The Skunks of Squashville

(This piece was inspired by StoryADay.org's prompt to write about the source of a strange noise.)

The skunks that inhabit the woods behind Squashville Road are famous for being long-haired and friendly. From a distance, they vaguely resemble poodles with overgrown coats or even perhaps moving shag carpets. Some bear the signature black coat with white stripe down the back. Many, however, are white, beige, or somewhat tan with a black or brown stripe down their middle.

We first became acquainted with our resident skunks when our cat Pepper came home one September evening smelling strongly of one. Her eyes were glazed and at first she was running madly through the house until Jim, fearing that all of our belongings would soon smell of skunk, corralled her into the mudroom. We were preparing ourselves to call the after-hours urgent care animal clinic when an Internet search revealed that the skunk's spray while a bit pungent was usually harmless. A tomato juice bath could cut the odor and reduce any sting that might be glazing a pet's eyes.

We had tomato paste, which we diluted with water. We soaked a bath towel in the orange liquid and managed to wrap Pepper in it. The juice seemed to ease whatever  pain she might have had in her eyes, but she now smelled like a combination of skunk and tomato sauce. More Internet searching revealed another home remedy: a warm water bath with dish soap, baking soda and hydrochloric acid. We sacrificed another towel to the cause of the cat, and she emerged from it clean and fresh-smelling. We wrapped her in a blanket and carried her into the house so she could warm herself by the fire.

We were so impressed by the clean smell of dish soap and baking soda that we then decided to stop buying laundry detergent and see how it would work on our clothes. As finances got tight, I quietly thanked the skunk that sprayed Pepper for teaching us one new trick in the art of thrift.

The skunks returned the following summer, and one of our other cats Salty -- who sports a snow-white coat of fur and can probably run a five-minute mile if she needs to -- quickly decided that she wanted to make one of them her next present for her loving owners. Dusk after dusk, as I was trying to herd her in, I would find her in the tall unmowed grass of our backyard crouched down in hunting posture. Two feet, three feet, four feet ahead of her would be the skunk -- white and woolly with a brown stripe on its back.

Now, Salty is a girl in every sense of being a girl. She preens herself incessantly. Her nightly nail and fur cleaning regime is so well known that our next door neighbor sometimes comes over to watch. But she was a kitten in a household of male cats, which meant that she learned how to be a tomboy real fast. At four months, she climbed to the top branches of our neighborhood trees. At six months, she followed me four blocks up a steep hill to a coffee shop where I would grade papers. She caught her first mouse when she was just over a year old, and outran scores of squirrels in our old neighborhood in Seattle where she was born. Upon moving to upstate New York, one of her first achievements was to bring home a baby bunny rabbit -- the first of our cats and the only one to date to do so.

I didn't worry too much about Salty's fetish for skunks. Moving to the country had given the cats a plethora of possibilities outdoors, and with ample food coming from small birds, mice, and moles, they had evolved into terrible hunters. The proof of their ineptness was reinforced when B-Girl (who is actually a boy, but that is another story) put out a paw tentatively onto the coils of a sleeping garter snake. The snake put up its head and B-Girl leaped terrified three feet into the air. I didn't actually see this happen but heard about it from my husband Jim later.  I was grateful. The last thing I needed was a gift of a garter dropped at my feet by a cat rubbing my ankles.

But I digress. Back to the skunk. I had done some research on skunk-cat relationships and had learned that they were compatible creatures. Many people who loved cats also loved skunks and adopted them as pets, a prospect that filled animal-loving Jim's heart with desire for several moments. I, however, was not willing to extend my fondness for felines that far. I did worry, however, about the skunk getting the better of Salty. Unlike Pepper, who is small, sweet, and compliant, Salty has a nasty mean-girl side to her. I couldn't imagine dousing her with tomato juice or baking soda and dishwashing soap without her inflicting some serious damage to Jim and/or myself. Fortunately for us, though not perhaps for Salty or the skunk, the neighbor's dog Chase turned the hapless skunk one afternoon into lunch.

Or so we thought. One night a few weeks after Chase devoured his prey, a rustling noise that sounded like a cat scratching at a wall startled us outdoors. We went out with a flashlight, and in the golden glow were able to make out the long silky threads of a skunk's furry back. The skunk was scrabbling quietly in a bag of dried pea pods I had left on the deck, meaning to husk them for seeds for the following spring's crop.

Preferring to feed the skunk seeds from peas over offering it an opportunity to unleash its powerful smell, we quietly turned off the flashlight and went indoors. I fell asleep on the sofa while reading a little past midnight.

Around 2 a.m., I awoke to a clatter. Jim, who had been dosing in a chair beside me, headed into the basement. A black silky body, with a signature white stripe, had managed to make its way in via a crawl space that should have been plugged but was recently opened to get some boiler work done. Jim came back upstairs, his eyes grim and his jaw set. No skunk was going to inhabit this basement. He began to hunt for a broom, when I remembering him chasing raccoons who had invaded our house in Seattle and a bat that Pascha (the fourth of our industrious cats) had brought into a Saratoga Springs apartment via an open window hastily intervened. "If you scare it, it might spray," I said. "If you hurt it, it surely will."

Jim understands sense when he hears it. He quietly closed the basement door and we both made our way up to bed.

The four cats accustomed to all sorts of oddness didn't even rise from their slumber.


In the morning, the skunk was gone. The basement smelled like a basement -- which is perhaps the one scent worse than a skunk's spray. Fall approached, then winter. And with the arrival of spring so came back the skunk. We discovered its calling card one muggy night as a thunderstorm approached. Lightning forked the sky, clouds collided into thunder, and a few minutes later, a much-needed rain began to fall. But before we could get the windows closed, our visiting skunk emitted its familiar odor. It's still with us a week later.