By al drinkle
They seem to be everywhere at this time of year. As dusk grants us her respite from the day's heat and illumination, the striped little stinkers exit their dens (which are probably under your deck or behind your shed) and begin their exploration of the neighbourhood. You've seen them. They're cute as hell, but their indomitable malodor is a force to be feared and respected.
Skunks are magnets for dogs with any sort of prey drive. It makes sense—they're slower than rabbits, less alert than cats, and they don't seek refuge in trees like squirrels. Despite a pair of experiences whose consequences should have reasonably dissuaded her, my dearly departed dog of some years ago only became more possessed with wreaking havoc upon these fetid bastards as she advanced into old age. The German word, Stinktier, is hilariously fitting.
A few years ago during my brief flirtation with running, I was awoken particularly early by the eye-watering reek of skunk blast. Upon exiting my front door shortly thereafter I almost gagged on the intensity of the aroma, and while completing my route, couldn’t help noticing that the smell strengthened again as I approached my home... My wife had awoken by this point and bemoaned the olfactory torture just prior to observing what seemed to be a reposing creature in our back yard.
I crept out cautiously. On the grass just beyond our deck lay dead and bloodied one of the largest skunks that I've ever seen. It had been subjected to a partial disembowelling as if its stomach had barfed itself onto our lawn—roadkill without a road. Our yard is fenced so death must have come from above, and cursory research revealed that owls, given their nocturnal hunting proclivities and minimal sense of smell, serve as a formidable threat to skunks.
I felt that my nostrils must also be bleeding from the horrific pungency, but gratefully this small detail was mere imagination. What wasn't imagined was the daunting inconvenience of an immeasurably fragrant mammalian corpse that would have to be extricated from my property.
After some contemplation, I shook open a heavy duty garbage bag, thick as can be, then nimbly grasped the dead, floppy skunk through the plastic and pulled the bag inside out upon itself as if I was picking up a colossal piece of dog shit. I tied off the end and, holding the bag as far from my person as possible, rode my bike one-handed to the nearest public green space to make an unsavoury deposit in a communal garbage bin. My yard retained an osmic reminder of the massacre for at least another year, but this noteworthy morning doesn’t quite serve as my favourite personal skunk anecdote.
Many years ago on a cool autumn night, I slept atypically well and experienced an unsettlingly vivid dream. In my dream I had been walking for some time before stumbling across a yellow school bus that I instinctively knew served as a canteen for a movie set that I had inexplicably been working on. Upon boarding the bus I was handed a paper plate with beans and sausage, a crusty bread roll, and tricoloured cole slaw. I sauntered down the aisle, taking an empty spot at a small booth across from a couple of fellow actors or crew members or whatever it was that we all contributed to this nonsense dream film. I was pushing the beans around the plate, contemplating a bite when I was distracted by something rushing towards the bus across the vast parking lot.
From my window I could see Richard Harvey sprinting in our direction. Though Richard is a brisk and determined walker, it didn't occur to me in the dream that I'd never seen him run in my entire life. Yet there he was, hustling like he was trying out for track and field.
Richard leapt onto the schoolbus and stood next to the driver's seat, gripping the support rail and staring wide-eyed down the aisle. Tucked into his black jeans was a tight black T-shirt with a gigantic skunk silk screened upon the front. Everybody on the bus sat frozen, mouths agape with their cutlery held in mid-air, staring at Richard in his skunk shirt as he slowly turned a maniacal gaze towards me.
Once his eyes were fixed on mine, he cryptically but definitively stated, “Watch out!”
The next day at work I shared the dream with my colleagues. They humoured my tale with a superficial patience that failed to belie the boredom that people invariably feel when they're suffering through a synopsis of somebody else's dream. I even playfully attempted to add “Skunk Shirt” to Richard's list of nicknames but nobody seemed entertained—Richard, least of all.
Darkness crept over the city as I rode my bike home that evening. After an unremarkable commute I was a mere block or two from my house when I saw a smallish, short legged, mostly-black cat shuffle out from beneath a bush and onto the street not far in front of me. It seemed a bit drunk with a wobbliness of gait that rendered it endearingly graceless, and since I'm not superstitious about black cats crossing my path, it struck me as possibly the least intimidating creature conceivable. All the while, the vividity of the previous night's vision still haunted me.
I hadn't slowed my pace and was about to circle behind the critter when a streetlight chillingly illuminated two stark white streaks upon its back, and the words of Richard “Skunk Shirt” Harvey—O, that dreamtide prophet! That omen of potential aromatic obliteration!—rang in my ears. I ground my bike to a silent halt and circled the block to approach my house from another, hopefully skunkless, direction.
It was a close call, and I'm eternally grateful that I was spared a skunk spray thanks to the significant, if unbeknownst, effort that Richard must have invested to visit me in a dream.
