Winter

by Dallas Lore Sharp

Peculiar, too, was the history of one of these nine young ’possums (the one we named “Pinky”). For after Pinky’s mother choked to death on a fish-bone, I gave all his brothers and sisters away, and devoted myself to training Pinky up in the way he should go. And strangely enough, when he was grown, unlike any other wild animal I had ever tamed, he would not depart from these domesticated ways, but insisted upon coming back home every time I took him away to the woods. Of course he was only a few months old when I tried to turn him loose in the woods, and that may account for his returning and squeezing through the opening of the pump-box trough into the kitchen and going fast asleep on the cushion of the settee; as it may also account for his getting into a neighbor’s yard by mistake on his way back one night and drowning in the well.

You have read of ’possum hunts;—and they are peculiar, too, as naturally they must needs be. For you hunt ’possums with rabbit hounds, and shoot them with a meal-sack—shoot them into a meal-sack would be more exact. And you hunt by moonlight if you really love ’possum.

We used to start out just as the moon, climbing over the woods, fell soft across the bare fields. The old dog would be some distance ahead, her nose to the ground, sometimes picking up a trail in the first cornfield, or again not until we reached the woods, or again leading us for miles along the creek meadows among the scattered persimmon trees, before striking a fresh scent.

Wherever the trail started it usually led away for the woods, for some hollow stump or tree, where the ’possum made his nest. Once in a while I have overtaken the fat fellow in an open field or atop a fence, or have even caught him in a hencoop; but usually, if hunting at night, it has been a long, and not always an easy, chase, for a ’possum, in spite of his fat and his fossil ancestors, is not stupid. Or else he is so slow-witted that there is no telling, by man or dog, which way he will go, or what he may do next.

A rabbit, or a deer, or a coon, when you are on their trail, will do certain things. You can count upon them with great certainty. But a ’possum never seems to do anything twice alike; he has no traveled paths, no regular tricks, no set habits. He knows the road home, but it is always a different road—a meandering, roundabout, zigzag, criss-cross, up-and-down (up-the-trees-and-down) road, we-won’t-get-home-till-morning road, that takes in all the way stations, from the tops of tall persimmon trees to the bottoms of all the deep, dark holes that need looking into, along the route.

Peculiar!—So, at least, a dog with an orderly mind and well-regulated habits thinks, anyhow. For a ’possum trail will give a good rabbit dog the blues; he hasn’t the patience for it. Only a slow rheumatic old hound will stick to a ’possum trail with the endurance necessary to carry it to its end—in a hollow log, or a hollow stump, or under a shock of corn or a rail-pile. Once the trail actually led me, after much trouble, into a hen-house and into a stove in the hen-house, where, upon the grate, I found three ’possums in their nest!

It is a peculiar sport, this ’possum-hunting; yet it is mildly exciting; and when you get your ’possum by the tail, he smiles at you—grins, I ought to say—and has a fit. To go hunting for a creature that smiles at you in a dreadful manner when you capture him, that flops down in a dead faint or has a fit when you take him up by the tail, that shows the spunk and fight of a boiled cabbage—to go hunting for such a beast must be exciting, as exciting as going to the store for a quart of beans.

But here are the winter woods at night, and the wide, moonlit fields, covered, it may be, with the glistening snow. The full, round moon rides high overhead, the pointed corn-shocks stand silent over the fields, the woods rise dark and shadowy beyond. Only the slow, musical cry of the hound echoes through the stirless air, which seems to sparkle like the snow, as if filled with gleaming frost-dust that only the moonlight can catch and set to glancing silvery-bright.

You don’t care whether you catch a ’possum or not; you are abroad in a world so large and silent, so crystal-clear and shining, so crisp, so open, so acreep with shadows, so deep and mysterious in its distances, so pure and beautiful and unblemished, that just to be abroad is wonder enough, and you are not sorry to come back under the brilliant midnight sky with the old dog at your heels and over your shoulder an empty bag.

But if your bag is heavy with fat ’possum then that, too, is good. You have peered into his black hole; you have reached in and pulled him out—nothing more. No roar of a gun has shattered your world of crystal; you have killed nothing, wounded nothing—no, not even the silence and the serenity of your soul. You and the clear, calm night are still one.