Just when I start to think that by now I have surely seen it all, that from this point on everything will just be a series of repeats, enjoyable repeats to be sure but repeats just the same...
Snowball was there tonight. (KyWoods, I guess he heard you asking about him.) He's more comfortable around me now, so he waddled on out of the brush to eat from on of the stations on Juliet's side. He was alone over there for a while, but eventually Juliet's boy who had been eating from the dish at the back corner of my bench ran out of food and wandered over there to eat with Snowball. There were 3 dishes of food over in Juliet's area, so when the kit went over there, he took a position at a dish about 2 feet away from Snowball.
The 2, Snowball and the kit, ate peacefully for a while. Then I through a handful of peanuts over to the kit. As the kit moved about in pursuit of the peanuts, he ended up with his body realigned so that his head was pointing toward his own food and his rump toward Snowball. The kit was still standing upright as he ate. This new position meant that his back end was less than a foot away from Snowball who was still eating quietly.
Then Snowball lifted his head and turned his long nose toward the kit's back side. Snowball sniffed the kit, and just as I was thinking, "Awwwh, isn't that so sweet?" in a dreamy kind of way, Snowball took a huge bite out of the hind quarter (back of the hind leg just above the knee) of the kit! No he didn't actually remove any flesh or even, thankfully, break skin, but as the opossum moves more slowly than the raccoons, I was actually able to see Snowball bite - not nip - the kit. Opossums have long noses and thus long mouths with lots of teeth, and when Snowball launched this completely unprovoked attack on the kit, his entire mouth rapped around the upper part of the kit's back leg such that the kit's back leg was well up into the corners of Snowball's mouth. Ouch!
The kit let out a holler followed by a growl/snarl combo. There was a very brief struggle then during which Snowball was still hanging on to the hind limb of the raccoon and the raccoon was trying to double back on himself to strike the opossum. At that point everything became a blurr, a big ball of flying, snarling fur which ultimately 'shot' Snowball out of one side. Snowball waddled quickly back into the brush. The kit licked his leg and went back to eating, seemingly non-plussed by the whole thing.
The entire scene made little sense to me. The kit had not behaved in a threatening manner, nor had he attempted to take Snowball's food. The two had been eating quite peacefully for a while. (Maybe Snowball resents that whole 'back in your face' thing that HRH does, and thought the kit was dissing him Just kidding, of course.) The whole thing made even less sense considering the results, Snowball exiled to the veggie patch without additional food. It didn't seem like the kind of smart move one might expect from such an ancient survivor species. (I guess I won't be hand feeding Mr. Snowball - or maybe 'she' is a hormonally challenged Ms Snowball. That might explain things.)
Well, what can I say. Never a dull moment in the garden, at least not when the raccoons and opossums are present. I am certainly getting an opportunity to see things that humans rarely see. Raccoons chasing opossums. Opossums 'sucker punching' raccoons. I feel almost like the proverbial fly on the wall here.
