Rural Routes, Blog Version

Story No. 1

The first time I saw skunks, I thought they were cute and furry and needed to be saved.

I grew up on a farm with my parents and five siblings.  We did not have running water; my parents took that big step in 1978, the year K and I were married. We had no sewage system; the toilet was a shack in the back yard during the summer and a pail in the basement during the winter.  Paper trash was burned in a burning barrel. Other garbage was tossed in a pail under the kitchen sink and emptied into the ‘garbage pile’ at the edge of the bush north of our house. Periodically, my dad would load the contents of the pile into the back of his truck and haul it away.

I don’t know how old I was the day I looked out a north bedroom window and saw the skunks nosing through the garbage pile. I know I was not yet tall enough to see out the bathroom window which gave a better view but was higher than the bedroom window and I know I had not yet started school. There were five or six skunks there, obviously drawn by the scent of kitchen leftovers. I called to my parents to come see.

My dad immediately went for the gun and I was old enough to know what that meant. I began to rap on the bedroom window, alerting the skunks to the danger. They took the hint and scattered.  By the time my dad loaded the gun and made it outside, they were all gone.

I almost got a spanking that day, my dad was that upset with me. But mom talked him out of it.

Story No. 2

October 31, Hallowe’en. Late in the afternoon. K and my father-in-law were working in the farmyard when they heard noise coming from the corrals.

The cattle were in panic mode, fleeing a skunk which nipped at their heels/hooves. Strange behaviour for a skunk. My husband went for his gun.

Enter Spike, our two-year-old Blue Heeler. Spike’s most memorable feature was his ability to fetch and retrieve endlessly.  He hadn’t yet been trained as a cattle dog.  As my husband always says, if you want to train a dog, you have to know more than the dog does.

Spike thought he was doing a good deed that day. What he really did was sign his death warrant.

He dashed into the cattle pen, grabbed the skunk by the neck and shook it until the animal was dead. By the time K arrived, the gun in his arms was unnecessary.

Given the skunk’s unusual behaviour, we thought it wise to have its corpse tested. The test came back positive for rabies.

Our cattle herd was quarantined for six weeks. The vet’s advice about the dog? Put him down now or lock him up for six weeks and see what happens.

We didn’t want to put our dog down. We loved him. We locked him in a machine shed. Every morning K would open the door to feed him and the dog would come rushing towards him, happy to see a human being.

We were raised  on Old Yeller. The daily uncertainty – what if the dog rushed forward not in friendliness but in rabid fury? – grew. In the end, my husband did what the veterinarian had recommended in the first place.

Nobody loved Spike more than our four-year-old daughter. “Where is Spike?” she would ask.

“Spike is gone,” we told her.

Story No. 3

Fast forward fifteen years or more. Our daughter is now a university student and her brother is a teenager. It is winter, the week between Christmas and New Years, and our daughter calls one evening to say her car will not start. Her dad makes the two-hour drive to play mechanic.

Our three-legged Border collie begins to bark outside. I turn on the yard light and open the side door to see what is causing the commotion. Just in time to see a skunk sidle into the dog house, not the barrel embedded in our cement step, but the wooden dog house we had built later.

Buddy the dog wants inside and I let him in, thinking he will stay out of trouble if he is separated by a door from the skunk. Several times during the evening, I check to see if the skunk is still in the dog house. It always is.

K returns hours later, mission accomplished. He replaced the battery and our daughter’s car is once again running.

“What is Buddy doing in the house?” he asks.

“There’s a skunk in his,” I reply.

My husband drives to his parents’ yard and returns with one of those humane animal traps, a kind of cage that he hopes to get the skunk into. He places the open cage in front of the doghouse entrance.

First he tries tipping the doghouse forward from the rear. The skunk does not move. It appears to be asleep.

Next my husband takes an old hockey stick and tries banging on the roof. That doesn’t work either.

Increasingly frustrated, he attempts a combination of banging, tipping and yelling. Anyone watching would think he was attacking the doghouse. I think it is funny. K does not.

Eventually he gives up and comes to bed. The dog gets a sleepover in our house.

In the morning, we are finally able to remove the skunk from the doghouse. But questions remain.

Why was the skunk wandering around in the middle of winter? Was it sleep walking?

Why did it never spray? If I had the capability, and someone were turning me upside down, banging on my shelter with a wooden stick and cursing loudly, I would certainly let loose.

-30-