The Legend of the One-Eyed Opossum

February 22, 2009 Day 19

About a week ago I went to the back yard to tend to some business. It was night, I had my headlamp on and before I could take care of anything I saw a fairly large opossum in the very back part of the backyard, near the chicken coop. I went inside and tried explaining what I saw using the word I knew for opossum but I just got blank stares. Then I said there was an animal like huge rat with a white face and they knew what I meant and everyone got up from the living and ran outside carrying a host weapons, but it was gone.

I was expecting a round of jokes about me once we were back inside, but apparently others have seen the opossum before. Veronica said she had seen a big one in the back yard and it only had one eye and it had tried to eat the chickens. Then there was much debriefing about the nature of opossums; if they were edible, if they always tried to eat chickens, if so how big did they have to be? It was basically decided possums were the only tangible threat to their chicken supply. I said something about wanting opossum pupusas (a stuffed tortilla), and everyday since someone has told me to kill the opossum so we could have some pupusas or made a joke about me being a fierce possum warrior. Two days during that week someone would see it and everyone would run outside to get it...last night it was got.

There had already been one possum sighting that night with no success so I already had my headlamp on, and was falling asleep on the hammock when an hour after the first sighting there was a volley of cries about the possum I ran outside and Ricky (the 14 year old who had dengue (who is better now)) was a few seconds in front of me and grabbed the machete and I grabbed a large club. Before I even shinned the light on it Rickey had nearly cut the opossum in half with one stroke. It was writhing and gnashing it's jaws and everybody watched in the dark. I felt bad for it and bashed its head with my club a few times-- it stopped writhing.

I was inside myself watching it die. I didn't feel bad for it or sorry we had killed it; it was just a little stunning, I had never seen a mammal killed in front of me.

The mood was surprisingly merry after the beasts unmaking, and I ran inside and took this picture. I was staring at it and trying to figure out what I was looking, when the mother asked if I still wanted to eat it and a shook my head and she started laughing. Ricky picked it up by the tail with a rag and it spun around and that it was—only one eye! It was somewhat baffling that it only had one eye, I cant understand the significance of only having one eye. So I was expecting that we were going to eat it anyway but then Ricky just tossed it over the brick wall into the neighbors yard and everyone started laughing—to be fair the neighbors backyard seems more like woods than a back yard.