As soon as I opened the front door yesterday morning, I saw a turkey buzzard having breakfast in our driveway. From where I stood, the bird's breakfast appeared to be either a light-colored cat or an opossum. If Mikey had spent the night outdoors, I would have been frantically running toward the buzzard, since the dead animal's coloring looked like that of a Himalayan cat. But Mikey had just walked out the door with Rebel and me. Naturally, Rebel started barking, which caused the buzzard to fly to the nearest tree, where it stayed, observing us, before moving to a higher limb, and soon afterwards it decided that it would be neither safe nor pleasant to continue dining in our yard with noisy Rebel.
I discovered that nature's undertaker had already started his autopsy, so to speak, on a female opossum, which looked like roadkill in the driveway. Unless somebody had driven down our driveway during the night and had run over the poor creature, I suspect the opossum had been struck on the road and had attempted to make it back to her sleeping quarters under our deck. Another possibility, of course, is that a predator had attacked the opossum, but she had somehow managed to escape before dying.
I do not know whether or not this opossum was the one I had named Eggroll, who had been friends with Ponzo and one of the neighbors' black cats. I had only seen Eggroll as a youngster, playing with Ponzo and the other cat. Well, while Mikey sniffed the opossum's body from a distance of about six inches, I watched the neighbor's black cat sniff and gently touch the body with his nose. Perhaps it was Eggroll; may she rest in peace.
