YANKEE CLASSIC: How in the World Do You Get a Skunk out of a Bottle?
Yankee Classic from June 1991.
The sandy dirt of Canterbury Road is just right as I pant my way past Johnson’s hayfield. The air cool enough for delight but not cold enough for long johns and stocking cap, the early sun slanting low. No sound but my labored breathing and the chunking noise of sneakers on dirt. Just another morning. Or so I think.
Then I see him, off to my right. Twenty-five feet or so from the road in a cut-over hayfield. A skunk. One of the kind that are mostly white, with the black mainly on their sides. From the corner of my eye I watch him turn, move. I detour to the other side of the road.
But something seems wrong, in the way that he moves or the way that he looks. Some glint of strangeness. I slow my pace, looking over my right shoulder. The skunk moves through the stubble toward the road. I stop and shade my eyes against the low sunlight. The skunk comes closer. And then I see it.
A glass jar. About 4-1/2 inches long, about three inches in diameter, with a pinched-in neck — a large baby-food jar, perhaps. It is jammed over the skunk’s head, completely covering it past the ears. Unable to hear or smell, the skunk raises his head in a clumsy, unnatural way. His dim eyes catch sight of my bright purple warm-up jacket. He begins, slowly but unmistakably, to come toward me.
As you probably know, this is not what skunks or any wild animals typically do. But as I stand on the bright, hard-packed road, this skunk is clearly coming toward me. More, I can’t help but feel that he is coming to me.
I begin to talk to him. Only later does it occur to me that he is probably unable to hear anything with the jar on his head, but the talk is more for my sake anyway.
“Oh, boy, “l say, as the skunk trundles closer, “if you aren’t a textbook case in conservation ethics, I’ve never seen one.” I back away a step. What if he’s rabid? He lifts his head, feebly, to the right, to the left. I can see the long white silky hairs of his back, the fogged translucence of the glass jar.
I have a sudden desire to turn, go, keep running, get home.
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What a story!!! Enjoyed it so much!
My hero!!!
I had an experience similar to yours Bob, when I was a teenager. I was walking home from the store along a paved road, woods on both sides. When suddenly a skunk with a tin can stuck onto his head, staggered out of the tall grass right in front of me. I actually never gave it a thought that he might spray me. I knelt down and took a hold of him, with my hand under his abdomen, I grasped the can and twisted it off his head. He looked up at me as if to thank me, and we both went our separate ways. I think that skunks have been given a bad. I have had a lot of contact with them over the years and have never been sprayed.
Loved this story. Once I stupidly left a bag of trash in my Florida room and came home late to find a family of skunks – a Mom and her babies – had torn a hole in the screen and were inside having a picnic. I didn’t even think of the consequences as I shooed them out the door and on their way. Not a drop of spray! Whew. My lucky night.