Carpetbagger From Dixie

A WILD SPORT

That old Southern sport of possum hunting is also moving north. It is not moving as fast as the possums but it is spreading. Every now and then a possum-hunting Southerner moves north and when he finds that his old friends are around he soon takes to the woods with his dog.

This possum hunting is a wild sport carried on by night. It lacks form but it is noisy and exciting. A couple of years ago I had the privilege of participating in a scientific possum hunt. I had accompanied an expedition of the American Museum of Natural History from New York to the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee to obtain specimens and background material for a habitat group showing the opossum in its natural surroundings.

As one of the main objectives was to obtain a specimen of Didelphis, T. Donald Carter, mammalogist and leader of the expedition, arranged with some local mountain men to go on a possum hunt. Our dogs had been turned loose in the woods only about ten minutes when they opened up and in a few minutes more they treed a possum. Scientists and mountaineers rushed through the scrub until we came upon the quarry in a persimmon tree, silhouetted against the moon.

POSSUM UP A TREE

Bob Seaton, 17-year-old mountain lad who was the official tree climber of the hunt, swarmed up the tree and eased out onto a small limb. He shook the limb frantically until the possum lost its grip and tumbled down. Amid wild yells from the hunters and the barking of the dogs the gang closed in. After a short chase one hunter grabbed the possum and put him in a sack.

"Nobody's goin' to believe this," Bob Seaton said as we rested before turning the dogs loose again. "When you folks get back to New York and tell 'em we found our first possum up a 'simmon tree just where he ought to be, they won't believe a word of it."

Bob's fears were unfounded, for that particular opossum is now a part of a habitat group in the museum's Hall of North American Mammals and it is up in the top of a persimmon tree, just where it ought to be.

Its presence in the North is bound to bring a lot of changes. In time New Englanders may be raving over roast possum and clam chowder and giving their folksongs and rhymes a Southern tone. There is one old Southern rhyme which goes:

Possum up a 'simmon tree,
Raccoon on de ground.
Raccoon says to de possum,
"You tho' dem 'simmons down."
The New England version probably will be something like this:
Possum in de compost heap,
Quahog in de sand.
Br'er Possum sho' tastes good.
Cheers fo' New England.