Furry little feller found

Kindness, not cleanliness, is next to Godliness, even if it doesn’t have a long-e middle syllable. I don’t get many opportunities to be kind, through every fault of my own, so I was glad to get a chance while biking my way home last night.

I passed another roadkill – I pass far too many, as we all do, on American roads – and examined it as I passed, as I always do, to see if there were signs of life. It was an opossum, obviously dead. But I remembered a recent Ranger Rick article that was quite direct in dealing with the subject of animals killed on the road. Opossums merited special mention, because a mother opossum’s babies may survive and remain in the pouch or attached to her body. The mom and three of her babies were gone, but sure enough, one little guy was still alive, crawling around the rest of them. I scooped him up and nestled him in my shirt – he took right to it, snuggling in and clamping down on a fold of the shirt as if he were nursing. I gave Andrea a call and she rounded up the girls and the rescue team was on its way. I sat down in the grass with the little guy and kept him company for the next 15-20 minutes. It was one of those spiritual moments.

We found an after-hours emergency vet that took wildlife, bless them – the After Hours Small Animal Emergency Clinic of Wake County – and dropped him off shortly after the girls arrived. You are not supposed to feed orphans – or even give them water – unless instructed, so we were happy to hand him off to a vet that works with rehabilitators to get him back into the wild. Godspeed little buddy!