Opossum Adventure

The other night my family stayed up later than usual talking and enjoying each other. Well, I have an old geriatric miniature Yorkie that has a very small bladder, so I went to let him out on the front porch before going to bed and something moved and caught my eye. On the front porch we have a small table where we keep a bowl of cat food available for our tom cat. The movement was on the table and by now I was trying to figure out if the shadow was Sonny, our cat, or something else. I finally concluded within a few seconds that this was not Sonny and quickly flipped the light on. To my amazement there was an opossum staring straight at me. Of course I snatched my little Yorkie up in a heartbeat and hollered at my Dad to grab a net. I wasn't about to have a repeat of last years Opossum Adventure. Which included Mom screaming and beating the poor thing on the head with a stick, then crying because it was "playing possum". Which I  must admit was very convincing, I even thought the thing was dying. Then Dad decided to try and shoot it with his huge bear gun. That didn't go so well, he missed. But he did by chance happen to blow off a portion of the poor things leg. Eventually I think it died because we never saw it again after that. Anyway back to this year. I was planning on catching the little critter and transporting it somewhere else. To my great surprise while he tried to jump off the table I was able to place the net conveniently in front of him so he just sort of jumped into my net. I placed him in a dog crate and left him till the morning. So here's a hint of advice, you do not want to own a pet possum. They STINK! He was only there for a few hours but Man! Talk about reek, I could smell him as soon as I walked out of the back door, and he was a good 50 feet away!  Okay, back to the story. So I fed the little guy and talked my Dad into bringing him to a gravel road I knew wasn't very populated. We let him go but the funniest thing was when we opened the cage to let him go he just looked at us like "You're really gonna let me go?!" after about 3 seconds he leaped out of the cage and ran off. Possums are really funny to watch run by the way. I'll put some pictures that I took of him up here for you to see. Mom named him Mr. McDoogle. And yes, it was a male. Thank goodness it wasn't a female with babies like the last one.