Rina and The Skunk

With Steve and Reid posting lately on puppies, I thought I'd share a recent outing with mine. Skunk lore and stink remedies appreciated in the comment section, please!

The neighborhood park where I let Rina run in the evenings abuts a city-owned campground and public stables. There's pasture for the boarding horses and a riding trail through a stand of old oaks that ends at the playground my kids know well. All together it's a moderately manicured property, surrounded by subdivisions and barking dogs, yet home to a fair host of wildlife too. Barred owls, Mississippi kites and Red-shouldered hawks nest on it. Three or four species of heron feed and roost there, plus a cormorant and a flock of semi-tame ducks. A few swamp rabbits and two species of squirrel live there. A shrike hunts over the softball field and all the normal neighborhood birds visit or nest in the shrubs.

And there are skunks (Mephitis mephitis) too. Evidently, lots of them.

A friend who stables her horse nearby says the skunks roam the stalls with impunity, pushing aside the barn cats to eat their kibble---And this in full daylight.

Rina and I see skunks regularly on our evening walks: they ramble and poke myopically at the bases of trees. Foraging with head and tail down, skunks resemble small badgers and not at all any familiar cartoon rendering. They don't look or move like cats. And they don't act like prey; despite oft-cited depredation by Great-horned Owls, skunks have more to fear from cars than from other critters. . . I am the skunk who walked by himself.

Rina is fascinated by them. I am horrified to imagine the outcome of this fascination. But my dog needs to work off lead, and there are as many skunks (mink, too) in my hawking fields as in the park: A mustelid meet-up is inevitable. In my view it's better the hawk not be involved in the first one. So I've been cautiously trying to "break" Rina of her interest in skunks; I know the skunks would be less gentle with her.

Our lessons began with Rina sniffing bushes skunks slip into. I watch her catch the scent, give her a firm "NO," and quickly move on. Recently we both spotted a big black-and-white cruising across an open space; so still on lead, I walked Rina within 25 feet, speaking to her in the tone I use to mean, "Do NOT eat Shelly's cat. Do NOT!" I waited for her ears drop and to look at me for direction, then walked her away in search of a squirrel to chase. All's well.

But two nights ago Rina found her own skunk. She was off lead and galloping ahead in the wide arcs I fancy to call "quartering." My control over the dog at full gallop is pretty good, actually; she'll at least break stride and drop into a canter at my "Whoa!" Sometimes she'll even stop. But should she spot game on the run, a switch throws somewhere between her shoulder and her skinny loin and the Hyperdrive engages. Rina was pushing Warp Three when she disappeared.

All hunters know The Bad Feeling when they feel it, and I felt it then. I found Rina fifty yards inside the wood, locked up rigid and leaning forward, nose to tail with an angry skunk. I broke my own stride into a canter then, and stopped... What to do? What to do?

The skunk knew; it was the wisest of us all. It huffed and pawed the ground, arched its back and puffed its fur to nearly twice its actual size. All the while it aimed the business end at Rina, probably well within range of a good spray.

"Rina," I croaked, "Doooooooon't do it."

She didn't. And the skunk didn't. I walked around to the back side of the stand-off and called Rina to me. I praised her sternly, if that makes sense, and heeled her away toward better things. She never looked back. I don't know what the skunk did in our absence, bless his temperate soul.