Willis Eschenbach
When I was a kid on the cattle ranch, my stepdad worked in the surrounding forest as what’s called a “timber feller”. The fellers are the ones who actually fell the trees, and it’s a dangerous job. As a result, they are the aristocracy of the logging crew, and by all accounts, he was a good one. One of the things he was best at was finding baby animals whose parents had been killed and bringing them home for us kids to raise. My mom used to find them too as she was working around the ranch. At various times we had a baby horned owl named Dr. Simpson, a baby flying squirrel that could really fly, and of all things, a tiny baby skunk. Named The Skunk. We also had a dog named Puppy until it died of old age, and a cat named Kitty. The Skunk was always and ever just called “The Skunk”, in capital letters like that.
Dr. Simpson was the most amazing baby bird. She used to ride around on my mom’s shoulder. Her head could do that crazy owl trick of going almost all of the way around and then snapping back to the other side so fast it looked like her head was going in circles. Us kids loved to walk around her. She liked to take showers in the sink. We’d turn on the faucet, and she’d hop in under it, and preen her feathers, and make her funny owl sound.
We never kept them in pens or cages or anything, they just lived in the house. The squirrel liked to glide from the upper bunk bed to the floor, with us kids cheering her on.
We never mistook the owl and the squirrel for domestic animals, though. And when they got older, they seemed to recognize that. We made no attempt to send them back to the wild, but at some point when they got old enough they started spending more and more time outside, and then taking forays away from the house, and longer forays, but always returning at nightfall and sleeping in their old beds. Then after a while, first the flying squirrel and then the owl was just gone, and we never saw either of them again.
The Skunk was different from the start. There’s no mistaking a skunk for a domestic animal. When they are tiny babies like The Skunk was, they hardly have any skunk smell at all. Their squirt guns don’t even develop until they are a few months old. But even then it’s clear that they are wild.
Now you can get skunks de-scented, but when we first asked about it The Skunk was too young … and then the days ran on, and ran on some more, The Skunk was still around, ranch life went on, dog, cat, kids, horses, chickens, pigs, a whole raft of cattle, and the odd skunk … and one evening we were all getting dressed up to go to town. Going into town from the ranch was a big deal, seven miles of bad dirt road, it was always a notable occasion. And this time it was the school fair, involving bobbing for apples and the like, a night for kids instead of grownups. There were about twenty kids in our grade school, and seven of them were me and my brothers and cousins. My oldest cousin, she would have been maybe eleven, I was about seven. We were all excited to go. And that night, my oldest cousin walked out on the porch, where she managed to startle The Skunk. He turned, and did that funny dang half-handstand thing that they do, lifted his hind end in the air, and gave my cousin the full head-to-toe treatment.
I’d never realized until that day that smells could be contagious, but that skunk smell was more catching than Ebola, and at least forty percent as lethal. My cousin came running back in the house, she was a very unhappy young lady … and when we laughed at her and said “P.U.”, that strange acronym from my childhood that meant she smelled really really bad, she understandably lost the plot entirely and tackled us and punched us around … by the time mom and my aunt came in from the back, every one of us had caught the smell. We didn’t just smell of skunk, however. We reeked of skunk; we radiated skunk; we were the source and very fount of skunk. It was one of those smells that seem to make the air around you shimmer like a heat mirage.
The Skunk was still on the porch, no telling what he thought of the result of his first foray into the perfume business.
All seven of us were unceremoniously dumped into the bathtub, the shower was turned on, and we were instructed to start scrubbing. Nowadays people talk about using tomato juice to get rid of the smell, but where the heck were we going to get ten gallons of tomato juice? Fels Naptha soap was what we used, and it does a dang poor job with skunk, too.
We finally got scrubbed up, and we got in the car, and we went to the school fair. We were not exactly pariahs, but people did tend to maintain a respectful distance from the entire tribe of us … and for weeks afterwards I’d turn a corner in the house and there that smell would be again …
The Skunk lived with us for some months after that. We didn’t hold that evening against him, we just kept more distance and moved kinda slow around him. And as he came of age he too started to travel further and further from home.
But curiously, he didn’t disappear entirely one day the way that Dr. Simpson and the flying squirrel had. Instead, he came home less and less often. He started by staying out overnight one night at a time. But the next day he’d come back to eat the dog food out of the bowl with Puppy. They were great friends, they’d chow down together. He’d stay a day or four, then he’d disappear for another day. Then his absences grew longer and longer, his stays with us shorter and shorter … and one day he stopped coming back to eat at all.
And that would have been the end of it … except that there was a green grassy hillside across from the ranch house, on the far side of the barn in the picture below, with Latour Butte in the background behind the tall firs growing on the slope of that hill.
And late one afternoon, with the golden sunlight slanting far and low across the fields, we saw The Skunk sitting out on that hillside, just sitting at the top of the field and looking at the ranch house. We all went out to see if it really was him, and it was. He was dignified in his greeting, skunks are great on their dignity. But he kept a bit of distance, he didn’t want us to get close to him. We weren’t too enthusiastic in that regard either. But he didn’t run away. We sat with him for a while, looking back at the ranch house. And when mom called us for dinner and we left to return to the ranch house, we tried to get him to come for dinner … but instead, he stayed and watched us walk back. We waved goodbye to him.
And that would have been the end of it too, just like with Dr. Simpson the owl, and the flying squirrel … but for the next couple years, a few times every year, always in the early evening, I would see The Skunk at that favorite spot of his on the hillside, where he would sit, and look just across the little valley to the where the ranch house lights shone out through the windows. From there he could hear the shouts of us kids, and see the people come and go in the evening. He’d just sit there and watch us for a while, and then the next time I looked up, he’d be gone. I don’t recall ever seeing him arriving at that spot or leaving that spot, I’d just look up one evening and he’d be there, and I’d watch him sit there. I always loved to see him, and then after a while, I’d look up and he’d be gone.
Even as a kid I always wondered what it was that brought The Skunk back to revisit the scenes of his childhood … and more than that, what he was feeling when he watched the evening lights come on, what he felt when mom would call us kids in from outside for dinner, a dinner that he used to share with us. I wondered, why didn’t he come and have dinner with us like he used to? He knew my mom’s dinner call of old, he used to show up just like the rest of us kids at mealtimes. He would come in from wherever he was playing and he would eat next to Puppy out of the dog dish.
What did The Skunk feel, I wondered, when he saw mom once again framed in the front door with the light behind her, hearing the siren song of food and friendship from that warm ranch house in the gloaming, with the call of our mother, the only loving mother he’d ever really known, ringing out across the hillside … and ringing back from behind him the pulsing dance of the wilderness, the rise and dark loom of the forest, and the songs all of his ancestors echoing from the hills? What does a halfling skunk feel then, a child of two worlds, pulled from both sides by the endless and intricate bonds of blood and adventure and wilderness and kinship?
As a man who loves to solve puzzles, I rejoice in the fact that this astounding planet provides a cornucopia of mysteries that I will never solve, questions that I will never answer … and as a stranger from my birth, I can only have compassion for The Skunk, for I too have spent a lifetime pulled between the warm and the wild.
And I have no option. I have to have compassion for The Skunk and his choice, because over the years I’ve basically blown all of my opportunities to live a proper domesticated existence. At this late date, about all that’s left for me is to keep on making the choice The Skunk made … don’t forget the warm, but keep living the wild adventure out on the edge of the world.
Because when the bell tolls and the ride is over, you don’t want to be sitting around recounting how many warm dinners you had …
w.
OT
[snip . . indeed, post on Tips and Notes, thanks . . mod]
people who chop down trees in the region where I live are called criminals
@ur momisugly Jim south London says:
“Was that an unused script from The Waltons.”
There is always some. Why? Nobody knows, but they also like pulling off wings of flies.
Can’t you enjoy a good story for what it is?
Roger Sowell says:
February 9, 2013 at 11:30 pm
Ah, my dear fellow, what a wonderful world you miss with your fantasies that somehow you are superior to the animals, that you are special and can do things they can’t …
Here’s the curious part. When I was a kid, there was supposed to be a bright line between humans and animals. There were supposed to be human characteristics and animal characteristics, human behavior and animal behavior, and if you applied one to the other it was called “anthropomorphism”.
The “human” characteristics, the ones that were supposed to be unique to humans, were such things as language, and the ability to use tools, and the ability to grasp and utilize abstract concepts, and to form complex social societies, and mourn our dead, and the like.
However, much of that bright line division has fallen by the wayside from things like gorillas using sign language and crows using tools and animals painting pictures and dolphins talking to each other and sharing childcare and elephants mourning their dead and dolphins bearing their dying to keep their head above water and the like. Every time we think there is something that makes humans all wonderful and super-special and different, we find out well, there’s an animal somewhere doing that too …
And as a result, the whole idea of “anthropomorphism”, the idea that there are uniquely human characteristics that we should never apply to animals, the idea that there is a bright-line division that separates the lower animals from the higher us, turns out to be mostly BS, just a way for humans to feel superior to other forms of life, and sooo twentieth century … Me, I think we need a new word, the opposite of anthropomorphism. It would mean a pathological inability to accept that we’re actually not much different from animals at all …
Now, as regards The Skunk, here’s the thing. I think he came back time after time because he was caught between the warm and the wild. If you don’t think that was the case, Roger, and it might not have been, what is your theory about what brought him back there? It obviously wasn’t food, or sex, or territory, or any of the things we normally think drive animals, it was just a barren hillside … so what was it that brought him back to that spot?
w.
The last skunk story/encounter I had was a few months ago. Middle of the night and I went over by the dumpster to “take a leak” and while doing so a critter that I thought was a stray cat came around the corner so I “hosed it down” so to speak. When it got into the light I saw it was a skunk! Man won that round!
Joe Prins says:
February 9, 2013 at 10:34 pm
Great tale Willis. Born, bred and raised in the CITY, such experiences were not part of my childhood. Do I miss those type of country incidents? NO. After all, do you miss Not living and growing up in the city? Without gps I am normally lost about 15 miles outside the city limit. On the other hand, almost any city feels like home.
Just a different perspective.
==================
“Just a different perspective.” You got my attention with that. While outside the city pay attention to which way the water flows and the mountains run. Watch the flow/direction of the high level clouds. Remember the sun and the moon is not at all times in the same place. The big dipper is your friend.
Now with regards to the city and a GPS, never trust a GPS in a city but sometimes it’s better than flipping a coin. Shopping centers all look the same. One hour in city driving can be 2 miles whereas it can be 50 in the wild.
It’s all in the perspective
One more thing to add to my comment above. I’ve never “needed” my .357 in the wild but it was necessary a couple of times in the city.
Re: Willis Eschenbach says:
February 10, 2013 at 3:12 am
“… so what was it that brought him back to that spot?”
To laugh at the humans so slavishly bound to “the warm”?
To see if young Willis was yet ready to join him in the “wild”? (Maybe he knew Willis was “different”)
Is this a joke? It reads like every Gorenecdote from AIT.
Ah Willis. A lovely story and reading it gives me a pang of loss as I think of my life as a youngster. A life similar to yours but with the differences that there are with being on the other side of the world.
I grew up poor, but had no idea of that until I was in my teens, and even then it was only a realization that if I wanted anything I needed to go out and do some work and earn some money to get it.
My father owned some mountain country. Hard, wild, timbered and beautiful and he tried to raise cattle there, with us kids as free labour as we grew old enough. He had cattle, but in retrospect I realize he also had too many horses and dogs, and he probably liked them better than the cattle. And better than the kids. We learnt a lot early about life and death with animals and wildlife around us every day.
It took an hour and half to ride up to the plateau, so we were often riding home in the dark, usually cold and sometimes wet (no expensive jackets for us!), and on clear evenings I’d see the lights of farmhouses in the valleys on the other side, two thousand feet below us and looking warm and cosy. And I’d think of the families in there eating and talking, and likely viewing their television sets. We didn’t have a television, so I remember that last one as an envious thought. I remember sometimes feeling very cut off from the world on those lonely rides, usually with a silent sibling along, or perhaps my even more silent father. I looked forward to a time where I’d be qualified (in something!), and wealthy and jetting about the world.
My father eventually was forced to sell most of the land, and he and my brother moved onto work as timber cutters and loggers, initially cutting fenceposts then moving more and more into mill timber. I sometimes joined in, but I felt I struggled with big chainsaws and felling trees on steep slopes. My brother and father were big men, both of them about sixteen stone to my ten stone, and I felt like a weakling next to them. Eventually university and the hope of good jobs and salaries drew me away, but there I found that for cash I still gravitated to laboring jobs. Even when I was supposed to be in lectures I’d often be working in the sun and sweating, as a builders labourer, a brickies labourer, a concrete labourer and I was in my early twenties before I finally realized I could outwork and outlast most normal men on most jobs.
Well, I’m long since qualified and now do all those things I had wanted then, but I sometimes think I’d give almost anything to have again that long sold little private piece of mountain and to raise a few cattle, and gaze down without envy on the ‘normal’ people in the valleys below. But I know I’d need to be much wealthier than I am now to sustain myself in that once so basic lifestyle.
I, too had wild pets as a kid. My favorite was a groundhog. Max was lovable and very clean and loved a good wrestling match with feints, growls and charges, but not once did he ever bite. Mom said however it was time for him to go and we found an abandoned groundhog hole and turned him loose. He Loved his new digs. For a year I could call him out with his favorite treat…ice cream.
Then one day while visiting an elderly neighbor he confided that his wife had cooked him up a groundhog over the weekend. Yep…it was Max. I never said a word to him as doing so would have come to no good.
Thanks for bringing that back, Willis!
Thanks for another great story Willis. Reminds me of many things. Taking down 75′ trees with a cross-buck saw, and reducing them to fire wood with that saw, a wedge and a sledgehammer. My dad bought his first chainsaw when I left home at sixteen. My wife and I adopted a wolf from a rescue a dozen years ago. I’ve had dogs all my life, but Isabel is a special personality, and definitely not a dog. Never cottoned much to men, took two years before she would come up to me on her own. Even though she was two when we took her in, I’ve never seen a more devoted canine than she is to my wife.
I agree with you on the anthropomorphism issue. I suspect what separates us from animals is is thinking we are different, and being unwilling to accept the negative projections we make on animals. It takes one to recognize one as it were. Over dinner with some neighbors the other night, I noted how odd it is that we live where there are no street lights, where 20′ off any given road other than a couple of highways, a human is just another piece of ambulatory meat. Yet we feel far safer than venturing into a city day or night.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the reasons this is the most popular science blog on the internet. It isn’t THE reason or even the major reason but it certainly is one that adds to the rich experience that WUWT offers and delivers.
*golf claps* Willis, what fun.
We had six baby skunks under the barn at our Childcare last spring. We never saw the mother, and they were only around for about a week. One day three popped out to play in the sun, the next day four, then five, and finally six, with the smallest and weakest appearing last. Then they were gone; I suppose the mother led them off.
The State of New Hampshire was alarmed, and said if any child touched one they needed to go to the doctor for a rabies shot, and they were going to send someone to gather the baby skunks up (and do what? I’m not sure.) However the skunks skipped town before the authorities arrived.
They were adorable. We did them no harm, and they did us no harm. I never took the chance to see if it is true baby skunks can’t spray.
The one animal that chows down on skunks is Great Horned Owls. Sometimes you can smell the reek of skunk from up a tree over your head, and that tree likely has an owl snoozing the day away in a hollow place.
So perhaps it is lucky “Dr. Suess” wasn’t living in your ranch house at the same time as “Skunk.”
Anyone who spends time with beasts knows they do sometimes act like humans. Anyone who spends time with humans knows they do sometimes act like beasts.
Another well written piece Willis. It’s interesting to note that except for a couple, most of the trolls are silent. Maybe they’re just rolling their eyes and snorting, but I don’t think so. I think that Willis’ prose skills totally intimidate them. The best part is that Willis doesn’t care, doesn’t write for them, he writes to share. Like many others here, I’ve lived in the country, in small towns on the Great Plains, in big cities in California, and “offshore” in Europe. Willis stories seem to bring back the best memories, for this I thank him a lot!
Here I sit in quiet comfort drinking coffee and looking out the window at the snowy landscape in my yard, and then Willis brings me back to reality by reminding me of skunks… well one skunk in particular, which currently is hibernating under my deck. After at least half a dozen encounters between my dogs and skunks, I have no fond memories of them. Darn you Willis for ruining my morning 🙂
My experience w/”wild” animals is similar to yours, Willis. One of the water turtles in my stream “knows” me, and comes to the bank when I’m feeding the fish. She comes out on the bank & stretches her neck out for a feed. Chicken skin is her favorite.
With just alittle practice, I could get the blue-gills & brown trout in the stream to jump 6 inches out of the water for a dangling piece of chicken skin/fat.
Wow! Whether it is a rant on climate science or a life experience your posts are always enjoyable to read. They all have such a unique perspective and conversational style. Keep writing Willis,we’ll keep reading.
re: “… It obviously wasn’t food, or sex, or territory, or any of the things we normally think drive animals, it was just a barren hillside … so what was it that brought him back to that spot?
w.”
I am sure we can attribute it to climate change.
Hummingbirds can be “trained” rather easily if you have a feeder. Just get close to the feeder for them to get used to you. Eventually I take the feeder off the hook & place it in my lap sitting in a chair. With only alittle hesitation, they’re on the feeder, eying me a bit suspiciously, but soon comfortable w/it, and the boldest hovering near my face, and even gently probing my hair & ears.
Mike Hebb talking about the 25 flying squirrels in the attic… you need to keep them out. The flying squirrel is a fire hazard because of their fondness for chewing insulation on wires. Believe me I learned all about it. Not the hard way, thankfully my home didn’t burn down, they never got in that I could tell. But they ate the insulation off everything outside. My boat trailer, farm trailer, TV & radio antennas, etc.
It was all myself to blame. Feeding birds attracted them and when I discovered the cute little buggers I put stuff out especially for them. Got a night vision monocular to see all our night critters. At dusk they would glide in. I had them eating peanuts out of my hands.
It started with a dozen flying squirrels, then two dozen and that became probably a hundred plus. They would eat the lids off my deer feeders and get trapped inside and couldn’t get out. I’d do the repairs and next night they’ve done it again until I had to remove the feeders. I had to remove the bird feeders at night because they began chewing them up. Even the hummingbirds feeder.
In fact they only quit destruction when the bad winters and poor mast crops of solar minimum/VEI 4’s forced them to move on to lower elevations.
Thanks for your stories, Willis. Bill Dance was a beagle who had a passion for dancing with skunks. It was like a beautifully coreographed dance. He knew the exact moves and distances involved that provokes skunks into this display. Never a spray (after the first one) and absolutely hilarious. I do miss him so.
Bears have carried off a couple of bird feeders and I actually called the game wardens for advice on a bobcats problem. So I learned my lessons on wildlife feeding and now limit it to birds and a few apples and carrots for the deer that raise their young on my place. Minerals blocks at greenup for them because pregnant does and sprouting bucks need them so. Feeding too much only leads to eventually problems that can get out of hand.
As others have said Skunks have dignity.
I had an apartment neighbor in NH who used his 1/2 of the garage as a place to dump garbage. It attracted a skunk who had no problem walking up to me, saying hello in a dignified way and then leaving whenever I opened the garage door. She never offered to spray.
Bats are another critter that has no problem human watching. I have had a bat follow me when prussiking (rope climbing) out of a cave trying to figure out what the heck I was doing.
I have a red fox who sits in the driveway waiting for us to come home. She has even walked up and sat on the porch with the cats. One day I opened the door and she started to walk into the house – sure slammed that door fast.
None of these animals are tame or babies they are just here.
Thank you again Willis!I just knew you were collecting your storys.
A thousand ” I’m sorry ” for my posts yesterday. [: ….
BTW ,I hear tomato juice is good for Skunk oder…don’t quote me.
Thanks again.
Alfred
Seems lots of folks have a skunk story.
One of mine is about the time some relatives left their white standard poodle with us while they travelled somewhere. Fine looking dog, all trimmed, since it was a “momma’s dog”. One night about 10 pm there was a load of barking on the front lawn and we soon learned the dog had bumped into a small skunk. The skunk nailed the dog and the dog killed the skunk. Now what? It was right at the freezing point outside. As Willis mentions, I was able to get two or three large cans of tomato juice and gave the dog a bath on the driveway. The treatment worked well enough that we were able to bring the dog inside to the basement for the night.
However, that white dog was pink for the next month or so!
phelpsr2@yahoo.com says Thank you so very much for sharing the sweetness of what’s out
there around us. Thank you,
Richard J. Phelps , Lover of God’s wild around us.