by Farley Mowat
We saw them almost daily, and with a special quality of resignation we awaited the inevitable; but, almost incredibly, it did not come. I do not know why this was so, except to hazard a guess that Mutt too must have felt the weight of our social isolation, and did not even have the heart for skunk conflict. There was no overt act of war, yet we remained uneasy and alert until the first heavy frosts assured us that the skunks had retreated to winter quarters.
The earth-floored basement of the house contained our winter supply of vegetables and preserves, together with a barrel of Prince Edward County apples. There was an outside cellarway, barred by a pair of massive doors, and these we closed and calked against the advent of the frost. My father and I spent a Sunday carefully sealing up the many holes in the foundation, and when we had finished hardly a mouse could have got in – or out.
We had with us at this time a maid named Hannah whom we had brought from the west. She was one of those solid, grain-fed women for which the prairies are justly famous, but she was not gifted with much brain. Nevertheless, she had a vivid, if erratic, imagination. No leap into the fantastic was beyond her, and when she noticed that the level in the apple barrel was falling with unusual rapidity, she exercised her imagination and laid a formal complaint against Mutt. It was a fascinating picture that she conjured up: Mutt, scrunched into the barrel, industriously munching apples through the long winter nights. We were almost sorry that it could not have been so.
With Mutt ruled out, Hannah was temporarily at a loss. But not for long. She was a persevering woman, and one day while we were having breakfast she startled us with a unique solution to the problem of the diminishing apple supply.
She was handing Father his plate of oatmeal, and with it she volunteered the information that:
“Them ghosts is et half all them apples up.”
Father toyed delicately with the phrase for a little while, then dropped his eyes to his plate with a slight shudder. I was made of sterner stuff. “What ghosts?” I asked.
Hannah looked at me with placid condescension. “Them apple ghosts,” she explained patiently. “He’s et about most of them apples you got from Prince Henry’s house and just kind of lays the cores around.”
After this we were driven to make a full investigation, and Hannah was relieved, yet at the same time disappointed, when I was able to tell her that we had no ghosts – only a skunk.
He was a mild-mannered fellow who must have led an unexceptional life up until the time he got himself locked up for the winter in our cellar, for there was no odor clinging to his fur. He was under the preserve cabinet when the beam of my flashlight found him. He showed no resentment, but only blinked his eyes and ducked his head in an apologetic sort of way, neither frightened nor aggressive. He must have long since assumed that we meant him no harm.
For a few days we were foolish enough to consider ways and means of removing him. Mutt, apprised of the skunk’s presence, had a plan of his own and he was so anxious to put it into effect that he almost scratched a hole through the cellar door. We did not trust his discretion.
We soon recovered our reason and concluded an armistice. We had far more apples than we needed, anyway, and since the skunk was obviously amicable, we decided to live and let live.
Things worked out very well. The skunk stayed in the vegetable room, ate such apples as he required, and bothered no one. We came to accept his presence tranquilly, and it was no uncommon thing for one of us to be rummaging in the potato bin, while a few feet away the skunk munched on an apple.
This harmonious state of affairs would probably have continued until spring, when the skunk could have gone voluntarily on his way, had it not been for a man whom none of us has ever met. I do not even recall his name, but I know that he lives in one of the southern states of the Union. He is of the expert genus who write books and articles about birds and animals with such assurance that the reader is convinced the author must be privy to the thoughts of the beasts. Shortly before Christmas this man published an article about skunks in one of the more famous sporting magazines.
I read the article, and was deeply impressed. The author had developed a foolproof principle for handling skunks, and he was generous enough to share his secret with the world. The essence of his method was a garden hose. He had discovered that a jet of water directed a few inches behind a skunk, and in such a way that the stream was deflected slightly upwards after contact with the ground, would safely move any skunk that ever lived. Reasoning skunk-fashion, the author explained why the method was so effective. “The skunk,” he wrote, “under the impression that his discomfort stems from a natural source, will move briskly away without attempting retaliation.”
Christmas holidays were due to begin in a week’s time, and I was bored and disgruntled by the last days of school. Hannah and I were alone in the house, for my parents were in Oakville on a three-day state visit to my father’s family. I put down the magazine and went downstairs.
In my own defense I can plead that I was least systematic. My first move was to pry open the outer cellar doors, and only then did I enter the basement and attach the garden hose to the laundry tap. When the hose was spluttering satisfactorily, I moved into the vegetable room and, having located the skunk, I brought the stream to bear upon the hard ground immediately to his rear.
There was a startled scurrying and the skunk shot out of the vegetable room, and sought sanctuary behind the old-fashioned hot-air furnace. I pursued him with the jet, chivying him slowly toward the cellarway and the open doors. He went, unhappily, but, even as my author had foretold, without attempt at retaliation. Victory was nearly mine, when I glanced up at the cellarway to assure myself that there was no obstacle in the skunk’s way – and behold Mutt’s face framed in that square of cold blue sky.
I realized that he was poised to leap, and my reason was momentarily paralyzed by a vision of the certain consequences which must follow. Acting instinctively, I raised the hose in order to bring it to bear on Mutt, but I forgot that the skunk was in the way, and the lifting stream caught him fair amidships and bowled him over. I hit Mutt too, but by then it was too late to matter much.
Tears of rage and agony were blinding me, but I no longer cared. While Mutt and the skunk skirmished around the perimeter of the basement I followed them, brandishing my hose indiscriminately. Sometimes a ricochet blast from the skunk would send me staggering back toward the cellar doors. Raging, I returned each time to the fray. Back and forth we went, into the vegetable room, behind the furnace, under the cellar stairs. The air grew murky and the single electric light bulb shone dimly through a rich and yellow haze.
Mutt was the first to call it quits, and to leave by the outside entrance. The skunk, exhausted and suffering from its own potency, followed close behind. I was left alone, the hose still spurting in my hand.
The silence was intense, until from somewhere far above me I heard Hannah’s stentorian tones.
“Mother of God!” she cried. “Mother of God – I go!”
In the event, Hannah did not go, but only because we were so far from Saskatchewan, and she had no idea which way her lost home lay. There was no escape for any of us.
There was misery in that house for a long time. Despite the bitterness of the weather, the furnace had to be turned off, since it sucked up tangible fumes from the basement and circulated them freely. Even with all windows and doors wide to the winter winds, the basement remained a haunted place. The skunk oil, mixed with water, had permeated the dirt floor so deeply that I doubt if even yet it has entirely passed away.
As for our neighbors, far from rallying to us in this time of need, they drew yet further off. One of them was overheard to express the opinions of them all.
“What else can you expect,” she said with smug complacency, “from people who would live in a place like that?” It was clear that skunks and culture were inextricably bound up together in her mind.
My parents did not punish me directly, but they insist
ed that I go back to school on the day after the event. I pleaded for mercy, but to no avail. I went off very slowly, and with bowed head.
It was a frigid day, and the school was overheated. Before the opening exercises ended, there was not an occupied desk within five feet of me. I sat on, a self-conscious island of misery, until at last the teacher – Miss Leatherbottom was her name – called me forward and handed me a note. It was succinct. “Go home,” it said.
The humiliation of that experience was a heavy load to bear, yet it was as nothing to the spiritual torment inflicted on me a few years later by Mutt and his passion for skunks.
My maternal grandparents owned a cottage and a lake in the remote highlands of Quebec, and here the family was accustomed to forgather in the summer months. It was a place of pleasant memory on the whole, for it was free of the horrors of most summer resorts. There were no thundering outboard motors piloted by fat and foolish men, hell bent at fifty miles an hour for nowhere. There were no rows of shoddy matchbox cottages clustered cheek by jowl along the shores – the sylvan counterpart of city slums. Instead there was a single unobtrusive log house, an even more unobtrusive boathouse and sleeping cabin combined, and then nothing but the ancient hills, black-shrouded in their forests, overlooking and solacing the waters of the lake.
For Mutt and me it was a blessed place after the horrors of Toronto, and the almost equal horrors of the Ontario village. It was also the scene of my first love.
The girl was the daughter of a wealthy doctor who owned a cottage on a nearby lake. She was not insensible to me, and she showed some taste for poetry, which, in those days, was my chief interest. I wrote verse of a somewhat melancholy vein, but she would listen patiently while I declaimed it. I recall one passage that seemed particularly to move her. It concerned the fate of an abandoned lover, and one verse went like this:
Still his unseeing, dull and lidless stare
Earnestly scans the long blue upper air;
A corpse’s gaze – save where a clinging fly
Scuffs busily across the sunken eye.
I thought it was effective, and so did the young lady. Great things might have resulted from our association had it not been cruelly terminated within a week.
Each Saturday there was a dance in the nearby village of Kazabazua (you will find the name on any reputable map) and I had arranged to take my girl to one of these affairs. The explosion of a summer thunderstorm on the Friday night before the dance did not distress me as I lay abed, dreaming my dreams. Yet that storm had a shattering effect upon my life.
In its first wild rush it uprooted and toppled a magnificent old pine that had stood for two hundred years not far from the house. In its fall the old tree uncovered a family of skunks who had their burrow beneath its roots. The skunks immediately sought other shelter, and found it under the floor of the cabin where a space had been left open for ventilation purposes. Unfortunately, Mutt, whose fear of thunderstorms was still pathogenic, had long since occupied this sanctuary, and there was hardly room for all the new arrivals.
My parents and grandparents were sitting by the open fire when the old tree came down. Grand mother, who always tended to take acts of God as personal affronts, was outraged. She began to pace up and down the room, peering out at the wreckage as she passed the window, and she made a little speech.
“I refuse,” she cried, “absolutely refuse to plant another tree. What point is there when they just blow down again?”
Grandfather wisely let this pass, but my parents were still trying to digest it when all four of them became aware of new sounds of natural discord. From below their feet came strange and muffled scuttling noises, some snorts, a muted growl or two, and a weird sort of chattering. Grandmother, who was seldom at a loss, was mystified. She pounded the floor with her foot and cried out:
“Now what’s all that about?”
The floor boards were not tight. There was no subfloor, and Grandmother got her answer. With a callous indifference that I still find hard to forgive, my four elders promptly evacuated the house to seek shelter in the sleeping cabin by the lake. They left me to my fate.
I woke soon afterwards. The turmoil underfoot was mounting in intensity and the stench was breath-taking. Clutching an eiderdown, and burying my nose in its folds, I scuttled to the door and began slithering down the steep path to the lakeside. The thunder muttered overhead and rain drove down with a vicious intensity. A flash of lightning illuminated my path and I beheld the white and frightened face of a skunk two or three paces ahead of me, and evidently in full flight from the Donnybrook under the house.
I could not stop. My bare feet scratched for traction on the steep and muddy path, but it was useless. Both the skunk and I were on a greased slide, and we fetched up at the bottom of the path almost inextricably entwined with one another in the eiderdown.
They would not have me in the sleeping cabin. Grandmother held the door shut. “He’s your damned dog – go and sleep with him,” she said, and there was an unaccustomed bitterness in her tone.
As a matter of fact I slept under an upturned rowboat for the rest of the night.
At the crack of dawn on Saturday morning I was in the lake laboring with a cake of carbolic soap. At intervals during that awful day I experimented with tomato juice, kerosene, turpentine, and pumice stone, and although none of these was wholly effective, by evening I was relatively free of skunk. At least, I could no longer smell myself, and with this false assurance of purity I set out to escort my young lady to the dance.
We had no more than a few hundred yards to walk together, and there was a good evening breeze, so that by dint of remaining downwind from her, I escaped immediate detection. But she was on the alert.
“Hurry up,” she said once. “I think there’s a skunk somewhere about.” There was something close to panic in her voice, and I was surprised by it, for she had always seemed a singularly fearless sort of girl.
The dance was in a barn and it was well attended. Oil lamps supplied the illumination, and boosted the already volcanic temperature to an almost unbearable extreme. I knew before the first dance ended that I would not get away with it. Yet by dint of refusing to sit out any dances, and by moving very quickly through the press, I kept the finger of suspicion from pointing directly at me. I was considerably relieved when, after half an hour of it, my girl clutched me by the arm and in a strangled whisper implored me to take her home at once. She kept peering at the other dancers and there was a stricken look about her.
Once out of doors I felt that I should confess my guilt. My lady had a sense of humor, and I was sure that she would be amused by the affair. We paused on the path outside her cottage, and I told her all.
She gasped, turned from me, and ran as if pursued by all the fiends of hell. And never to this day have I looked upon her face again.
It was her older brother who explained. I met him in the local general store one day and insisted that he tell me why his sister would no longer receive me.
He laughed heartily.
“You don’t know?” he asked, and it was a stupid question, for how could I have known? “Oh, but this is rich! It’s skunk stink,” he cried when he could master his mirth. “Jane’s allergic to it – it makes her break out in hives – all over – and they last a month!”
15
AFLOAT AND ASHORE
ne of the first things my father did after we returned to Ontario to live was to give substance to a ten-year-old dream. He bought a ship. It was not a canoe this time. It was a real ship – a vessel to make any sailor proud.
She came from Montreal and she was a double-ender of a type designed originally in Norway for service on the North Atlantic, and called a redningsskoite. She was big, and black, and as strong and well developed as the “big-boned, deep-bosomed, buxom western women” that Father used to talk nostalgically about. She was ketch rigged. Her sails were made in Lunenburg and tanned a glowing red. Everything about her was solid and seagoing.
&nb
sp; My father sailed her up from Montreal single-handed, and when she arrived among the varnish and mahogany yachts of Toronto (yachts that sometimes flew streamers of ticker tape from their spars instead of pennants) she seemed as out of place as an Aberdeen Angus among a herd of fallow deer. The natty lads in their cream flannels and yachtsmen’s hats were inclined to sneer at her, and when they read her name they laughed out loud.
“Scotch Bonnet!” they cried. “What kind of a name is that for a boat? Why didn’t you call her RayMar or BillJean or Saucy Sue VIII like the rest of us?”
But when they saw our yachting caps – Balmorals, imported direct from Caithness – they realized that we were beyond their ken entirely, and they ignored us from then on.
Scotch Bonnet did not care. She knew where her name came from, and she was proud of it. For the black granite reef that rises out of Lake Ontario below Prince Edward County, and that bears the name Scotch Bonnet Rock, is a place that once loomed large in the minds of the real sailormen who manned the grain schooners that owned the Great Lakes in the days before steam drove them into limbo.
Scotch Bonnet was – and is – a ship to inspire deep affection in her crew, and even Mutt was not immune to her attractions. He did not come to her as a complete landlubber, for he had sailed before, in Concepcion. Nevertheless, his first sail aboard Scotch Bonnet might well have turned a lesser dog against the sea forever.
In the first week of September, my father announced that he and I and Mutt would take the vessel down the lake to the Bay of Quinte. We drove from our house to the anchorage inside Toronto’s breakwater, and when we arrived there we found a gale to greet us. The storm warnings were flying, and the seas, running in across some forty miles of open water, were thundering against the concrete barriers along the shore.