Ever have one of those wildlife encounters that is so unusual and so bizarre that you tell all your friends and family about it? This is one of those.

We own and live in an old mill house in South Carolina. The house was built in the 1930's and has high ceilings and lovely hardwood floors. It also has had a history of being a rental property with a landlord whose ideas of renovations and repairs are, shall we say, quick and inexpensive. Behind the kitchen cabinets where the sink is located are several openings that lead to the crawl space beneath the house. One of our four cats has been known to pass through the largest of these openings to hunt for vermin. And we think it was through this same opening that an unwanted visitor got into our home.

Now, I am a confessed computer fanatic. I spend a lot of time on the computer, writing stories and chatting with friends from around the world via the Internet. As a result, I'm usually the last one in bed at night, and this night was no exception.

I was saying my goodnights to some of my friends from other time zones and preparing to shut down my computer when I heard a rustling in the living room. It sounded like it was coming from under the end table that was squeezed between the sofa and the wall nearby. I thought nothing of it; we have four cats and they can't all be silent as they walk around our home. So I continued shutting down my computer and turned out the overhead light, plunging the room into darkness.

Or near darkness, anyway, as the dining room was lit, illuminating my way across the living room floor. As I came around the couch and headed for the open doorway, I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. It was so quick and quiet that I was not sure I had really seen anything at all. With a mental shrug, I crossed the floor and walked into the dining room.

Once there, I heard another rustling, this time to my right, coming from behind one of the wicker chairs that had been placed there while we rearranged furniture in the living room. And this time, I saw a definite *something* ease out from behind my microwave cart and cross the open doorway into the kitchen. It was clear from its profile that this was *not* a feline.

"Where is a cat when you need one?" I muttered to myself as I followed it. To me, the creature in question had looked like an extra-large rodent. Our best mouser was outside, I knew, and I wished fervently that she was inside the house on one of her favorite kitchen perches instead. I stopped by the doorway between dining room and kitchen, and saw the rodent-like animal stop near the entrance to the laundry room. I screamed, a short squeal of surprise, and my noise motivated the creature to continue its journey to the back of the house. My curiosity got the better of me and, against common sense, I gave chase.

The animal ended up in the corner made by the door to the outside and one wall. I approached carefully and got to within a yard of the critter. At that distance, I could finally see that it was a possum! It didn't look as big as some of the ones I had seen as road kill, and it was far more frightened of me than I was of it! It turned as if to flee back into the house.

~Oh no,~ I thought. ~We're not going through that again!~ I reached out a cautious hand and turned the knob, swinging the back door open to the night. Without a moment's hesitation, the possum turned back around and scurried out, running for dear life across the stoop and eventually under the carport. I watched it for a moment, then closed the door behind me. Shaking my head, I turned and went on to my bed, waking my husband, Robert, to tell him of my experience.

The next evening, both my husband and I were on the computers: me in the far corner of the living room and him in the dining room, just yards from the kitchen doorway. I was chatting with a friend who was visiting another state when I heard him call.

"Uh, Joanne? Your critter is back."

My eyes widened and I abandoned my conversation without a word to join him in the dining room.

"Where? Where is it?"

"On the trash can."

The kitchen trash can sat half in, half out of its niche under the counter. I peered at it but no possum could I detect.

"It's not there...."

My husband got up from his seat and pulled the receptacle fully from its place and looked behind it.

"It's... no, it's not there either. Wait, it's behind the box," he said, indicating a box of groceries that lay on the floor. Moving up beside him, I could see the tail end of the possum and couldn't help but notice its resemblance to a light-furred rat.

My husband put the trash can back where it belonged. The movement startled the possum, and it scurried from its hiding place behind the box to further out into the kitchen. I screamed my little scream again, and that further startled the beast, but instead of heading out to the laundry room as it did before, it turned and came my way, entering the dining room and hugging the walls behind the table. Another startled shriek and it was out of the dining room, across our tiny hallway and into... *our bedroom*!

I reached the room just in time to see the possum's tail disappear between the piled-up baskets of clean laundry. My husband groaned.

"You realize that we'll have to take everything out of this room to get it out from behind there?" he complained. I nodded; there were several baskets sitting there as well as a down mattress topper that was being stored in our room until we found a better place for it. With a sigh, he began hauling things from the room, taking them out to pile on the living room sofa. I tried to keep an eye on where the possum had hidden itself as he did so. This meant we were often in each other's way, a situation that always frustrates him. After a few minutes of this toting and lifting, the possum, realizing that it was about to be discovered, left its hiding place for what it thought was a better one. I shrieked again as it scampered *under our bed*!

My spouse came back in a hurry and I told him where the creature had gone. The first thing he did was fetch our best mouser, Cotton. He put her down at the end of the bed and tried to shove her under. Now, Cotton is a good mouser, and she's been known to take on squirrels from time to time, but she knows not to tangle with a possum. She scampered from the room as quickly as she could.

With a sigh of resignation, he lay down on the floor on the side of the bed farthest from the door. He pulled up the bed skirt to look beneath the box spring and mattress.

"I can't see anything. There's too much junk under here." He began to pull old shoes and pieces of paper out from under the bed, muttering as he did so. I, on the other hand, went out to the hallway and closed doors, first to the bathroom and then to our daughter's room, which was across the hall from our own. Her door did not shut well; I tried and tried to pull it to, without success. Finally, I woke the teenager within and told her that a possum was on the loose and she needed to barricade her door. She sleepily complied, and I was able to turn back to my own room. I saw an old shower curtain rod standing in a corner of the hallway and handed it to my husband.

"What's this for?" he asked.

"To drive it out. So you don't get bitten," I told him.

"I don't think it's under here anymore. I think it got out behind my nightstand," he replied. Nonetheless, he started using the curtain rod to push the debris towards the door in hopes of driving it out. I kept watch on the opposite side of the bed from where he lay to spot the critter when it made its escape.

It took some time, but my husband was eventually convinced that the possum had gotten out of the room when neither of us was looking. I wasn't as easily swayed though. I had to see with my own eyes that the thing was no longer under my bed. He sighed.

"I could pull the box spring and mattress up so you can look," he offered.

"Would you, please?" I asked, knowing very well that he really didn't want to do it, but also knowing that I'd never sleep with the thought of a wild animal still under my bed doing who-knows-what.

"Okay," he said, and with an effort, he pulled first the queen-sized mattress and then the matching box spring up and onto their sides so I could see exactly what lay beneath the bed.

There was a lot of junk under there, and I made a brief mental note to clear it all out the next day. I peered down, looking carefully at the places where the creature would be most likely to be playing dead and wishing I had worn my glasses. Finally, I was satisfied that the possum was no longer there, and I told my husband he could return the bedding to its rightful place.

"I just hope the thing got out of the house," I muttered as I backtracked along the route it had taken. It was not in the dining room that I could see, nor did I find it in the kitchen. A scan of the laundry room did not reveal its presence, but did show me that my sons' bedroom door was closed, for which I was heartily glad. A possum in there would have been a major headache. I returned to my room and my spouse.

"It must have gotten out again," I told him. "How do you suppose it's getting inside?"

"Joanne, you know that there are places behind the sink where the cats have come in and out," he said in exasperation. "And there's an access spot in the back corner of the house, too. I couldn't tell you exactly where the thing is coming in if I wanted to. We just have to get in there and close those holes up."

I agreed. It would be difficult to do because some of the spots my husband mentioned were hard to reach. But it had to be done.

The next night or two produced no visible sign of the possum, though both of us heard the rattling of dishes that signaled something was getting into the sink or the dishwasher. Hubby suspected the cats, but when I heard the rattling from the open dishwasher, I slipped into the kitchen and found... nothing. I knew that none of our cats were known to disturb the dishwasher, so I suspected our unwanted nocturnal visitor.

On the third night after our second encounter with the possum, I had just said goodnight to one of my nightowl Internet buddies, and I shut down my computer, heading to turn out lights in other parts of the house. I entered the dining room, and what did I see? Perched precariously on my vacuum cleaner, which was standing in a corner, was... yes, you guessed it! The possum. I shrieked again.

He did a sort of possum-dive into the nearest hiding place, one of those tiny bathroom/bedroom trash cans, the kind that only holds about a gallon of water. I yelled for my husband while keeping an eye on the possum's refuge. Hubby came out, all bleary-eyed and confused because I had woken him up. Eventually I got through to him what was going on and he went over to peer into the can.

"That's big!" he said, having gotten his first good look at the thing. "That could cause all kinds of mayhem." He looked over at me. "What do you want me to do? Just let him go? Or take him for a ride somewhere?"

"I don't know. What do you think we should do? If you take it for a ride, what will you carry it in?"

"I thought I might use one of those animal carriers."

"A cat carrier? How will you get it in there?"

He had no answer for that.

"Where would you take it?"

"I don't know. Any suggestions?"

"The church? There's lots of woods around there." Our church is about two miles away from our house and any possum coming back to us would have to successfully cross at least one five-lane highway.

"Okay."

He went and got a slightly larger trash can and slid it down over the small one, showing his intelligence because that was the same idea that I had. Then he tipped the bucket up and left the smaller one, plus passenger, inside the larger. He got his shoes on, and headed for the door.

"This thing is wiggling in here," he said as he opened the front door and prepared to step out into the night.

"Just make sure it doesn't get out of the trash can," I cautioned. He said he would, and left the house.

I got ready for bed and waited for him. I had visions of bitten hands and a trip to the emergency room for rabies shots. He was back sooner than I expected.

"So, where did you take it?"

"Oh, somewhere."

I could see that he wasn't going to tell me. So I plunged on.

"Did it get out in the van?"

"No. I kept banging on the trash can and yelling so it wouldn't try anything." He paused, then continued. "It was rather disoriented when I let it out. But it didn't attack or anything. Finally, it just ran off. That thing was fast! I was a little scared though."

"Why?"

"It ran off in this direction."