Marsupial girl in a material world

Some ARE BORN TO GREATNESS. OTHERS HAVE greatness thrust upon them. Then there’s Evelyn Gabai. An opossum was thrust upon her, and she’s never looked back.

Gabai, a curly-haired woman of 44, lives in Van Nuys and writes scripts for television animation. Apart from a fondness for critters that goes back to her New England youth, her life was proceeding in more or less normal fashion until 15 years ago. That’s when a friend found an ailing mammal -- cat-sized and pink-nosed, with a long, hairless tail and dozens and dozens of teeth. The friend invited her over to have a look.

You know opossums: those furry, toothy, long-tailed beasts that occasionally turn up in the glare of your high beams or the dark recesses of your yard. They are the only marsupials found in North America, and if you look closely instead of shuddering and turning away when the high beam finds one, you may catch a mother carrying her young in a pouch or on her back.

This is what Gabai’s friend had and what Gabai saw. The angels sang.

“I was just hooked,” she remembers. “It was so docile and sweet.”

Gabai still spends much of her time walking and talking like the rest of us in this ostensibly denatured city. But in fact, she is an agent of the wilderness. As a volunteer counselor for the Opossum Society of the United States (www.opossumsocietyus.org), she harbors opossum orphans, cleanses opossum wounds, gives opossum talks and of course fights opossum ignorance and opossum oppression wherever she finds it.

Now, make no mistake: Whether alive in your yard or dead on the roadside, these animals are commonly counted among nature’s least charismatic mammals. Yet Didelphis marsupialis does something for Gabai.

“Do you know why we call them opossums and the rest of the world calls them possums?” she asks. “When we first started colonizing this country, Miles Standish was keeping a book of native species, and he asked somebody, ‘What’s that?’ And they said, ‘Oh, possum.’ ” (I was not only unable but also unwilling to test the veracity of this story.)

Do you suspect your neighbors of possessing insufficient knowledge of the opossum? Gabai will be right over. I met her on such a night, at a gathering of the Franklin Hills Residents Assn., just south of Griffith Park.

“The opossum has been in your neighborhood for a long time,” she began perkily, facing an auditorium full of skepticism. “Roughly 70 million years.”

And then she was off and running as only an opossophile can run. Their temperatures are generally too low for them to carry rabies, they eat many rodents and other garden pests, they don’t dig, they’re harmless to humans. They have thumbs on their feet. It’s true, Gabai confessed to the now-attentive crowd, that an adult opossum boasts about as many teeth as a shark (50), yet in confrontations, once they’ve bared those teeth and drooled impressively, they tend to keel over and play dead. To play possum.

“They’re very good at it,” Gabai said. “Right down to the rictus grin.”

Now I’m going to pause a moment, as she did in the auditorium, to let that lifeless-smile image linger for you. There. Excellent.

Most opossums are born in early spring. Thus, for Los Angeles’ two dozen or so counselors, this is the calm before the marsupial storm.

In the next few weeks, Gabai knows, the cages and enclosed runs in her yard will fill with these small, snuffling beasts, as many as 30 at a time. Last spring, a relatively light season, more than 100 of the animals passed through her care. It’s an intriguing avocational choice for someone who’s allergic to fleas, but destiny is destiny.

“I have a very patient boyfriend,” she says. “You’ve got to be kind of a nut job to do this.”

Along with wounded or captured adults, she often winds up tending orphans -- tiny creatures, a few inches long, found in the pouches of mothers killed on the road. She feeds them complex mixtures of meat, fruit, bugs and bones; they’re omnivores, yet with delicate constitutions. She will not concede that they are ugly. Instead, she’ll tell you about the Native American tribe that believed that the first opossum singed its tail hairless while dragging the sun toward the Earth. Or she’ll bring up Calvin Coolidge, who brought a pet opossum into the White House. Or Laura Bush, who apparently left the Coolidge possum out of a recent presentation on first pets. Efforts to reach the White House for a clarification of its opossum policy were unsuccessful, because, um, I never made them.

When pressed, Gabai will eventually concede that opossums aren’t always easy to love. They do resort to cannibalism when hungry, and she occasionally finds herself rinsing maggots from their wounds. But usually, healing an opossum is a matter of food, water, cage and a month or two of waiting.

Once they reach 7 inches, nose to rump, she sets them free in a handful of favorite forest spots. If you try to adopt one as a pet, Gabai and other authorities warn, it’ll probably soon get sick and die. The Opossum Society urges returning them to the wild as soon as possible, and most house pets I know would agree.

Perhaps inevitably, Gabai did once make a bid to unite her vocation and avocation: She dreamed up a cartoon hero called Sophie the Vampire Opossum, whose sidekick, Renfield, was a gay fruit bat. The idea “went to pilot but didn’t make it beyond. I don’t know why,” she says. “I guess the world isn’t ready to see vampire opossums that have magic pouches that they can pull anything out of.”

And now I’m picturing the test audience for that pilot: They sit transfixed before Sophie and Renfield as the credits roll. They have been educated and entertained, and yet they have these funny, frozen, gape-mouthed looks on their faces. What do you call that look?

Oh yeah. That old rictus grin.

To e-mail Christopher Reynolds or to read his previous Wild West columns, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.