Man’s world

In which our Southern man draws on the hunting prowess of his forebears and listens attentively to a message from the world.

Joe Bennett goes on the hunt – things do not go well.

There are times when the world speaks, and it has just spoken to me. Things began, as so often in this life, with tuberous begonias.

I do not warm to tuberous begonias. I find the name off-putting. It brings to mind those maps of the human body with the skin removed.

Nevertheless, it was late autumn and I wanted colour for my window boxes and there wasn’t much else flowering at the garden centre, and there was nothing else flowering at $1.99 for a punnet of six.

To my surprise they flourished in my window boxes and continued to do so into winter and I grew used to opening the curtains on a cold grey morning and beholding my begonias with their scarlet petals and what we botanists call their yellow bits. Then one morning I opened the curtains on nothing. Where once had been tuberous begonias stood only stumps.

“Possums,” I hissed. “Possums.” Generally speaking, I have a soft spot for our furry fellow species.

But when in autumn possums ate my entire crop of ‘Golden Delicious’, that spot began to harden. And when they went on to ringbark my ‘Golden Queen’, it hardened further still. And now my tuberous begonias.

We Bennetts are placid creatures. Ah well, we say when we confront misfortune, worse things happen at sea and other platitudes counselling forbearance. But when we are roused, when our blood at long last warms, watch out. We strike with a rapidity and a ferocity that cobras can only envy.

So it was a mere month later that I mentioned to a local real estate agent that possums had razed my begonias. “Wait there,” he said and from his garage he fetched a metal cage. “You bait it with an apple, Mr Possum wanders in, he treads on the thingummy, the door drops like a medieval whatsit and heigh diddly ho you’ve trapped him.”

“Heigh diddly ho indeed,” I said. “And then?”

“Then you ring me.”

“I see,” I said. “And then?”

“Then I come up to your place with a 22 and it’s heigh diddly ho for Mr Possum.”

“Heigh diddly ho indeed,” I said, though as I said it

I could feel my spot softening once more.

But then

I remembered my ‘Golden Delicious’, my ‘Golden Queen’, my pretty window boxes. I was tempted to bait the trap with a begonia, but possums are notoriously blind to irony. And as I laid a ‘Braeburn’ in the baiting zone I felt my hunter forebears stir. It was those same forebears who prodded me out of bed the next morning at the crack of nine to see what I’d bagged.

I’d bagged a medium-sized hedgehog. It had eaten half the apple and fallen asleep. I raised the portcullis and left it to escape in its own time. An hour later it had finished the apple and gone back to sleep. I had to evict it.

Half an hour after that,

I was in my study when I heard wild cries.

Out I dashed. P¯ukeko, ladies and gentlemen, do not take kindly to imprisonment. This one tried to maim me even as I sought to free it. In the afternoon

I bagged a juvenile blackbird. The following morning the hedgehog was back.

“How d’you get on,” asked the real estate agent when I returned the trap.

“The world spoke,” I said. “Ho diddly ho,” he replied.