I was in downward dog when the old pooch started raising a ruckus in the yard.
He stopped after a third “No Bark!” but started up a few minutes later. Not his normal raspy through-the-fence missives warning passersby to continue passing by, these were guttural, darn near ferocious.
A subsequent chorus of admonitions from the living room quieted him down.
Finished, I bothered to walk to the back door. There sat Klaus in a parched brown patch that passes for grass during the rainy season. Not his normal spot. And he was facing the office, not his usual direction.
I flinched when I noticed the large gray and white creature slumped against the office. At first I thought the dog had finally achieved what has seemed his lifelong goal and caught a cat, though the woman he boards with swears he hung out in the same room with a cat once and didn’t care.
I took a second look. No, an opossum. And it sure looked dead.
“C’mon buddy,” I said, feigning calm. He shot up and ran to the house, a curious reaction given how he’d behaved the last time an opossum dared enter the yard.
That evening I’d heard Klaus and my old dachshund Bella (may she rest in peace) barking and running through the yard.
Looking out the door I saw an opossum standing on the inner ledge of the fence. Klaus jumped at the frozen critter, coming within a few inches of its long, curled tail.
“C’mon puppies,” I called. Bella came running. Klaus turned his head slowly, made eye contact, turned back, sat and stared. I called again. Left ear twitched. Otherwise nothing.
Yelling at the petrified opossum didn’t help. Neither did shaking Klaus’ bag of treats, usually a surefire solution. I picked up a small soccer ball, and — with visions of a wayward throw knocking the beast off the ledge and into the yard, making a bad situation Trumpian — I hurled it at the middle of the fence. For once my aim was true.
The action distracted Klaus. I called again and he ran inside but — realizing he’d been duped — stopped, turned and tried to run back out, slamming into the glass door I’d closed quickly.
The opossum was gone a few minutes later.
Klaus remained for hours, occasionally scratching at the glass, while Bella and I chilled on the couch.
I’d felt a tinge of guilt chasing the opossum away. The sole marsupials in the United States and Canada are not only harmless, they are beneficial, killing almost 95% of ticks they come across and cleaning up fruit left in yards.
I wondered if this could be the same creature who had walked with me part of the way home a few nights before.
Stumbling off the last train of the night after a raucous concert in Oakland, I was belting out one of my favorite songs (apologies to the people in the nearby houses) when I spied an opossum on the top of a stone fence that runs along a path next to the train tracks.
“How ya doin, little buddy?” I asked. The opossum walked the edge of the fence beside me to an intersection at the bottom of the hill where I had to cross the street. I’m not saying the opossum at my house was one and the same.
I just don’t know. Like, for example, so much when it comes to Covid-19.
This time I wondered, darkly, if Klaus came in eagerly because he’d already dispatched his victim. He didn’t have any blood on him, and from what I could tell neither did the opossum. But if he had attacked, I couldn’t be mad. He was just following his instincts. And he had tried to tell me something strange was happening, but I didn’t understand.
