That Time I Went All 'Goodfellas' on an Opossum

Recently I posted on Facebook about about my brief but memorable encounter with an opossum. Since, posting, however, I’ve decided that it deserves more than just a few hundred characters to truly give the moment the appropriate amount of fanfare and embellishment. If not for the sake of pure entertainment, then at least for the sake of the opossum, who gave his life for the story.

And in true short story format, I should give you just the smallest bit of backstory and an idea of the setting so you know what you’re dealing with here. So with that, I begin the tale of that time I went all ‘Goodfellas’ on an opossum.

Where I live is aptly described as an acreage in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but cornfields, just a few miles from the quaint hamlet of Ogden, Iowa, pop. 1,996. We’re fairly new ‘country folk’, as we moved from the metropolis of Ames to said acreage just over two years ago.

Our house sits on just shy of an acre and while we don’t have enough land for a hobby farm (a term until recently I was unaware of, but that’s another story), we do have chickens, ducks, rabbits and plenty of cats. We also have two dogs--the first, a 10 year old schnoodle (schnauzer/poodle mix; a small and hypoallergenic breed) named Olive, and the other, a 6 year old Great Pyrennes (a large breed, named for the mountain region in France) named Lily. Both dogs were adopted, Olive way back in 2011 and Lily when we moved two years ago. We got Lily to be our acreage guardian, since her breed is known for being excellent livestock protectors. If you are wondering what she looks like, imagine a Newfoundland but instead of black fur, hers is white. Very puffy, and long fur too. Essentially, she is a cloud that barks.

She’s a good dog and I love her very much (I love large dogs in general). My wife, however, is not so fond of Lily. This could be because she barks at everything in the distance (trains, tractors, mooing cows) and chases cars that drive by (which as the driver of said car, it has to be terrifying to suddenly see this lumbering white beast coming out of a ditch). More importantly, though, rather than protect our livestock, which we got her for, she instead opts for killing them. She doesn’t eat them, she just loves them too much...with her mouth. She’s even killed a few kittens, so as you can tell, it’s been a real lesson in life and death since we moved out to country. Which is a good segway to the opossum.

Really, we’ve been lucky with carnivorous animals, or a lack thereof, at our place. We don’t have much for woodlands near us, so the only animals we do see at our place are vermin, like mice and moles, but we have a plethora of farm cats--11 in total--and they do a good job of keeping them away. We do get a fair amount of birds, which the cats enjoy, but they are quite harmless. I have seen an owl visit us a few times, but he didn’t stay long, and only once have I heard coyotes laughing in the distance, so any would-be predators to our fowl have been quite rare. In fact, since we started raising our ducks and chickens, only five have ever been lost to mysterious circumstances, i.e. they just disappeared overnight. With no evidence of a violent end, we assume they found a better place to call home or are out making a name for themselves in Boone County, seeing the sites. Living the life of a vagabond fowl. In actuality, we chalked their disappearances up to maybe a coyote, fox or bird of prey.

I should add that our fowl are ‘free range’, so they are potentially easy prey. That being said, even though she perhaps doesn’t intend it, Lily’s constant barking at things and her overall size has maybe been somewhat intimidating to carnivorous animals who might consider stopping by to check the place out. But she does come in at night.

Of the few chickens we’ve ‘lost’, two of the more recent were white silkies. If you unfamiliar with that chicken breed, just know that they are an ornamental variety and offer really nothing for meat or eggs. They are small and white and have puffy feathers all over, especially on top of their heads, which gives the appearance that they can’t see a darn thing. They are like a tiny, chicken version of Lily. And just like a chicken, they are dumb as nails, so I wasn’t surprised these small birds might have been snatched, even by a so-called chicken hawk. And now, this brings me to the opossum.

On the night that Willy met his end (for that is what I called the opossum posthumously), I went outside to make sure the chickens were in their coop to shut them in, and in the distance, inside said coop, I saw the outline of a sizeable rodent, just mozying around like owned the joint. Most of the chickens were already in there, as well as the cats, just snoozing while this guy walked around, ate their food and drank their drink. Not cool, bro!

Though he walked like a trash Panda walks, I realized it was an opossum, the lowest of the marsupials, and knew I needed to act. At first I ran into the coop, yelling at him to leave at once. He refused, claiming squatters rights it seems, as he ran to his make-shift den. Then, with my shovel and my flashlight--the tools of a skilled opossum hunter--I found his den and to my surprise I sighted not only him, but a collection of scat, bones and white feathers! Though he appeared innocent of nothing but being an advantageous passerby, he clearly was guilty of much more--the murder of Chester and Daisy (I also named the chickens posthumously).

I first forced him out of his den by annoying the hell out of him with the end of my shovel. I then chased him out of the coop, not before attempted to hide inside the cat’s sleeping box. As he entered the box, Dandelion, our cuddly huntress of a cat leaped out of the box and again Willy feigned squatters rights and refused to exit. So I dragged the box outside and opened it, poking him to in hopes he’d leave. I wanted to give him a chance to make amends but he refused. In fact, he jumped out of the box and ran back into coop, hiding in the corner.

At this point I knew what must be done. He would not leave. He had a good thing going--a warm place to sleep, plenty to eat and drink, and nightly entertainment which included the methodical murder of a bird of his choosing. Sadly, Willy had to die. But here comes the hard part...we don’t own a gun.

It may be surprising, that I, an Iowan who lives in the country, and who is a Republican nonetheless, does not own a gun, but alas, t’is true. To eradicate this pest I needed to employ the closest thing I had to a gun: Lily.

So I grabbed Lily and told her the game plan. I would corner Willy and while it was distracted with my incessant prodding with a shovel, she would go in for the strike. I would then make sure she didn’t completely obliterate it and bury the beast. Seemed like a good plan and it went pretty well, until the end.

At first, when I brought her over, Lily could tell straight away there was something unwanted in the coop. She has some instincts after all. But when she got close to Willy, he growled and hissed at her and she seemed to not want to tangle with him. Then I poked him again and he hissed at me, which peaked Lily’s interest because at that point she went after him. I assume she was protecting me, which I appreciated.

The opossum did was they do, and tried to fight back then made a big stink, literally, and played dead. After a few more seconds, I called Lily off as I didn’t want her to start eating it or get sick from it or something. The beast seemed dead, after all. But Lily took my call to ‘stop’ as an insult or critique because she took off and wouldn’t come back. Still, I was hopeful that the deed was done but as I grabbed my shovel and began to pick up ol’ dead Willy, he moved and fell off the shovel. Willy still lived, though he played opossum very well. Alas, the final blow, pun intended, now fell to me.

I moved Willy to the drive and weighed the options on how to handle him as humanely as I could. I really didn’t have that many options, so I decided the quickest way would be to use my old trusty shovel and club him in the head. After another few moments to build up my gumption, I raised my shovel and channeling my inner mafia gangster, I struck Willy’s head with prodigious force, or at least I tried to. He began to lurch so I had to strike him again...and again..and again. Finally, he stopped moving and I stood there waiting for the horrible ordeal to end. I also realized in that moment that I was standing under the lamp light, pretty well lit up, and I hoped the kids weren’t looking down at me from the window. Luckily they weren’t, for if they were it truly would have looked like a scene from Goodfellas.

When it was over, I picked up now fully-dead Willy with my shovel and carried him to the edge of our property. I buried him the next day (which was my birthday) with the kids by my side. We said a few kind words about him. Recounted his quirky ways. Talked about his stubborn streak and lastly, asked him to forgive me, for it had to be done. His spree of murders had to be ended. The chickens could sleep well knowing the dread beast would no longer return. This also explains why those white silkies didn’t want to go into coop. For a few nights, it was a house of horrors that took the life of Chester and Daisy. Rest easy, my feathered friends. You’re lost but not forgotten.

Quite an ordeal, for sure. Am I a better man for it? Maybe. Lily is all full of herself these days though. She can at least say she wasn’t afraid of that overgrown rat like the cats were. All that matters is the chickens and ducks are safe and happy now, and it might be time to consider buying a .22, just for any future run-ins with curious vermin.

And thus ends the story of the time I went all Goodfellas on an opossum.