Scents of spring
Skunks aren’t cats.
They are named for them in some parts of the country, but they are distinctly different creatures.
There is nothing catty about a skunk. They lumber, wattle, skitter and raise their tails. They do this in the dark, in spring — when the first robin flutes from an aspen and collared doves pipe from the tip of a fir.
Early spring mornings are also the time when the guy delivering the newspaper careens around a corner in a minivan, not expecting to meet a jogger who didn’t expect the nearby cat to be a skunk.
Unlike a cat, skunks take their sweet time sniffing out garbage cans with their pointed noses and beady eyes and sometimes you don’t see a skunk, just smell it.
The tangy aroma — an oily, pungent, eau de toilette that lingers and garners attention — can make a person look around like on a surveillance camera. But it’s night and the prevailing thought is, where’s the skunk? Is it close enough to step on? Because that would be a pile of bad.
Skunks are better observed in daylight. In the event a skunk is struck by a news carrier’s minivan — its stout body feet up with Xs in its eyes — it can be safely poked with a stick, but be careful.
A pancake-like skunk on a highway might just as well be a cat, except for the smell, which is a sign of spring, just like the fluting robins and the calling doves and the sandhill cranes that fly over town in great flocks before daybreak, cackling in a chorus that makes you stop and crane your neck briefly because, well, skunks.
Keep your eyes peeled.
When I was a kid my neighbor called excitedly because he had caught a badger in a trap. Badgers were worth $15, he blubbered. Their hair is used for shaving brushes, the fur buyer had confided. I walked across fields, through strips of forest, and we stood looking at his drag, which is a long thin cable that led down a hole in the dirt. We pulled it, and it pulled back.
What should we do? He asked.
I’ll yank it out and you shoot it, I offered.
With each of my yanks, however, it pulled back more ferociously, and the more I considered it, the less confidence I had that my pal Robbie and his grandfather’s bolt action .22 could stop the buzz-saw teeth of a mad badger on a leash.
I went home and days passed before Robbie returned to school, the smudgy aroma of a polecat, not a badger at all, still seeping from his pores.
A biologist told me that skunks can’t spray when their feet are off the ground. He smiled when he said it. He didn’t smile a lot, so it concerned me. Try it, he said.
That was in the days before Siri, who has since advised that all animals are unpredictable.
Once a pal and I found a live skunk peering up from inside a steel 50-gallon drum sunk into the gravel alongside the tracks where the railroad crossed a wooden bridge. We had been grouse hunting, a laborious process that required miles of treading alongside brushy fencerows and swamp edges, while keeping alive the lightning-quick reflexes that could be called upon if a grouse momentarily flared up, breaking hours of tedium. We used the tracks to walk home because we weren’t old enough to drive. We came upon the skunk, looking rat-like and forlorn in 8 inches of water at the bottom of the barrel. We gathered sticks to build a ladder for the animal to climb out, but it only hissed menacingly and lifted its wet tail.
That’s no way to go, my pal exclaimed. Starving to death in a barrel?
He offered a coup de grace and carefully lowered the end of his 20-gauge grouse gun, slowly squeezing the trigger until the stock jumped in his arms and an eruption of skunk parts and perfume, oily railway water and a pile of debris spewed like a volcano from the opening. He had just enough time to close his eyes.
Walking home behind me, his shirt and pants slowly drying and the acrid fizzles of skunk parts in his hair, he blamed the lousy polecat for the mess he was in.
But it’s spring. And skunks are part of the picture. They climb onto porches scavenging pupper’s kibbles, they dig under decks and seek out refuge in garages and garden sheds from neighborhood dogs and cats that hamper their omnivorous discontent, all the while announcing their presence with what some refer to as an odious aroma.
But it’s really not odious at all, it just smells like a skunk, and soon it will be replaced with blossoms, which emit a different kind of fragrance that is just another presage of winter’s demise.
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Ralph Bartholdt can be reached at rbartholdt@cdapress.com.