Any one can acquaint himself with the out-of-doors, if he keeps his eyes and ears open and lives a little while, should his lines happen to fall even in a city. Most cities have parks, or a river, or a zoölogical garden. A zoölogical garden is not to be despised by the naturalist. About ninety-nine hundredths of every wild animal remains wild in spite of iron bars and peanuts and visitors.
There is one little creature, however, that you must live at least on the edge of the country to know, for I never saw a zoölogical garden that had a pit or cage for him. Yet he is not a blood-thirsty nor a venomous beast; in fact, he is as harmless as a rabbit and every whit as interesting as a prairie-dog. Nevertheless it is of no use to look for him in the city. You must go out to the outskirts, to the farms and pastures, if you would meet the wood-pussy. And even here you must not look for him, but go to church or visit the neighbors after dark and let the wood-pussy look for you. It will be altogether a rare and interesting experience, an encounter to remember.
But what is a wood-pussy? That is the question I asked myself the first night I spent in Maine. I had occasion to go down the road that night, and as my hostess handed me the lantern she said warningly, "Look out for the wood-pussies on the way." From what I was able to put together that night I was sure that "wood-pussy" was a very pretty down-east name for what, in New Jersey, I had always called a skunk.
I have had about a dozen unsought meetings with this greatly dreaded, seldom-named, but much-talked-of creature. Most of them are moonlight scenes—pictures of dimly lighted, shadow-flecked paths, with a something larger than a cat in them, standing stock-still or moving leisurely toward me, silvered now with pale light, now uncertain and monstrous where the shadows lie deepest. With these memories always come certain strange sensations of scalp-risings, chill feelings of danger, of wild adventure, and of hair-breadth escape.
I have never met a skunk at night that did not demand (and receive) the whole path, even when that path was the State highway. Dispute the authority of a skunk? No more than I should the best-known ranger's in Texas when requested to hold up my hands. The skunk is the only animal left in the East that you will not parley with. Try to stare the Great Stone Face out of countenance if you wish, but when a skunk begins to sidle toward you, do not try to stare him out of the path; just sidle in the direction he sidles, and sidle as fast as you can.
Late one afternoon I was reading by the side of a little ravine on one of the islands in Casco Bay. The sharp, rocky walls of the cut were shaded by scrub-pines and draped with dewberry-vines. Presently the monotonous slop of the surf along the shore, growing fainter as the tide ebbed, was broken by a stir in the dry leaves at the bottom of the ravine. I listened. Something was moving below me. Creeping cautiously to the edge, I looked down, and there, in a narrow yard between two boulders, not ten feet beneath me, was a family of seven young skunks.
They were about three weeks old,—"kittens," the natives called them,—and seemed to be playing some kind of a rough-and-tumble game together. Funny little bunches of black and white they were, with pointed noses, beady black eyes, and very grand tails. They were jet-black, except for white tips to their tails and a pure white mark beginning on the top of their heads and dividing down their sides like the letter V.
