"A family of seven young skunks."
My presence was unsuspected and their play went on. It was a sight worth the rest of the vacation. When you find wild animals so far off their guard as to play, do as Captain Cuttle suggests—"make a note of it." It is a red-letter experience.
I doubt if there is another set of children in all the out-of-doors so apparently incapable of playing as a set of young skunks. You have watched lambs stub and wabble about in their gambols, clumsy and unsafe upon their legs because there was so little body to hold down so much legs. These young skunks were clumsier than the wabbliest-legged lambkin that you ever saw, and for just the opposite reason—there was so little legs to hold up so much body. Such humpty-dumpty babies! They fell over each other, over the stones, and over their paws as if paws were made only to be tumbled over. Their surest, quickest way of getting anywhere was to upset and roll to it.
It was a silent playground, as all animal playgrounds are. The stir of the dead leaves and now and then a faint hiss was all I could hear. Who has ever heard any noise from untamed animals at play? One day I came softly upon two white-footed mice playing in the leaves along a wood-road and squeaking joyously; but as a rule the children of the wilds, no matter how exciting their games, rarely utter a word. Silence is the first lesson they are taught. Or is it now instinctive? Have not generations of bitter life-struggle made the animals so timid and wary that the young are born with a dread of discovery so strong that they never shout in their play? This softness and silence was the only striking difference to be seen in the play of these young skunks here in the falling twilight, safely hidden among the rocks of the wild ravine, and that of school-children upon a village green.
The child is much the same, whether the particular species is four-footed or whether it goes on two feet. Here below me one of the little toddlers got a bump that hurt him, and it made him just as mad as a bump ever did me. There was a fuss in a twinkling. He stamped with both fore feet, showed his teeth, humped his back, and turned both ends of his tiny body, like a pinched wasp, toward every one that came near him. The others knew what that particular twist meant and kept their distance. I knew the import of that movement, too. These young things had already learned their lesson of self-defense. I believe that a three-weeks-old skunk could hold his own against the world.
The dusk was deepening rapidly in the ravine; and I was just about to shout to see how they would take it, when a long black snout was thrust slowly out from beneath a piece of the ledge, and the mother of the young skunks appeared. Without giving them a look, she crawled off around a rock. The family followed; and here they all fell to eating something—what, I could not see. I tried to scare them away, but at my commands they only switched their tails and doubled into defensive attitudes. Finally with some stones I drove them, like so many huge crabs, into the den, and—horrors! they were eating one of their own kin, a full-grown skunk, the father of their family, for all they knew or cared, that had been killed the night before in one of the islander's chicken-coops.
The skunk is no epicure. The matter of eating one's husband or wife, one's father or mother, has never struck the skunk as out of the ordinary. As far as my observation goes, the supreme question with him is, Can this thing be swallowed? Such thoughts as, What is it? How does it taste? Will it digest? Is it good form?—no skunk since the line began ever allowed to interfere with his dinner. An enviable disregard, this of dietetics! To eat everything with a relish! If the testimony of Maine farmers can be credited, this animal is absolutely omnivorous. During the winter the skunks burrow and sleep, several of them in the same hole. When they go in they are as fat as September woodchucks; but long before spring, the farmers tell me, the skunks grow so lean and hungry that, turning cannibal, they fall upon their weaker comrades and devour them, only the strongest surviving until the spring.