I Like Skunks

by LOUISE DICKINSON RICH

1

THERE’S nothing to be afraid of in the woods — except yourself. Nothing is going to hurt you — except yourself. This, like all sweeping statements, is subject to a few amendments; but the basic idea still holds. There is nothing at all to be afraid of in the woods — excepting always yourself.

Animals in the woods aren’t out looking for trouble. They don’t have to look for it. Their lives are nothing but one trouble after another. The sentimental view is that wild animals live an idyl, doing what they want, browsing on herbs and flowers, wandering happily along woodland glades, and sleeping where night overtakes them. Actually the poor devils must live in a constant state of terror. So many things can, and do, happen to them. They can starve or freeze in winter. They are fly-ridden in the summer. Men and larger animals constantly harass them. Their young may be taken from them by any number of means, all violent. They know trouble too well to be interested in making any more. I pity all animals, but especially wild animals; and it’s very hard to be afraid of anything that arouses pity.

I don’t want to pose as an expert in animal life. In other words, I want to hedge a little. I don’t know anything about lions or rogue elephants or hippopotamuses. People who know about them claim they’re something to steer clear of, and I’ll take their word for it. I’ve never happened to get in between a she-bear and her cubs, but I understand that that’s not a good thing to do. I’m just talking about the Maine woods and the animals you ordinarily encounter there.

The way to see wild animals to the best, advantage is to see without being seen. As a matter of fact, that’s about the only way possible to see them. They don’t stand around, if they see you first. I always wonder, as I walk down the road, how many pairs of eyes have me under surveillance, how many hearts beat with suffocating rapidity until it is certain that I am going straight along the Carry Road on my own harmless business. I can feel that constant mute and questioning regard from hillside and thicket and roadside tangle of grasses and weeds; deer, and bear, and coon, and fox, mink and partridge and little whitefooted, bat-eared mouse — they all stand and watch.

My favorite animals to watch are the deer and foxes. They are both so quick and pretty and well-coördinated, and they’re both such a lovely red color in the summer. We don’t see foxes very often. I think they do their sleeping days and their prowling nights. Once I saw one, though, eating blueberries off a bush. Usually we see them trotting their precise and dainty trot along the road. This one looked so informal, with his feet braced and his head outthrust, pulling the clusters of ripe berries off the bushes, and ducking as the branch snapped back.

We see deer all the time, but we never get tired of them — or almost never. The exception was a deer we named Joe. He started coming into the yard when he was just a young spikehorn, and we took such pains not to frighten him that he soon became very tame. He’d stand around and watch us work. Deer are very curious, and it almost got to the point where, before Ralph could drive a nail into a board, he had to shove Joe’s nose out of the way. That was all right; what finally gave us our fill of Joe was his destructive attitude toward our flower gardens.

We’d worked hard on those gardens. One was an old anthill which we’d chosen as the site for a bed because it had good exposure and didn’t need clearing. All it needed was to have the ants exterminated. Before we got through with that little chore, we wished we’d never been born. Two or three of the beds just had to have the underbrush and roots and rocks cleared away — and, of course, the soil changed over from acid woods mold to good garden earth.

But the last of them we made on the vestigial remains of an ancient bridge pier. No one has ever been able to account for that pier. It is just above the house on the river bank, and apparently once there was a very sizable bridge there. The pier is made of huge boulders, much too large to have been moved by anything less than an ox team, so the bridge was more than a temporary structure. There must have been a road through there once, but there is no record of there ever having been such a road. Where would it have come from and where would it have gone to? Nobody knows. There is no trace of it now. Someone once advanced the theory that Arnold might have built it on his way to Quebec, but I think his route is now established as having been well to the east and north of here. Whatever the reason for the bridge, it was built a long, long time ago. We had to cut trees with six-inch butts when we cleared off the pier for our flower garden.

But that was only the beginning. When we got the trees cut and the roots and sod cleared away, there was nothing left but bare rock. We had to haul dirt in from any place we could scrape it up to fill the pockets in the rocks, and we had to haul in about an even amount of stable dressing to make the earth arable. It was a lot of work, and we didn’t appreciate, when we got the garden planted, having Joe go in there to stamp down all our seedlings and later eat all the blossoms off any plants that survived his first treatment.

It may well be asked why we bother with a flower garden, considering all the sweat involved, especially when we have a whole forest full of wild flowers for the picking. The answer may sound a little silly, especially to those people to whom we have so carefully explained that no, we don’t miss seeing other people. We don’t miss them at all. It may sound a little pixyish and whimsical to say that what we do sometimes get lonesome for are civilized flowers, and stretches of lawn, and ordered gardens. Our tangles of zinnias and larkspur and violas, slopping over into rather shaggy grass paths, may be a far cry from shell walks and clipped hedges and roses around a sundial; but we love them and I can have tame flowers to put on my dinner table and around the living room part of the year.

I hope the foregoing explains why we got bored with Joe. Unfortunately he didn’t get bored with us. He’d go back onto the ridges every fall, and we’d hope for the best. But every spring he’d show up again, bigger and lustier than ever. It didn’t make us much happier to learn that a full-grown buck makes a dangerous pet. After he has reached maturity, he may, without a moment’s warning, turn definitely nasty, lashing out with horns and hoofs for no reason at all. We didn’t want that to happen to us. The situation was solved when we developed that dog-team idea. The smell and sound of a pack of huskies was enough to scare Joe into the next county. So some good did come out of that impractical dog-dream after all.

2

Probably the sweetest animals in the woods are newborn fawns. They aren’t red like their mothers, but spotted tan and white, so that when they stand still — as they do, instinctively, in the presence of danger - they look like just another patch of sun-dappled shadow. Nature is really wonderful, when it comes to protecting her own. There is nothing quite so defenseless as a new little fawn, so Nature takes over its protection until it can at least outrun the more deadly of its enemies. Not only does a fawn become practically invisible when it stands still, but it has no scent whatever to betray its presence. A dog that can smell a deer a half a mile away will pass a fawn almost within touching distance, and never turn its head. Oddly enough, the fathers of most of the wilderness young are hell-bent on their destruction, so Nature attends to that, too. During the spring and early summer, when the does are dropping their fawns, the bucks are in the velvet. They have shed their antlers during the previous winter, and on their heads are the beginnings of the new horns — two swollen, velvet-covered knobs, which are not only soft but also extremely sensitive. The mildestmannered doe, inspired by mother love, has no trouble at all during the velvet season in bulldozing the toughest buck that ever breathed. Nobody ever told us that this is the reason for the apparently extravagant antler-dropping, but to us it seems obvious, and I mention it because so many people have remarked to us that they didn’t see any point in a buck’s growing a fine set of horns, only to lose them before the next spring.

Some people who should know better — like some guides and woodsmen — believe that a doe will desert her fawn if she detects the man scent on it, and they warn you not to touch a spotted fawn. I’m happy to be in a position to state authoritatively that this isn’t so. This is how I happen to know.

One day in the early summer, Ralph was coming down from Middle Dam in our old Model T, and, as usual, he wasn’t sparing the horses. He broke over the crest of Wangan Hill and around the bend in the road, and there in front of him, right in the middle of the road, were a doe and a fawn that couldn’t have been more than a few hours old. Its spots were bright and it wavered on its slender, impossibly delicate little legs. Ralph slammed on everything and skidded to a halt just as the doe, who stuck until the radiator was almost touching her, jumped clear. She had courage, poor thing. The fawn couldn’t jump. It was too little and weak and confused. It went down in the road. Ralph swarmed over the door, heartbroken. He’s often hard-boiled in his attitude toward his own kind, but when it comes to animals he’s just a bowl of custard. Then he saw that he’d stopped well short of the fawn. It hadn’t been touched. It had simply obeyed a command from something that had been born within it — a command to play possum. It lay flat on its belly with its hind legs under its body in a crouch and its front legs stretched straight out, its head between them. The grass between the ruts arched over it, and it lay perfectly still, even when Ralph bent over it. Only its eyes moved, rolling back to follow his movements.

Even when he ran his hand along its spine, to make sure it was all right, the only sign of life it gave was an uncontrollable shrugging of the loose skin on its back. It didn’t know what this was all about; after all, it had had only since about dawn to get used to this world; it had nothing to go by except that inner voice; but it was doing its poor little best to follow instructions.

It was obvious that it would go on lying there until snow flew, unless something was done, and Ralph had to get home to dinner. So he picked it up in his arms and started to carry it to the side of the road. Then it came to life. Legs flew in all directions. It was like trying to cuddle an indignant centipede, Ralph informed me later. He put it down off the road in a hollow by a large rock, and leaped into the Ford.

The first I knew about the affair was when I heard the car come into the yard, and Ralph’s voice shouting for me to come quick and ask no questions. Fortunately, I have long been accustomed to follow orders first and find out afterwards, so I set the pudding I was making back off the fire and ran. On the way back to Wangan Hill, Ralph explained what had happened, so I was all prepared when we left the car at the foot of the hill and walked the last hundred yards to where he had left the fawn. The hollow by the rock was empty.

Then we looked up. There, not twenty feet from us, were the doe and fawn, standing in a patch of sunlight. It was one of the prettiest sights I have ever seen. The little fellow was standing perfectly still while its mother lapped it over from head to tail, to get the obnoxious human smell off it. They both stared at us gravely for a long moment, and then the doe wheeled and trotted away, — not frightened, not even nervous, — with her child galloping obediently at her heels.

3

The animals we see most, next to deer, are porcupines. I can’t seem to find it in my heart to love a porcupine. They’re perfectly harmless, — they don’t throw quills, by the way, — but they’re stupid and ugly, and they do a lot of damage. They fill the dogs full of quills, — which is the dogs’ fault, I’m willing to grant, - and they try to gnaw our houses down around our ears, and they climb trees and sometimes girdle the tops, thereby killing them. The quills stick up all over their backs in an untidy mess, and they have blunt rodent faces with dull, slow eyes. They don’t make any noise, except a rattling sound, which I’ve read is made by clacking their quills, but which I think, myself, they make with their teeth. I can’t vouch for this. I don’t have much traffic with them.

We had a weasel living in the chimney base once, too, but we never could get very matey with him, either. He was too quick for us. We’d see him, brown in summer and white in winter, flowing like quicksilver in and out of the rocks and bristling his whiskers at us. He always gave me the shivers. He was so deadly purposeful, and he had such a vicious eye. I was glad when he moved away.

We’ve never seen a wildcat, though there are plenty of them around. We see their tracks often enough, and sometimes hear them yowling on the ridges. They aren’t dangerous, unless cornered, but they like to make you think they are. One of their tricks is to follow you along the road, just about dusk. They don’t stay out in the open, where you can turn around and heave a rock at them. They keep in the bushes at the side. When you stop, they stop. When you hurry, they hurry. After a while it gets on your nerves.

One evening in the late fall I was sitting in the living room with Ralph and our friend Rush Rogers, knitting. It was a very peaceful scene. For once the room was reasonably tidy, and for once the dogs — we had two then, Kyak and Mukluk - were sensible to their responsibilities, and were lying in picturesque postures in front of the fire, instead of trying to crowd us out of our best chairs. The firelight glanced off the backs of the books on their shelves in a satisfactorily colorful manner, and a little light snow brushed the windowpanes gently from time to time. The radio was coming in well, and the room was full of music. I should have been purring like a cat, with contentment, but I couldn’t settle down.

Rush said, “Good Lord, Louise, what ails you? You’re usually positively soporific. I never saw you twitchy before.”

I said, “I don’t know. I just feel someone looking at me.”

Ralph hooted. “I suppose so. Who, for instance?”

I said stubbornly, “I don’t know. I only know that someone’s looking at me. I can feel it.”

I didn’t get any sympathy. I was told that neither of them could stand notional females, and if I was planning to develop a temperament, I’d better go somewhere else and develop it. They both knew a lot of sure-fire cures for temperament.

But I still felt someone looking at me.

Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. I got up, lit a lantern, and went out on the porch. The dogs raised their heads somnolently, and Ralph and Rush exchanged looks of bored amusement. It was snowing lightly outside and the porch floor on the open end was sugared thinly over — all except a little spot where a furry rump had been planked, and two smaller ones that were clearly paw marks, directly outside the window at which I was sitting. A scramble in the snow told of a hasty departure when I had opened the door. The evidence was easy to read. A wildcat had been sitting within three feet of me all evening, watching me knit. I learned later that this is not at all uncommon. They love to look in at lighted windows. I can’t imagine why. I can’t imagine, either, what ailed the dogs that they didn’t put up a howl — except that they have a real talent for always doing the wrong thing, even when the wrong thing is nothing.

We see bear only once in a while, although there are plenty of them around here. They are shy animals, not easily caught unaware. We usually come on them in various berry patches, when their attention is concentrated on picking berries. These encounters are carried off with a minimum of excitement. We say “Oh,” and start south, and the bear says “Oh,” and starts north. Not that anybody is afraid of anybody, you understand. We just don’t like to intrude on each other’s privacy.

4

We don’t believe in confining wild animals. Once we made an exception, but that was none of our seeking. It was more or less wished on us by circumstances. This is the way it happened. I had asked Coburn’s driver to bring me in three lemons, so when Ralph came home with the mail and handed me a little paper bag, I thought I knew what was in it. I tipped it up and dumped the contents out on the kitchen workbench. Then I did a typical female, clutching my pant legs and shrieking, “Eeeee! Take that thing away from here.” My lemons had suffered a sea change into a two or three days old skunk.

When I recovered my composure enough to look the thing over, I had to admit it was cute. It was about three inches long, with an equally long tail and about half-inch legs, and it was striped black and white like any other skunk. Ralph had seen it in the road when he went up to get the mail, and when he came back, over an hour later, it was still there. By then it had fallen into a deep rut and was unable to get out. He stopped the car to help it, and discovered that it was almost too weak to stand. We discovered later that, the day before, a mother skunk accompanied by her new and numerous offspring had had a skirmish there with a dog belonging to one of Coburn’s guests. (The dog lost, incidentally.) In the fracas, this little fellow, whom we named Rollo, got lost.

You can’t go off and leave a young thing to die of starvation, naturally, so Ralph picked it up and brought it home. He put it in the lemon bag so that he could hold it without hurting it while he drove with one hand. He thought he could probably figure out some way to feed it after he got it home.

Cookie, Kyak’s mother and the best dog we ever had, was our dog of the moment. Not to put too strong a point on it, she was the best dog anybody ever had, bar none. Kyak and the other pups were a couple of weeks old, and we were still keeping them in a pen in the corner of the kitchen, where they’d be warm and where Cookie could reach them easily. While we were debating the skunk commissary question, she came in to dispense the evening meal to her family. That seemed to be the answer. We found an unoccupied nipple, told Cookie everything was under control, and added Rollo to the roster. She looked a little startled, but, being the dog she was, took our word for it that the situation was entirely comme il fout. That’s the kind of good dog she was.

Cookie was willing, and Rollo had the right idea, but a husky is built on a somewhat grander scale than a skunk, so it wouldn’t work. Then we thought of a medicine dropper, and that did work. Poor little Rollo went at it, clutching the dropper frenziedly with both front paws, and never stopped drinking the warmed canned milk and water until his little stomach was as round and hard — and about as large — as a golf ball. By this time Cookie’s four pups were gorged and asleep, so we dumped Rollo in with them. Cookie looked at us, smelled of him, and looked at us again, trying to understand what was expected of her. Cookie definitely was a lady, and she always tried to live up to her station in life. She understood that we meant that she was to take care of this odd-looking addition to her family. So she rolled him over with her nose and, despite his struggles, lapped Rollo thoroughly from stem to stern, just as she washed her own children. After that Rollo belonged. Nobody was going to accuse her of favoritism; and from that day on, Rollo was just another husky puppy, as far as she was concerned.

I think he, himself, thought he was a dog. Certainly the other pups treated him like one of themselves. The whole lot of them played together as puppies do, roughhousing and mock-fighting, chewing each other’s tails and ears, and attempting mayhem in any form. At first we used to try to rescue Rollo. The pups were almost ten times as big as he was, and I was afraid he’d get killed. But he didn’t thank me at all for my solicitude. When I put him down again at a safe distance from the fray, he’d stamp his hind legs in a towering rage — the skunk method of expressing extreme irritation, and the last step before the gas attack — and rush back to fling himself into the battle. I still don’t understand why he didn’t get completely ruined. I’ve often seen one dog grab him by the scruff of the neck while another grabbed his tail, pulling him in opposite directions with all their might, growling and shaking him as puppies will do with a piece of rope. It made my stomach ache to watch, but he apparently loved it, for when they released him he’d always rush in for more. It’s my opinion that that twenty-four hours of being lost in the wilderness so early in life left a bad scar on his subconscious, so that he valued any attention as preferable to no attention. He’d never let himself be left alone for a moment, if he could help it, and when the pups slept he was never content to sleep on the edge of the heap. He’d always burrow down into the center, completely out of sight.

He used to follow me around like a shadow as I did my housework. He’d be at full gallop never more than six inches behind my heels, and if I reversed my field he’d sidestep and fall right in again. It was lucky he was so fast on his feet. Half the time I’d never know he was there, and if I’d ever stepped on him, there wouldn’t have been even a grease spot left. He was so tiny he could easily curl up in one of my shoes and have plenty of room left. It made him simply furious to have me go upstairs. The risers of the steps were much too high for him to negotiate, and I’d come back down again to find him stamping back and forth in a dudgeon below the first step. That stamping never failed to amuse me. He’d not only be mad - he’d be just, damn good and mad! And yet, though he obviously wanted to make a noise like thunder and stamp the house down, the best he could make was a little pattering sound on the floor. If you’ve ever gone out of a room in a fury and slammed the door behind you with what was supposed to be a shattering crash, only to find it was equipped with a pneumatic check and so eased soundlessly into place, you can appreciate how he probably felt. Still, despite his rages, he never in all the time he was with us made the slightest smell in the house. We thought some of having him operated on, but the vet in Rumford said frankly he had never done such an operation, so we let it go. We are glad now that we didn’t find someone who could do it. He was cleaner around the house than any cat we ever had and he never, even in his infancy, made a single error.

Only once that we know of did he ever make a smell, and we couldn’t blame him for that; in fact, Ralph applauded him. We had at that time a cat named Jane, and she and Rollo had always hated each other, for no good reason that we could ever see, for they always left each other strictly alone. One evening I had made a chocolate malted milk for Rollo — that was his favorite food — and set it out. Rollo was just starting in on it when Jane appeared around the corner. Rollo stamped violently but Jane continued to approach and sniffed at the saucer. She wasn’t going to touch the contents, I’m sure; she was just curious. But he had warned her and she had paid no attention. Faster than the eye could follow, he turned end for end, arched his tail over his back, and — whisht! smack into Jane’s face at a range of less than a foot. She rolled right over backward, scrambled to her feet, and went off like a bullet. She never came back. Presently she took up her abode at the nearest lumber camp.

We had been afraid that after the pups and the skunk reached the age where they could eat solid food Rollo would starve unless we fed him separately. He could never hold his own, we thought, against that gang of ruffians. We might as well have spared ourselves the worry. He was quite capable of looking out for himself. When the crush around the communal pan of puppy biscuit and milk became too great, he would wade right into the middle of the dish, forcing the pups to eat along the edges while he stuffed himself practically into a coma.

Rollo became really a terribly spoiled brat before the summer had advanced very far. We gave him too much attention, and so did the dogs, and so did the sports who kept coming in in increasing numbers as the news of our pet skunk spread. I never thought to have my social career sponsored by a skunk, but that is what it amounted to. I met more new people during that summer than I ever have before or since in the same length of time. Perfect strangers, they’d come drifting into the yard from God knows where, say “Good morning,” and then come to the point: “We heard you’ve got a pet skunk.” The upshot was always the same: Would it be all right for them to have their pictures taken holding Rollo? The folks back home — Rollo became as cameraconscious as a child movie star, and as objectionable. He’d look bored and sulky, but he’d never miss the chance to have his picture taken. His complete composure served as an excellent foil, I might add, to the nervous apprehension on the faces of his picture-companions. Nobody ever seemed to take our word for it that he was perfectly safe.

Skunks are a horribly maligned animal. Everyone shuns them. Everyone accuses them, and without ascertaining the facts, of various crimes, such as hen killing and egg sucking. Actually they don’t do so much damage; on the contrary, they are the natural enemies of vermin of all sorts and are among man’s best friends in the country. They are naturally gentle and easily tamed. A skunk will never attack until he is sure his person is in danger, or unless he is startled. I wish more people would bother to be nice to skunks. We were, and it paid. Rollo, in spite of being spoiled, made a perfect house pet while he was with us.

We never made any effort to confine him, so it couldn’t last forever. He was always free to come and go as he pleased. We even untacked a corner of the screen in the kitchen door so that he could get in and out at will. As he grew older, he began to revert to nature, and the skunk nature is nocturnal. He slept more days, and roamed about nights. When we went out to the woodshed in the early, dewy morning to get kindling to Start the breakfast fire, we would more and more often meet him, just coming home from a night’s ramble. Then for a while he wouldn’t come home for two or three days at a time, and finally he didn’t come home at all. We’d meet him sometimes a mile or more down the Carry Road, and he’d run up to us and we’d pick him up. He never forgot us, and we never forgot him. We just grew apart, as those whose interests diverge always grow apart. Finally we stopped seeing him altogether. I don’t know what eventually did happen to him — whether he wandered away, or whether he met with an accident. Very few wild animals die of old age. One thing we were glad of then: that if he did meet with death in any of the common swift wilderness forms, at least he was able to go down fighting. We hadn’t rendered him defenseless.

5

I’ve only been frightened once by animals since I came here to live. That was up at Miller’s, and was a completely silly performance. It happened a long time ago, when Cookie was only a puppy. She had an enemy — Miller’s older cow — who never overlooked an opportunity to chase her. I don’t know how the feud started, and I don’t know whether the cow would have hurt Cookie if she had caught her. It may have been just her bovine idea of a game. However that may be, she certainly looked like business as she thundered after that terrified little ball of fur, with her head down, her nostrils flaring, and her tail out stiff behind. I don’t blame Cookie for putting her tail between her legs and scuttling.

It was in June, and Alice Miller had a houseful. There were her sister Amy and two small girls, half a dozen men who were working repairing the dam, a woman named Polly Gould who was doing the cooking for them, and her little girl, besides Alice’s own family. We went up there one evening to visit with the assembled multitude, and in the course of events Alice, Amy, Polly, and I took their collection of five small children and my small dog up into the back pasture to see if the blueberries were ripe. The two cows and Betty, the horse, were grazing off toward the edge of the woods, but we didn’t pay any attention to them. Betty is as cross-grained a piece of horseflesh as ever drew breath, but usually she minds her own affairs.

Cookie saw her old enemy in the distance, too, and I suppose she thought that now her inning had come. She’d been the chasee all too often. Now she was with me, the allpowerful; now it was her turn to be the chaser. I don’t suppose it ever entered her addled little head that the creature lived and breathed that would have the temerity to think of attacking me or Ralph. We were God, as far as she was concerned. If you’re walking with God, there’s nothing you can’t dare. You even dare to run yapping after a dragon and nip at its heels.

Unfortunately, neither the cows nor that limb of Satan, Betty, were True Believers. As one, they threw back their heads in affronted amazement, snorted, and took off after Cookie, who knew only one thing to do. She turned in her tracks and sought sanctuary under the shadow of my wing.

The first I knew about the whole business was when Amy shrieked, seized her youngest by the arm, and started running for the gate. The rest of us looked up. I don’t know how two cows and a horse could create the illusion of being a whole herd of Texas longhorns gone loco, but they did. We each grabbed a child, and the whole hunch of us streamed off across the field, women shouting for help, children screaming with terror, and poor little ki-yiing Cookie bringing up the rear. None of us up to that time had been famous for her track work, but that evening, in spite of the rough ground, the boulders, and the bushes, we shattered all records for a two-hundred-yard dash. I swear that as we fell over the rail Fence hot breath was fanning the hacks of our necks, and horns were grazing our posteriors.

That’s the only time I’ve been frightened in a country where hear and wildcats are common, and cows and horses extremely rare; and because I was so scared, and the whole thing so ridiculous, my immediate reaction, once we were safe, was unbounded rage. I was mad at Millers livestock, at Cookie for bringing them down on us like a wolf on the fold, and at myself for rurning. But I was maddest of all at Ralph and Renny Miller and the crew of workmen off the dam. When we had got our breath and the spots had stopped dancing around in front of our eyes, did we see them running anxiously to our aid? We did not! We saw them all lying helpless on Millers back stoop, weak with laughter.