Wild Life Near Home

by Dallas Lore Sharp

"The family followed."

In August, along the Kennebec, I found the skunks attacking the sugar corn. They strip the ears that hang close to the ground, and gnaw the milky grain. But they do most damage among the chickens. For downright destructiveness, a knowing old skunk, with a nice taste for pullets and a thorough acquaintance with the barn-yard, discounts even Reynard. Reynard is the reputed arch-enemy of poultry, yet there is a good deal of the sportsman about him; he has some sort of honor, a sense of the decency of the game. The skunk, on the contrary, is a poacher, a slaughterer for the mere sake of it. My host, in a single night, had fourteen hens killed by a skunk that dug under the coop and deliberately bit them through the neck. He is not so cunning nor so swift as the fox, but the skunk is no stupid. He is cool and calm and bold. He will advance upon and capture a hen-house, and be off to his den, while a fox is still studying his map of the farm.

Yet, like every other predatory creature, the skunk more than balances his debt for corn and chickens by his credit for the destruction of obnoxious vermin. He feeds upon insects and mice, destroying great numbers of the latter by digging out the nests and eating the young. But we forget our debt when the chickens disappear, no matter how few we lose. Shall we ever learn to say, when the redtail swoops among the pigeons, when the rabbits get into the cabbage, when the robins rifle the cherry-trees, and when a skunk helps himself to a hen for his Thanksgiving dinner—shall we ever learn to love and understand the fitness of things out of doors enough to say,

But then, poor beastie, thou maun live?

The skunk is a famous digger. There are gigantic stories in Maine, telling how he has been seen to escape the hound by digging himself out of sight in the middle of an open field. I have never tried to run down a skunk, and so never gave one the opportunity of showing me all he is capable of as a lightning excavator; but, unless all my experience is wrong, a skunk would rather fight or run or even die than exert himself to the extent of digging a home. In the majority of cases their lairs are made by other paws than their own.

One of the skunk's common tricks is to take up his abode with a woodchuck. As woodchucks, without exception, are decent sort of folk, they naturally object; but the unwelcome visitor, like Tar Baby, says nothing; simply gives his host the privilege of remaining in his own house if he chooses. He chooses to go, of course, and the easy-minded interloper settles down comfortably at home. But it is not long before a second wanderer chances upon this hole, and, without thanks or leave, shares the burrow with the first. This often goes on until the den is crowded—until some farmer's boy digs out a round half-dozen.

From such a lair as headquarters the skunks forage at night, each making off alone to a favorite haunt, and returning before daybreak for safety and sleep. But a peculiar thing about these lodges, as about the family den in the ravine, is their freedom from the hateful musk. One rarely detects any odor about a skunk's burrow. I had been within twenty feet of this one on the island most of the afternoon and had not known it. How are a number of skunks living in a single burrow for weeks able to keep it sweet, when one of them, by simply passing through a ten-acre field of blossoming clover, will make it unendurable? It certainly speaks well for the creature's personal cleanliness, or else is proof of his extreme caution against discovery.

The odor will easily carry with the wind three miles. On the spot where the animal has been shot, you will remember it a twelvemonth after whenever it rains. "Do you want to know how to shoot a skunk on your kitchen steps and never know it twenty-four hours after?" queried my Kennebec authority on these beasts. I did, of course, though I never expected a skunk to take up his stand on my kitchen steps and compel me to despatch him.