Ahmed

Skunked

     My kid and I lived in a homebuilt house above the Gold Fork of the Payette River in central Idaho. It was seven miles to a gas station, sixteen to where she was a senior in high school, and over a hundred to the nearest stop light. 

     The cabin had an attached room about eight feet wide and fifteen long, the mud porch, with an outside door that led to an inside door. The outside door opened inward so six feet of January snow wouldn’t trap us inside. In the summer we left that door open and kept a sack of dry dog food slit-open on the mud porch floor so that our cow dogs could retrieve their own kibble. 

     She slept upstairs. I had a bed under the stairs on the bottom floor. The footprint of the place was about that of a two-car garage with big bay windows where I would sit in a rocker at midnight and wait for her Firebird’s headlights to come across the valley and up the county road. I’d hop in bed and pretend to have been sleeping all along and not worried sick that she was running late from a party in town.

     For the sake of the story, let’s say it was three o’clock on a Sunday morning in the early October. Delta was in high school and the days were still warm enough that the mud porch door was open.  She had been home since midnight. I heard her yell in a whisper from upstairs, “Dad?  Dad? There is a skunk on the porch. I can hear it eating dog food.”

     “Nah, it is probably a coyote sneaking in when it thinks we are gone to the world.”

     “Use your nose, Dad. It is a skunk. Can’t you smell it? If it stays out there much longer, the whole place is going to smell like skunk. It will get into my clothes and I cannot be going to school stinking.” 

     I flopped my legs off the side of my bunk, sneaked to the inside door, opened it gently, peeked through the crack and, sure enough, the business end of a skunk was sticking out of the  dog food sack. The little critter was chowing so enthusiastically and crunching so loudly that it didn’t hear me utter a few words about its mother. The dogs were smart enough to have gone on vacation. I shut the door gently.  

    “Yep, you are right. There is a skunk on the porch.”

     “Well, do something about it. Shoot it. Stab it. I don’t care how you do it, but get rid of it, now.”

     I sat down on the edge of my bed to think things over. In one of Earnest Thompson Seaton’s books there is a photo of young Anna Seaton sitting on a stump in her Dad’s Canadian hunting camp with a bowl of popcorn in her lap, surrounded by thirty skunks with noses pointed toward her knees. Maybe this skunk would listen to reason.

     When the inside door was open wide enough for my head, I began talking to the skunk as though we were at a symphony concert trying to prevent melt-down by a four-year-old. 

     “Hi, little buddy.” It pulled its head from the sack and looked back over its shoulder at me, making sure that the cannon was still pointed at me. “You have your belly full. Now it is time to go on back to your little nest and take a nap.” It pulled its front feet out of the sack. “Take your time, Pal. It would be great to get at least a little bit of sleep tonight, but we are on your schedule.” It began ambling toward the outside door. “That’s a good little skunky poo. Go on home now.” By then I was in the mud room with it. “That’s it. Keep on truckin”. You can do this.” My gentle approach to skunk parenting seemed to be working.

    The accomplishments of this world are transitory and impermanent. When little critter cleared the threshold of the outside door, I swiftly closed it and caught just the tip of the skunk’s tail in the door. 

     Pow. Wham. Full barrage deployed, Several unpublishable epithets from my daughter. The end of my career as skunk whisperer and a large setback in my career as a trustworthy father. Delta hated going to school and I was exiled to fixing five miles of fence by myself on the ranch job.

    It took us that long to get back to zero. Home remedies were not applicable. They don’t stock enough tomato juice in any store to de-skunk an entire house. We bought five gallons of Pinesol, rented a power washer, ran every bit of fabric in the house through the laundromat then invited a couple of non-smokers to certify our home as skunk-free and passed.

    After that, we kept the outside door closed year-round and broadcast the dogfood above the driveway at supper time. The skunk never returned. I can still raise my daughter’s hackles during a Thanksgiving meal merely by sniffing my nose a few times.