Shirley, my walking partner turned house sitter, reported all went well at the Prairie house while we were away. She had only one scare when she feared Jack, the cat, had expired on the sofa. She said she leaned down to see if he was breathing when he awoke with his gosh-awful howl; he roused himself up and sauntered over to his food bowl.
“He’s really deaf, isn’t he?” Shirley said.
“Yes, he is. People tell you that deaf cats feel motion and scatter but Jack doesn’t. Engines crank and cars back up and he never moves.”
Later in the day I walked inside the boat shed where, before we left, I observed a possum and set a trap for him. The trap was still set.
“That’s odd,” I thought. I always catch my critter, but the trap sat undisturbed. I left the trap in case the possum returned that evening.
The next morning Sam readied for fishing. Once he decides to go fishing this “readying” takes about three minutes and he’s up and out. I headed toward the boat shed and the little room at the back we call the “weight room,” the one that’s so full of junk you’d be hard-pressed to find the weights.
The door was closed. We always leave the door ajar. I pushed and felt something behind the door. I pushed harder. I could see the edge of a window screen wedged under the door.
I hollered at Sam and told him what I had found. “But don’t worry, you can look at it after you go fishing.”
Though the barricaded door was odd, it didn’t seem an emergency and one should not delay a man’s fishing if at all possible.
Instead, curiosity got the best of Sam; he headed to the weight room. Unwedging the screen, he opened the door. The weight room was totally destroyed. It looked like a tornado had demolished all our junk, maybe even the weights.
“That blasted possum! I must have shut him in the weight room while we were gone. Looks like he pulled a board right out of the wall and got out.”
I convinced Sam to go on fishing and take care of the room later. Sam returned that afternoon with a good haul of fish so he was happy. By suppertime the weight room was all cleaned up.
The next morning I went to the weight room again to inspect Sam’s clean-up job. I opened the door and this time it looked like a cyclone had hit it. While the door opened easily, the room was a mess. “Surely Sam didn’t think this was cleaned up?”
About that time Sam walked up, “Dang it! That dadgum possum must have been hiding in here the whole time I was cleaning!”
Again Sam cleaned up the room, but this time he left the door open and I set the trap beside the door. By the next morning we had ourselves a dadgum possum.
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