TOWN AND COUNTRY

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33791, 13 March 1975, Page 22

TOWN AND COUNTRY

Behind the fences of suburban Christchurch and deep down the driveways which lead to secluded back sections often live people of a strongly retiring nature, who only wish to be left in peace to bring up their children, cultivate their garden, pamper their pets, see one or two old friends, speak to their relatives on the telephone, and write their monthly cheques before they have passed the discount day. They are ill-equipped to deal with the wild things of life, if an escaped lion jumped their gate they simply wouldn’t know what to do. We know of one such family which lives in darkest Fendaiton, not far from one of the non-navi-gable waterways which meander here in a generally easterly direction. it is their habit to bring the cat in for the night rather than to put it out. and on a recent night they were searching

the garden for this skittish creature — a young female — when they discovered up one of their fruit trees two opossums, apparently a parent and its baby. Their distaste at this intrusion was equalled only by their pain at the subsequent minor publicity which attended this matter, for they are of a strongly retiring nature. Clearly the many large trees in the district encouraged the continued residence of the opossums and also, perhaps, they thought, the stream. Sensing a permanence in the visit they set about finding an answer, and finally were able to borrow an opossum trap from a kindly country organisation. This family was not entirely unused to ferae naturae — they had. for example, kept a magpie for just on a year — but their comfort with animals of this sort depended in great degree on how feral they really

were. The first night it was set the trap caught a hedgehog. The poor thing was weak with scratching and limp with the sun when they found it, but it soon revived when it was tipped out on the garden, stopped playing opossum, and trotted off into the potato tops. At the next baiting an opossum was caught — a real, live opossum. Right in town. They released it in the country. They couldn’t face hurting it; they would never forget its pink nose and brilliant black eyes. There was no other catch, and soon they returned the trap to its owners on their way out for the week-end at a back country cottage. On their first night they were disturbed by a curious “tuff-tuff-tuff” noise outside. They investigated with a torch. Behind a pink nose the brilliant black eyes of an opossum stared into the light.