I do have some affinity toward the skunk. I would never keep a skunk as a domestic pet, as some rare people do. I do not find it cute. The skunk has a nasty face, with a pig’s snoot and sharp fangs, and with eyes that are ever egomaniacal, with furrowed brows and tiny pupils. And its feet are long, with leathery black paws and long black claws like a demon.
Still I have some admiration for them. The skunk, like Africa’s honey badger, doesn’t give a damn. When I worked construction doing rain gutters and drainages, there was a drainage that ran under a long shallow porch abutting the home and leading out into a rainwater garden, and it was our job to repair the drainage under the porch, and it was understood by us and the homeowners that there was a skunk den under the house under the porch.
“James’ll go in there,” they said, “and do it.”
And I did. And I came out smelling only of dirt and mold.
My appreciation for the skunk, though, is quite new. When I was a boy and my father accidentally trapped skunks I kept well enough away from them, and even when I was a youth and I trapped skunks myself I would call on my father to solve the problem, which was the skunk, and which he did, poorly, with a shotgun.
The skunk is a member of the weasel family (‘Mustidae’), meaning a class of carnivorous mammals with very strong, musky scent glands,. This includes, obviously, the short- and long-tailed weasel, or ermine white in the wintertime, and the least weasel. These weasels are land predators, hunting mice and voles and eggs and fresh bloody kills of others.
Larger than the weasel and related is the aquatic mink, with an oily fur, long guard hairs and downy underfur for warmth in the cold water.
Just larger than the mink is the ferret of the Great Plains, which hunts down in the dry burrows of the prairie dog. I do not know much about ferrets other than that they can be domesticated like a cat and that my brother had two in the city in his apartment in our young adulthood.
Of similar size is the pine marten, very common in Cook County, whose solitary tracks in the snow are among – with the snowshoed hare and white-tailed deer – the most conspicuous.
The hind landing in the fore-paw tracks, always offset. Two offset, two offset…two offset. The marten is a tree climber that feeds on pine squirrels.
And larger still and more predatory and omnivorous is the fisher, or fisher cat, or bearcat. A large, long, bounding, full-body black animal that looks like a miniature black bear or large black cat. The fisher is both a land and tree-climbing mammal, which relishes porcupine meat and attacks the quilled porcupine head on and eats it belly-side first.
I have the tanned pelt of a fisher cat from my father that was killed in his rabbit warren, that is four-and-ahalf feet from tip of nose to tip of tail.
I trapped a fisher in my fox trap last year, and released it back into the wild, and it was powerful and pissed, and, when free – unharmed but none too happy – bounded off and disappeared into the woods.
Then among the weasel family is the fierce, burrowing, flat-bodied badger, with forepaws like a bear and a maw like a coyote.
The largest weasel is the wolverine, which is now an animal of myth and lore.
The same size roughly of the fisher is the river otter, the most family-oriented, playful and happy-go-lucky and noisy of them all.
It is not the skunk but the otter I admire – but sadly differs from – the most. The whimsical and communicative and community oriented river otter.
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