A couple of years ago, a possum got into my house. It was a peaceful nocturnal critter, and the only evidence I saw was that something tore into a bag of my cat's food. Then one day, it was lurking in the kitchen, and my former Cuban girlfriend saw it. Shrieks and cries of fear! Ayyyyyyyy!
My experience in Mexico led me to call it by its Aztec name, tlacuache. It was the only word in Spanish I knew for this animal. She had no word for it, other than "rata gigante". A Castillian word is "zarig?eya", but she decided to call it a rac? or rac?n. In M?xico, a raccoon is a "mapache". I assume that this is not related to the Chilean Indian group that is referred to by the same name.
The syllables "tla" "tlal" in Aztec often refers to the land. The city of Tlalnepantla, for example, means "land in between".
It had a hiding place somewhere. I never did find out where. I called some "experts" that told me that they would come over, if I made an appointment and paid them $50 in advance, no results guaranteed. So I bought a trap at the Home Depot for $40 and baited it with catfood. The next morning, there it was, in the trap. Piece of cake.
I took it up to a recession-affected building site 20 miles away and turned it lose. I figured that if I had asked the county what to do, it would cost me money and time, and I prefer fast, easy and cheap solutions. It is a wild animal, return it to the wild. I set the trap down and opened the gate, and my tlacuache waddled off. On the way home, I bought some Fabreeze and Fantastik and removed the funky smell from my station wagon.
Goodbye possum, goodbye rac?, goodbye tlacuache.