It’s been a year since the events surrounding what I think of as the Raccoon Wars of 2012 and there has been a change.  If you are new to ‘As The Ben Turns’, you may not know of the epic struggle in which I was embroiled: Inhuman foes, elaborate traps, puzzles, and coming face to face with snarling enemies are all parts of a series of escalations I’ve documented here.

For the past few weeks, there have occasionally been mysteriously clean dry-food plates in the Catfeteria.  As we all know, a dish that is 50% or below full of catfood = empty as the soul of an MPAA executive in the eyes of a cat, so finding the occasional catfood bowl that’s picked clean has been…  concerning.

Fast forward to 4:30 this morning.  Coming down the stairs, I heard a deliberate mechanical crunching.  Our cats are very casual eaters, so the chomping machine I was hearing was not normal.  CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH it went with the subtlety of a woodchipper being fed Federal witnesses.  CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH.

Turning on my flashlight, I crept around the corner to see a bag of dry food jerking and wiggling as it was methodically disemboweled by some sort of furred monster.  “It can’t be him…  I defeated the raccoon” I told myself, but the evidence of a non-cat invader couldn’t be ignored.  ‘Maybe it’s a stray’, I told myself unconvincingly.

I snuck closer, then shined the line directly at it.  “Ah HA!” I yelled.  “!!!!” it snarled and then, in a panic, disappeared _into_ the large bag.  I wasn’t sure what I had seen, but I knew a few things:

1. It was not a cat.
2. It was not a raccoon.
3. It was angry and uncoordinated.

The bag spun around and danced as the mystery creature struggled to, well, literally fight its way out of a paper bag.  After an embarassing 5-10 seconds it finally succeeded and tore out of the house through the open sliding glass door.  Crud, I’d forgotten to reset that last night, at least now I had a theory on how it had gotten in.

During its sprint, it looked over at me and for a moment, time slowed down and I got a clear look at what I was facing.  I could see every greasy hair on its pointy head as it turned to glance at me before majestically plowing into the corner of the slider and bouncing out the door.  Time returned to normal, but now I knew the name of my enemy.

Possum.

The small, land equivalent of a Great White Shark, the possum has approximately one billion teeth in its mouth.  I’ve been able to see a couple examples of this over the past few weeks when my mighty cats have brought in living possum yutes for us to presumably adopt.  Their mouths, when they’re hissing at me, appear to be lined with inward facing teeth like some sort of furry Sarlacc Pit and their beady little eyes contain only hate for a world that does not respect possums.

The yutes I’d carefully taken outside had been maybe 8-10 inches but the thing that erupted out of that innocent bag of Kitty Kibble must have had a torso that was more than a foot long, uneasily attached to an overly muscular tail of the sort you’d expect to be found on display in the Snake House at a zoo.

This ‘possum battleship’ blasted out of my house at a fearsome clip and I quickly closed the screendoor behind it, but now I’m left wondering: has this creature been coming in through the cat door before now?

Have the Raccoon Wars re-opened with a new ‘End Boss’?

Do I need to buy more catfood?