Last night as my husband, Les and I were rounding up the cat for the evening,  With flashlight in hand, we were out back calling his name when…….Les caught sight of something with eyes on the fence.  It didn’t look quite like eyes of a cat, they were eyes he’d never seen before!  And, it wasn’t Kramer!  What was it?  Hard to tell since the branches from our big Mela Lucas were hanging down, leaving us looking through the branches, and leaves from the bushes, and trees. From what we could see, it seemed very large!  The creature froze in the beam of the flash light, leaving us wondering if we were seeing things, or was there really something there!  As we moved around the back yard it never changed position, it didn’t even blink, and didn’t look like it was even watching us, but I  know it was!

Logic told us it wasn’t anything we had seen around here before, like a coyote, or even a racoon.  We get rats, and mice now and then, probably more than we realize, but this was much larger than a rat!  For a moment, we thought it might be an owl because it was so still, and had a kind of barn owl look, but it wasn’t wearing a mask, so we ruled that out!  Besides, even though we couldn’t get a clear look at this mysterious creature, I didn’t see anything that looked like feathers.  That was a clue!  Slowly, we inched closer, and closer, while it sat frozen in time.   We shinned the light on it from all angles, while still keeping our distance.  Finally Les  said to me unequivocally, “I don’t like it, not one little bit!”  He didn’t know what it was,  didn’t want to get any closer, and definitely didn’t want to have anything to do with this wild kingdom stuff!  Well actually, I didn’t want to get too close, but it wasn’t attacking, growling, or hissing so it was hard to believe we were in imminent danger.

After much discussion, we decided it had to be a possum.  The funny thing is, he was probably more afraid of us than we were of him, no wonder he was playing possum!