June Carter Cash, our dog, is generally a good dog. Probably the sweetest, kindest beast we’ve ever had. She was a year-old rescue when we got her three years ago.
Despite being half pointer, she has no interest in birds, not even chickens, which is a relief. She does have it in for lizards – especially iguanas – and cats, though.
June is a solid 65 pounds, so when you walk her, you have to pay attention to the world around you, lest she jump hard at an unnoticed cat under a car or a curly-tailed lizard skittering across the sidewalk. If she catches you off balance she could reorient your relationship with the pavement quickly. In terms of aggression, though, she will roll on her back for a pug puppy that’s an eighth of her weight and 40 feet away.
Her flaws? She likes to eat books. Which is a problem in our house, where most of the time you have to shove a stack of them out of the way to put down a cup of coffee.
Sometimes she chews apart the books when she’s mad at us for leaving her. Sometimes she does it because she’s bored. She mostly does it when we’re not home, though the other day, a Saturday when we were both in the other room, she shredded a discarded copy of the journal “The Auk” that my wife had given me because it had a story by James Bond – the ornithologist, not the spy.
Because of her anti-bibliomaniacal tendencies, she can’t be trusted alone in the house, and we tend to lock her in the kitchen with a baby gate when we leave. But the kitchen has a dog door, so she has an entire yard to roam.
We often explain that this wouldn’t be necessary if she would stop eating books, but she just stares at us with sad dog eyes, holding a Milkbone in her mouth, refusing to eat it until after we leave. (It’s always gone when we get back.)
This setup worked great until a couple years ago, when we left town for vacation, and a lightning storm arrived before the dogsitter. In a panic June broke out and visited herself upon our neighbors, Jean and Doug. Our friend Dave, a professional architect, went over to the house and tried to block her escape route. But June managed to escape four or five more times before we made it back, showing up on a different neighbor’s porch nearly every day.
We found a tiny gap in the fence that looked too small for her, but once we closed it up and fortified it with bailing wire and bamboo, she stopped escaping. Until two weeks ago, when I got a call from our neighbor, Matt, saying June had stopped by.
I spent a solid hour inspecting the yard and deck, which has a 6-by-6-foot open square in the middle, occupied mostly by a big mahogany tree. I could see she’d been digging at a corner, but didn’t think our somewhat-zaftig part-pointer could fit through that.
Then I remembered the trail cam.
A couple years ago I wrote a column about opossums and how they got a bad rap, and how if you couldn’t appreciate them for their beauty, you should appreciate them for their weirdnesses. Things like how you could fit a whole litter of newborn opossums in a single tablespoon. How they rode around on their mother’s back for several months — the way people ride on top of buses in developing countries. How they eat ticks and never get rabies. How males have two penises, and females have two and a half vaginas. And – “Battle Hymn of the Republic” building in the background here – how the Virginia opossum is the only native marsupial found in the United States, and goddammit ‘Merica’s Marsupial™ deserves our respect.
I also wrote that I couldn’t recall seeing an opossum in the wild, which made me feel incomplete as a person who’s supposed to know things about the natural world. Then one night on the back deck I startled one, and it startled me. We both hissed at each other until it slunk off into the darkness.
After the column ran, our neighbor Jean sent me a message: You know there’s a family living under your house, right?
No. No, I did not know that. Living there with me, a certified Florida Master Naturalist not noticing it? Impossible.
Jean’s message ate at me for years. And finally, sometime last April or May I opened up the hatch in the deck (no, it’s not how June escaped) and set up a trail camera.
I forgot all about it until June’s recent escapades, then realized if she was getting under the deck from a spot near the mahogany tree, she’d half to pass the trail cam to get under the house and out. So I crawled down and pulled it out.
Trail cams are designed to work for months at a time, and this one had taken 5,845 photos before the batteries died. If I was smart, I would have started with the newest photos, but instead I started at the beginning. The first 220 photos were of two neighborhood cats. But then, there it was, an opossum, its eyes glowing like marbles in the infrared flash.
It was a lone possum, impossible to tell if it was male or female.
For the next several months, that’s all that passed the camera – the two cats and the lone opossum. More than two months and 2,564 frames later, a female opossum passed with at least two young slung across her back like wide-eyed sacks of wheat. (Jean, I’m sorry I ever doubted you.)
There were no pictures of June on the trail cam, which didn’t mean anything, as I’d neglected to set the current date when I set it up, so all the photos were dated 2019.
The next day I set up the doggie cam my wife bought, which you can monitor through an app, as well as my trail cam and a GoPro, all covering different angles of the yard. I locked up June, got in the car so she would hear me leave, parked in the next block and watched on my phone.
Five minutes later she was nosing at the spot I thought was too small for her to get through. Thirty seconds later her tail disappeared under the deck.
I’ve since shored up the broken plastic lattice she had shoved aside with plywood, then some cinderblocks, then four crates of Mexican river rock I’d never known what to do with.
We think we have June locked in again. We just hope her escapades didn’t scare off the opossums.
