The traps have slammed upon their hand-like paws. Shotguns have blasted them from trees. Farm dogs have torn them asunder, and crueler men have drowned them when they catch them in cage traps.
But their kind has not died out. In 1600, their range extended along the hotter lands of the South, but the time of the Civil War, they’d spread up into the lands of the North. They colonized the West Coast when the favored few that had been kept as pets were turned out in the wild. And then they made it into Ontario and British Columbia.
The Virginia opossum is the most boreal of the contemporary metatheria. Didelphimorphia is not even the most derived of the marsupials, and in contrast the various pouched mammals of Australia, which are often forced to hold their own against the waves of placental invaders, the lowly opossum stands it own ground in the land of foxes and bobcats.
And baying hounds and properly polished shotguns.
It does so not by being particularly specialized to anything and producing wave after wave of young during the breeding season.
In ditches of the highways and on the burning summer blacktop, their carcasses are laid out every mile or so. Dead from the motor car’s rapid advance, and their own lack of caution and general sagacity.
The war on these “Southern” vermin, whose kind derived that other American continent, the one that seems so foreign, so tropical and exotic when compared to our attempts to make this land a new Europe, is utterly pointless.
We kill them and still they come. They have their young, and they spread to new territories, so when one is killed, their numbers are so replenish each year with newly independent pouch young.
This is a war that we’ve lost, but we don’t seem to know it. And it must sorely irk us that a creature so unlike us, so primitive and not particularly brilliant, can thrive while we try to kill it off.
Our murderous concept of civilization carries a heavy toll upon the wild things, but some wild things find such situations utterly roseate.
And in this age in which the big predators are pushed away, the meek really do inherit the earth.
And they might raid our chicken coops and dig in our garbage. But we cannot stop their advance.
Only the harshest of northern freezes can do such a thing, and seeing as we’ve waged a war on those frosts with our fossil fuel addiction, the world gets better and better for them.
And so we fail to control that which we have created in our folly.
And this is but one time that we have failed. The red fox came south out Canada to colonize our Eastern states. The raccoon came north to take much of Canada. And the barred owl came west to give the spotted owl hell, and the coyote came out of the prairies and into the land of the maple forest and the suburb.
Nature teems weirdly when we weird up the world. This is a simple lesson, but one that we cannot fully understand.
That is the story of the Anthropocene. This is the era where we create chaos, and species rise and fall based upon how the chips fall.
And the chips fell so nicely for the grinning opossum of the Southland.
