rotting possum in my wall and a beat up cat and accompanying vet bills, or a dead cat under my house and an increasingly arrogant possum to deal with. Said another coworker, "shoot it." i have no gun. Nor do i want to sit outside my house all night in the middle of January to await an ugly and historically mean creature that may, or may not ever, come out.

So i borrowed a trap from the groundskeeper. Fear not, it's not a Death Trap, but a metal cage that safely traps the critter without harming it. Our yard is Official CatClub HangOut for all of the Walnut Avenue kitties, and there was no way we were going to risk impaling a poor feline. Last night we set it up near the possum's hidey-hole entrance into our underground, put some tuna inside (the Google said canned cat or dog food, we had neither), and covered it with a blanket. The blanket was necessary because in addition to having multiple cats that cruise our lot, we also have a racoon and a skunk, and if we accidentally caught the skunk, we didn't want him to see us the next morning and releast The Stink. Thus, blanket.

This morning? no possum caught when we got up, but when it came time to leave for work, there was something decidedly furry in the cage! It looked like skunk fur, so we approached with caution, using a long stick to move the blanket and a flashlight to determine the species. It was Rocky, the squeaky, Siamese neighborkitty. Alas.

Possums: 0, Cats: 1