For here in their mother’s pouch they are like chicks in the shell, and quite as helpless. It is five weeks before they can stick their heads out and take a look at the world.
No other mammalian baby is so much of a baby and yet comes so near to being no baby at all. It is less than an inch long when put into the pouch, and it weighs only four grains! Four grains? Think how small that is. For there are 7000 grains to a pound, which means that it would take 1750 baby ’possums to weigh as much as two cups of sugar!
“I should say he was peculiar!” I hear you exclaim; and you will agree with an ancient History of Carolina which I have, when it declares: “The Opoffom is the wonder of all the land animals.”
I wish you had been with me one spring day as I was stretching a “lay-out” line across Cubby Hollow. (A lay-out line is a long fish-line, strung with baited hooks, and reaching across the pond from shore to shore.) I was out in the middle of the pond, lying flat on a raft made of three cedar rails, when my dog began to bark at something in a brier-patch on shore.
Paddling in as fast as I could, I found the dog standing before a large ’possum, which was backed up against a tree. I finally got Mrs. ’Possum by the tail and dropped her unhurt into my eel-pot—a fish-trap made out of an empty nail-keg—which I had left since fall among the bushes of the hillside. Then paddling again to the middle of the pond, I untangled and set my hooks on the lay-out line, and came back to shore for my ’possum.
I didn’t quite fancy pushing my hand down through the burlap cover over the end of the keg; so I turned it upside down to spill the ’possum out,—and out she spilled and nine little ’possums with her!
I had put in one and spilled out—ten! And this proves again that the ’possum is peculiar. Nine of these were babies that had been hidden from me and the dog in their mother’s pouch.