The Great Mystery Animal Hunt began with a spooky close encounter in the apple-tree paddock.
Michele, who keeps different hours to the rest of us, had gone out there well after dark to feed, pat and talk to our pet sheep: Xanthe, the queen of all she surveys; Elizabeth Jane, the ewe with no ears; S’periment, who walks like a ship rolling in heavy seas; and Becky, S’periment’s moody, estranged daughter.
Michele was, she showed me in a step-by-step re-enactment of the incident the following morning, nattering away to her sheeple when she looked toward the gate and found her torch had lit up two bright, possibly malevolent eyes near ground level.
“Hello,” she said. “Which cat are you?”
The eyes blinked, but the beast said nothing.
Michele tried again. “Is it you, Pixie?”
The eyes blinked, but again the beast said nothing.
In the quiet stand-off over the next minute or so, Michele and the sheep stared at the eyes, and the eyes stared back, then all of a sudden they began to move. Nonchalant as you like, the beast had decided to ignore Michele and the ewes and quietly, yet confidently, set itself to strolling away from them and into the large flaxes between the poplar trees. Then, like Labour’s lead in the polls, it just vanished.
As it was sauntering away, Michele shone her torch at it to try to make out what it was. Was it a stoat? Was it a brush-tailed possum? Was it an escaped lioness?
All three would need to be reported to “the authorities”. But if we can learn anything from recent events in Berlin, it is that it’s probably best to be 110% sure of your problem before you make the phone call.
As I understand it from some frankly catty news reports, Berlin’s Great Mystery Animal Hunt saw armed police, wild-animal specialists, professional trackers, hunters, blokes with night-vision goggles and drones deployed on a 30-hour pursuit after two people reported seeing a lioness in bush on the outskirts of the city. Nothing was found. “A lioness doesn’t just disappear into thin air,” an expert said in a statement of the bleeding obvious. Anyway, the local mayor, after wasting huge amounts of taxpayers’ money, decided to call the whole mad, pointless hunt off and declared the beast was “probably a wild boar”.
The lesson from this is that you should never trust fantasists with bad eyesight. Which was why Michele and I, who now both need glasses, decided we’d best not call Masterton District Council and report a sighting of a lioness in the apple-tree paddock. Our local council doesn’t have the sort of money you need to chase imaginary lionesses.
I decided it was best to examine the scene myself the next morning. After Michele’s step-by-step re-enactment, I checked the ground in the apple-tree paddock very carefully. I found no lioness paw prints. Then I rang the authorities, the Greater Wellington Regional Council in fact, to report that they probably needed to refill the possum bait stations they installed at Lush Places a few years back.
I‘m not sure what we would have done if we had found the mystery beast. Forget about lionesses. A cornered possum is something you don’t ever want to meet.
Many, many years ago, when I was still living under my parents’ roof and at their expense in suburban Auckland, a possum somehow got into the chimney one night, then managed to fall down it, landing behind the plywood screen that, for reasons I never understood, covered and sealed the fireplace. The fall did nothing for the possum’s mood, and it proceeded to have a wee bit of a tanty. It banged. It growled. It screamed. It sounded like the Devil. I thought we should get hold of a priest. Or perhaps a vampire slayer. Instead, Dad rang the authorities.
