When I was a boy, we had three skunks for pets. I caught two of them myself. They were still armed, so to speak. In the process, I disproved certain myths, falsely circulated as facts, concerning this fragrant critter.
My Mom caught our first skunk one summer while blackberry picking in Washington State, where we lived, while the rest of the family was back on my Grandparent's farm in Missouri, where Dad was remodeling a house. By the time we arrived home, Cologne, as she had named the new addition to our rather extensive "family animal menagerie", was as innocuous as a kitten, olfactorily speaking.
The skunk, having such a deadly chemical weapon at its ready disposal, never has had to develop a hostile disposition to ensure survive. As a result, this particular branch of the mammal clan has a rather pleasing personality. Once the twin glands beneath his tail were removed through minor veterinarian surgery, Cologne became as sweet a pet as you could hope to acquire. When my father lay on the bed, Cologne would stand on his chest and pound with his front paws to request the raw hamburger that was his favorite food. He once scrubbed a shrew into mush when we presented one the cat had dragged up on the front porch. He refused to eat the tiny rodent, however. Apparently, he thought it stank. Ground steer was more to his liking.
Attached to a leash, Cologne scooted along the sidewalk like a small dog, much to the amazement and interest of the general public. People were never quite sure whether to draw near in wonder, or flee in terror. Cologne liked being carried. He would even stick his head inside my brother's mouth in search of some fragment of a potato or blot of mustard he might devour, much to us watching kids' delight. We all wondered how far down he would go, so kept a leash on during such experiments, in case a retrieval were required and we must drag him back through my brother's tonsils. All in all, Cologne was a marvelous pet.
One night, Cologne escaped through the kicked-through bottom of our front screen door when someone forgot to shut the main door. The neighbor boy had kicked in the screen door and come in to help himself to a cube of butter one day when he found the screen door latched. We had never repaired it. We hoped Cologne's reputation would come to his assistance in the great wild world beyond, since his six gun holsters were both empty.
I immediately began dreaming of catching Cologne's replacement.
Us three Johnson kids were still in grade school. As we attended a small, church-operated educational facility that relied on charging tuition rather than taxing the public for its support, we began working to help earn our tuition at an early age. One of our first jobs for pay was gathering eggs on one of the chicken farms that belonged to the doctor in whose clinic my Mom worked. Those long laying houses where the eggs rolled down to the aisles on each side and the chicken poop fell through to the ground below, attracted skunks. They'd come in, along with rats and raccoons from the adjoining woods, to search for such eggs as broke and fell through the wire, or to eat the occasional dead chicken that had been discarded into the stink below. Even over the sometimes over powering smell of ammonia from the juicy droppings, a skunk's smell still carries. There's really nothing else like it in nature. As I gathered eggs, I kept an eye open for a new skunk for a pet. But though I often saw adults of the species, there were none young enough for de-scenting and taming.
Then late one rainy night as we neared home, I spotted a small skunk in the beam of the headlights. "Stop the car!" I howled. Whether in agreement, or in shock, Mom complied. I quickly exited the car in pursuit of the skunk, which disappeared over the dark bank down into the field adjoining my friend, Ken Knutson's parents' house. Even in the near dark, those black and white stripes allowed me to keep his trail.
Now I happened to be wearing my brother's new grizzly bear coat. We each had gotten a new winter coat of fake animal fur a few days earlier. His was imitation grizzly bear's hide, long, dark and tipped with blue highlights. Mine was a blonder longhaired variety with a touch of brown shading--perhaps a polyester buffalo of some sort. I'm not sure why I had John's coat on rather than my own that night. But I do recall him calling, "Watch out for my new coat!" I was too excited at the prospect of capturing my own pet skunk to pay heed. The wild wind and rain snatched away his words as though they had never been spoken.
I trailed the escaping skunk from the mowed field through the Knutson's garden. He dodged this way and that among the rows of corn and pumpkin vines, lifted his tail briefly, but kept on going. Eventually, I cornered him beside the glass door going into the Knutson's basement. There the wall jutted out at the edge of the slab of cement where we shot hoops. He was stuck in the V, and I could head him off whichever way he turned. The skunk whirled to face me in earnest, stomping and lifting his tail, according to the custom of his kind. I ripped off my brother's great grizzly bear coat and began shaking it at the skunk, like a bullfighter taunting the raging beast with a cape.
Based on what I had earlier read concerning skunks, this seemed the most prudent strategy. According to notable experts in wildlife, the common white and black striped skunk has only 6 or 7 squirts of that stinky stuff before he runs dry. The implication is that if you can entice him to use up that ammunition, you can pick him up safely at your leisure. The poor little skunk must have thought that great, fake-furred grizzly had him for sure. Each time I lunged forward, he'd go up on his forelegs and cut loose with another blinding blast of nose venom.
One!
Two!
Three!
Four!
Five!
Six!
Seven!
Ha! He was all squirted out. I had him now. I lowered my brother's odiferous coat to allow an unimpeded view of my quarry.
Eight!
Nine!
He nailed me with two withering shots that smelled like essence of burned rubber, and which, by all written accounts by armchair nature experts, couldn't possibly have been in his gun. My jaw dropped open and my eyes widened in amazement. I lowered the coat even further to view this marvel of nature.
Ten!
In the end, I caught that skunk just as Dr. Knutson, who had been watching T.V. in the basement, slid the glass door open to find out what was causing the horrific stench to permeate his living quarters. My friend's father, being a hunter, owned a shotgun. He sometimes emptied the lead shot and reloaded the shells with rock salt to educate dogs that toppled his trashcans. He was angry enough to educate me in a similar fashion, I think. But he couldn't chance a shot with the skunk in such close proximity without becoming liable to incur additional damages. So I made my escape.
I strode home in a swirling cloud of victory, with Cologne the Second held at arm's length in the furry folds of my brother's ruined grizzly bear coat. Everyone in the neighborhood knew something had tangled with a skunk before I arrived at that one place where, if you come, they have to take you in. Fortunately, my family did not own firearms. No one wanted to get near enough to me to whop me, as I deserved with a belt, or even to prod me with a broom handle. So they locked the doors and called out hopeful instructions through cracked windows.
My crimes against humanity were such that I escaped direct punishment, other than the simple expedient of social banishment. I dropped the new skunk into a large ice chest beside the garage, carefully inserting some milk-soaked bread and a broken egg for his supper, as we had no hamburger available. I wanted Cologne the Second to survive until we could get him to the vet for descenting. Then I began the futile effort of attempting the impossibility of cleansing my stinking self back into civilized society again.
According to the experts I had consulting among the weekly armloads of books we checked out from the local library, there are, in fact, several suitable liquids legendary for their ability to remove scent of the skunk from one's defiled person and clothing. Some experts list their favorite few. Others offer different suggestions. Occasionally, the experts' lists overlap. Besides having arrived in print, these recommendations have one thing in common: They don't work.
I tried quarts of tomato juice, vinegar, bleach, ammonia, laundry detergent, and even gasoline. These only enhanced, rather than removed, the original fragrance. In the end, I buried my brother's grizzly bear coat, along with the rest of the clothes I had been wearing, in a deep hole at the end of our garden. That, I had read, is also a recommended method for removing smell of skunk. Unlike the liquid suggestions, burial actually works. So long as you bury it deep enough. So long as you never dig the clothes up again ever. So long as you have included the essential step of burying yourself along with them.
For the next several days, the teacher at our grade school sat me at a desk by the open classroom window. My condition made me a little neurotic. Out on the playground at recess I could tag along with the games, so long as we played outdoors and I was careful to stay down wind. Inside, it was a different matter. On warm afternoons, when I began to perspire, I could smell myself. I was sure everyone else in the classroom could as well--particularly when they started choking and gagging and wiping their eyes. That sort of thing can put a permanent dent in a boy's budding psyche.
Eventually, the skunk's smell faded. By then, Cologne the Second was also a memory. He had eaten the bread and egg I provided, nosed open the crack in the lid of the ice chest, and returned to the wilds from which I had snatched him the same night I caught him.
Several weeks passed before I encountered Cologne the Third. I was coming back along the lane from Horseshoe Lake, which lay a half-mile behind the Knutson's property. We'd go down there fishing in the summer and hunting with BB guns in the fall and winter. By now, it was fall. I looked up the muddy lane to see a half grown skunk crossing between brush rows that bordered the lane. I immediately dropped my BB gun, ripped off my outer long-sleeved shirt, and began the bullfighting stance required for capture. One tends to revert to old habits in a crisis, even if they didn't work well before.
Exactly as the experts stated, the skunk, when disturbed, first pounds the ground with his front feet. That's his sign language means of warning you to back off. Then he lifts his tail. If you still don't get the message, he raised up on his front paws, lifting his hind legs over his shoulders and arching his back so that he can both shoot you over his own head and see what he's aiming at the same time. This is rather a neat acrobatic trick if you see it on a nature show on T.V., rather than in person.
I saw the yellow globules of spray beginning to spread in the air before they hit me. The wretched odor of concentrated burned rubber smote my nostrils a staggering blow. I gagged, yet I still pressed forward, closing in for the quick capture. I knew I had no idea how many shots this treacherous critter might have stored rectally. But since my last encounter with the species, I had acquired another curious and helpful fact about skunks. The best experts all affirmed it: If you pick up a skunk by its tail, it cannot squirt you. Somehow, dangling by his tail paralyzes the muscles that do the aiming and the ejection of the significant fluids.
I closed in quickly, like an infantryman charging a trench mid-mustard gas attack. The air was thick with the foulest spray, but I had my eye on the prize, that black and white frond of a tail. I reached and caught hold of it, lifting my quarry into the air. There, dangling with all four feet off the ground, the little stinker twisted his small body, looked me in the eye, and let me have a blistering blast at point blank range. So much for the experts' advice.
After that, I swore off skunks. I'd tried the patience of my family, classmates, neighbors, teachers, and fellow church members sufficiently. My interests turned to other wild pets. A half grown crow with an injured wing that my brother and I built a spacious cage for, only to find its new occupant a heap of cold feathers the next morning. Polliwogs with no, one, two, three, and even four legs we scooped from a slough along the road in a fishing net we constructed from the wedding veil we found in my Mom's closet and installed with the goldfish in the bowl on the bookcase. A score of sunfish we brought home and set swimming in our wading pool. The naked, still-blind baby sparrow my Mom found blasted from the nest in the bush beside the back door to the clinic where she worked by a sudden summer downpour. These, along with the more ordinary dogs, cats, puppies, kittens, sheep, chickens, and horse all entered and exited our lives in their turn. When we were collecting insects at school, by brother and I even sent away for praying mantis eggs, hatched them, and had 20 or 30 Mason jars incubators where we raised them on fruit flies.
But of all the members of our family's animal menagerie, none could match the three Colognes, at least in their ability to harness the attention of the neighbors--who involuntarily learned of their capture, and retained that memory for several days. My friend Ken's Dad finally forgave me for catching that skunk on his back porch. It was either that, or kill me. Many years later, Dr. Knutson still shifted in his chair uneasily and eyed me suspiciously when I reminded him of the incident. I had, after all, temporarily driven down housing prices in the area. My brother got a new winter coat. The skunks themselves became a wafting memory. Somewhere in the back of the old garden beside the house where I was raised, under two feet of dirt, lies the moldering remains of a fake grizzly bear's hide. I never did dig up my brother's coat, or the other clothes I buried with it. Some things, once buried, are better left undisturbed.
I recall these things and have written them here because a childhood friend, who sat near me at school, reminded me of the incident earlier today. Apparently, of our many shared memories of growing up together, this is the one that left its mark most deeply engraved in his recollections four decades later.
He remembers how I stank.
"A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it." Proverbs 22:3 NIV
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