The rays of the rising sun blazoned to the world the details of his impressive personality. His most noticeable and overshadowing feature was his huge, resplendent tail. It waved like a black and white banner over his broad back. Throughout its long dark hair, coarse as tow, were set bunches of white hairs, some of them so long that, when they floated out to their full extent, the width of that marvelous tail exceeded its length. At the very tip was a white tuft which could be erected. Wise wild folk, when they saw that tuft standing straight up, removed themselves elsewhere with exceeding rapidity. As for the unwise—they wished they had. Between the small eyes, which were set nearer to the pointed nose than to the broad ears, was a fine white stripe running back to a white ruff at the back of the neck. From this a wide white stripe extended across the shoulders, and branched down either flank.
As he ambled homewards in the sunlight, the skunk had such an air of innocence and helplessness, that a young fox, coming down the hillside after a night of unsuccessful hunting, decided that the decorative stranger must be some unusual kind of rabbit, and dashed forward to catch it with a quick sidelong snap of his narrow jaws. Unfortunately for him, the skunk snapped first. His ancestors had learned the secret of the gas-attack a million years before the Boche. As the fox rushed upon him, the skunk twisted its tail to one side bringing into action two glands near the base of its tail which secrete a clear golden fluid filled with tiny floating bubbles of a devastating gas, against which neither man nor beast can stand. Moreover, the skunk’s accurate breech-loading and repeating weapon has one other improvement not as yet found in any human-made artillery. Each gland, beside the hole for long-range purposes, is pierced with a circle of smaller holes, through which the deadly gas can be sprayed in a cloud for work at close quarters.
Just as the jaws of the fox were opened to seize him, the skunk compressed the mat of powerful muscles that encircled the two conical scent-glands. From the circle of tiny openings a cloud of choking, blinding, corrosive gas poured full into the fox’s astonished face. To human nostrils the very odor of the gas is appalling. A mixture of garlic, sewer-gas, sulphur-matches, musk, and a number of other indescribable smells only faintly defines it. A fox, however, is by no means squeamish about smells. Many odors which are revolting and unbearable to human nostrils arouse only pleasurable sensations in a fox. What sent him rolling backwards over and over, and stiffened and contracted his throat-muscles in spasms, was the choking acrid gas itself. It strangled him just as the fumes of chlorine or ammonia gas will choke a man. Only one thought remained in that fox’s mind. Air, air, fresh untainted air, preferably miles away. He departed to find it, at an initial velocity of something less than a mile a minute, while his adversary lowered his plumed tail and regarded him forgivingly. Then, with mincing, deliberate steps, the skunk started leisurely back to his home on the hillside, which had once been the property of a grizzled old woodchuck.
On a day, however, the woodchuck had come back to his burrow, only to find that he had been dispossessed. The woodchuck is a surly and dogged fighter, and always fully able and disposed to protect his rights. Yet it took but a single sniff to make this one abandon his lands, tenements, and hereditaments, with all easements of ingress, egress, and regress. From thenceforth, to the skunk belonged the whole complicated system of tunnels and galleries. To him belonged the two public entrances and a third concealed from sight in a little thicket. To him came the cozy nest, with its three exits in the centre of a maze of passages, the storehouses, the sand-piles, and the sun-warmed slope where the former owner had been accustomed to take his ease. From that day forward he occupied them all in undisturbed possession.
After the rout of the fox, the skunk slept until late in the afternoon, and an hour before sunset was out again. Here and there, through the bushes and among the trees, he tacked and zigzagged in an apparently absent-minded way. Yet nothing that he could eat escaped those small deep-set eyes or that long pointed nose. Near the edge of the woods he passed under a sugar-maple tree. On a lower limb sat Chickaree, the irritable, explosive red squirrel, nibbling away at a long cylindrical object which he held tightly clasped in his forepaws. As the skunk passed underneath, the squirrel stopped to scold at him on general principles, and became so emphatic in his remarks that he lost his hold of what he had been eating, and it fell directly in front of the plodding skunk. It was only an icicle, but after one sniff the skunk proceeded to crunch it down eagerly while the red squirrel raved overhead. The day before, the squirrel had nibbled a hole in the bark of one of the maple limbs, to taste the sweet sap which the thaw had started flowing; and during the night the running sap had frozen into a long sweet icicle, the candy of the wild folk, which heretofore only the squirrels had enjoyed.
The last bit of frozen sweetness swallowed, the skunk ambled up the hillside. Suddenly he stopped, and sniffed at a little ridge in the snow which hardly showed upon the surface. Hardly had he poked his pointed nose into the hummock, before it burst like a bomb, and out from the snow started a magnificent cock grouse. During the storm he had plunged into the drift for shelter, and the warmth of his body had melted a snug little room for him under the snow. There, safe and warm, he had feasted on the store of rich, spicy seeds that he found on the sweet fern under the snow, and for long days and nights had been safe from cold and hunger. The thaw, however, had thinned his coverlet so that the fine nose of the skunk had scented him through the white crystals.
As the partridge broke from the snow, his magnificent, iridescent, black-green ruff stood out a full three inches around his neck, and his strong wings began the whirring flight of his kind. The skunk shed his slowness like a mask and, with the lightning-like pounce of the weasel family, caught the escaping bird just back of the ruff and snapped his neck asunder. There was a tremendous fluttering and beating of brown mottled feathers against the white snow, and a minute later he was feeding full on the most delicious meat in the world.
Before he had finished, there came an interruption. Down from the top of the hill trotted another skunk, an oldtimer whose range marched next to that of the first. As the newcomer caught sight of the dead partridge, he hurried down to join in the feast. The other skunk stopped eating at the sight of this unbidden guest, and made a kind of chirring, complaining noise, with an occasional low growl. According to skunk-standards that was a tremendous exhibition of rage, but the second skunk came on unmoved. Under the Skunk Geneva Convention, the use of aerial bombs or any form of gas-attack against skunk-kind is barred. In a battle between skunk and skunk the fighters must depend upon tooth and claw. Accordingly, when the stranger sniffed approvingly at the half-eaten bird, he was promptly nipped by the owner of the same, just back of the forepaw. He, in turn, secured a grip on the first skunk’s neck, and in a moment the atmosphere was full of flying snow and whirling fur. The teeth of each fighter were so fine and their fur so thick, that neither one could do much damage to the other; but they fought and rolled and chirred and growled, until they looked like a great black-and-white pinwheel.
THE THIEF