Polecat

Connections

By Gale A. Sparks

           

Our spring stopped running we didn’t have water coming up to the house. It was the end of July and this particular evening was hotter than a two-dollar whore on dollar day and we needed water. My son and I headed down to the springhouse at the bottom of our ridge to repair the thing. The sun was already setting and dusk was coming fast as we began to climb down the southeast side of the hill. I knew that the holler where the spring lay would be dark already and had my coon light strapped around my waist. As usual our old redbone hound Jack lead the way.

            We’d barely started down the path to our reservoir tank when I spotted something black run across the path in front of the dog. The split second before thunder struck, I thought it was just a blasted house cat, and cussed my luck for a black cat crossing my path before I got to the spring.

In the same nano-second, Jack grabbed the creature by the scruff of the neck, and the whole scene unfolded.  Jack raised the critter to give it his patented death shake. I stared at the distinguishable white stripes.

Time froze at that second, as I watched the beautiful golden amber colored droplets showering the air around us as the big dog shook his quarry. With the droplets reflecting off of the sun setting over our shoulders, the artist in me thought God, that’s pretty, the hunter in me said God!! Not again!!

            Immediately the three of us were on the ground gasping for air and rubbing our eyes. I thought of the time that I caught the over spray of tear gas at a rowdy Black Sabbath concert in Chicago. It was the same difference, eyes streaming so badly I lost all sense of direction, the stench stuck in my throat, the praying for a breath of air. Just as I got my bearings and got back to my feet, my son, and hound went flying past me back up the trail towards our house.

            When a skunk has hosed you directly it affects your mind, as well as all of your other senses. It dawned on me just as the boy was approaching the house that the blasted kid was running up to the house to tell his mom!

I left out a blood-curdling scream just as they hit the porch, “don’t go in the house!”

 As his last step to hit the front door he veered to the right, and headed down the path to his grandparents. After that last scream I was out of air and didn’t have the strength to holler again.

I slid down to my knees catching my breath and thought, “too hell with it, they are on their own.”

            He did it, he ran into his grandmother’s kitchen in the middle of their supper to find his mama. He ruined their meal and got ran out of the house with his grandmother’s broom handle.

            My wife came walking home trying to stay ahead of her son, her attempt to walk up wind of him was useless, with the incentive of a broom handle, he managed to leave a trail of skunk perfume from one end of the path to the other. When she got back to our house my wife firmly banished us all to the barnyard. By now I couldn’t smell anything not even the odor that had permeated our entire hill and us. The barnyard was as far from the house as possible and still be covered in the glow of the nightlight.

My wife started making calls to a couple of her aunts that lived down the road trying to find a truckload of tomato juice. She was in desperate need of enough tomato juice to bath two humans and a ninety-pound hound. Once again I was sitting in the yard in a number ten washtub naked in front of God and everybody having a tomato juice bath. This time it was in the ambience of the purplish glow of a night-light.

           It was while sitting in the tub having the ritualistic pouring of the tomato juice over my head. I began reminiscing about all of my other polecat connections I have had during my life. It seems that through my life, even though it has been most enthusiastically regrettable, I have had more encounters with the tenacious polecat than one person should be allowed in their short time on earth. Some may find it odd, but as a youngster I thought the pungent sweet odor that these pretty little black and white beauties emitted smelled quite nice -- from a safe distance, of course.

After my first meeting with one of the mace spraying menaces, my opinion on the smell took an immediate 180-degree about face. My first real in your face experience occurred when I was around twelve years old. My parents had put our canvas camp tent up in the back yard so they could reseal it before we went on our annual trip to Minnesota fishing. My cousin Butch, my little brother and I had spent the day as we normally did in the summers prowling along the creek, the cow pastures and the woods that surrounded our house.

This particular summer was what a person might call our catch and release summer. We had became experts in custom building live traps, with a rather large roll of half inch hardware cloth and went about making live traps in all sizes. Some big enough to hold a thirty-pound ground hog, as well as small ones to catch little thirteen striped gophers and chipmunks.

Soon our garage began to look like a menagerie. Dad’s workbench was lined with bigger cages that we would keep our daily catches, chipmunks, gophers, and a baby ground hog. We would keep them for a day or so feed, water and observe them, some we made semi tame. During the week that the tent was up, the three of us spent nearly every night sleeping out in the tent in our back yard.

I still remember it like it was yesterday; we were walking along the creek that ran to the west of our house, checking a couple of the traps that we had set in the pink Multiflora roses bushes that grew along the creek bank. In the second trap that we checked was a baby skunk. We were ecstatic! Something was in our trap besides a chipmunk or a thirteen-striped gopher. We sat and watched as she paced in the trap for a few minutes and discussed what we were going to do with her. As well as our chances of getting sprayed when we opened the trap’s door.

After we had sat there discussing options, beside the creek listening as it trickled through the rose bushes and watching the little skunk. We unanimously decided that the safest thing to do would be to release her, and run down the creek to check our last few traps.

What we didn’t plan on was when we let her out, that she would follow us like a kitten that you had already had for at least a week. As we kept on walking down along the creek, we figured she would eventually get bored, we would turn around, and she’d be gone. She followed us all the way back to our house.

When we got home our parents were still in bed, but we also knew that we were going to have to do something fast. Butch went into the garage and brought a cage out to the back yard, while I crawled into the tent and brought out a couple of s’mores that we had left from the night before. I tossed the s’mores in the cage and Rosy, which is what we had decided to call her (since we had gotten her under a rose bush, not because of her fragrance), quickly scampered inside the cage. I told my two partners that the safest thing we could probably do with her was hide her cage under the big fuel oil tank that rested up against the back of the garage, with the weeds all grown up around it no one would see her. This would give us more time to think.

We took turns throughout the day checking on Rosy, she seemed happy as a clam. We put in a pan of water and a little cat food in the cage and she was doing fine. That night after mom had gone to bed we went into the tent as if we were calling it a night. Little did she know that we had a skunk or that we had carried her into the tent with us.

The tent was huge inside, eight feet by fourteen feet, with the three sleeping bags rolled out in one wing the rest of the tent was wide open. We thought there was plenty of room to let Rosy out let her get some exercise. The hours flew by while we were playing with our new pet. It was like having a kitten, only better nobody else had a kitten like this, with a slight hint of danger. If we did something to tick her off, we were going to be the ones that would pay.

The next thing we knew -- it must have been around midnight -- the tent flap opened, and in stepped our dad. The look on his face was priceless. He looked like he was about to scream, and then checked that; he didn’t want to make any loud noises and have Rosy hose the inside of the tent. In a very controlled, very stern, and almost frightened tone he told us to get the skunk out of the tent immediately and carry her as far from the house as we could and that we would be turning her loose where we caught her in the morning.

The next morning we carried Rosy back where we had caught her, we opened the door and she walked out. Just as she stepped out of the cage door, a rabbit came bounding out of the rose bush. It startled all of us including Rosy. She quickly came up on her front feet and hosed the air around us. I lost my breath and fell to the ground gasping. When I looked over my cousin and brother was in the same prone position.