Saturday, May 18, 2013

Again, the Skunk #T




From the archives.

Our last visit to the neighborhood involved the egg gathering and the milking lesson. Today, we will focus on the same vicinity. Just below the chicken house (12) there is a little drainage ditch which goes through a twelve-inch culvert under the road. We had been losing some chickens to some feral culprit, the most likely guess being a skunk.

One evening while my mother's Aunt Bessie and her family were visiting us, there arose a clamor in the hen house. Dad said I should get the .25-20 down and take care of the situation. So mother's cousin, Phil, and I headed up the hill to the scene of the supposed carnage. Not that it makes any difference to the story, but though he was my mother's first cousin, Phil was a year younger than I.

Anyway, as we arrived at the henhouse, there ran from beneath it a critter. It headed down the hill and dived into the culvert. It was a skunk. I lay down in the ditch and shined the light into the tunnel. Placing the barrel of the rifle in the culvert, I pulled the trigger. It was a direct hit: in fact, it would have been impossible to miss. We got a length of bob warr from the shed, stuck it in the pipe, twisted it into the carcass, which we retrieved. The wound in the side was big as my hand (remember we are talking twelve-year old kid here).


This resolved the chicken-theft problem. Fifty years later, Phil was visiting me in Indiana and said, "Do you remember the night you shot the skunk?" Well, yes; but I probably hadn't thought of it in many decades.

6 comments:

Sharkbytes said...

Too funny! And I love hand-drawn maps like that.

The bob warr was a great ahdeeuh

Secondary Roads said...

Quite the adventure for that age. Did the skunk raise a stink over being summarily dispatched?

Shelly said...

I wondered the same as Secondary Roads- whether it left a reminder of being shot! I hope not. We had a plague of skunks here a couple of months ago, but thankfully they've gone to their summer hangouts.

vanilla said...

Shark, no buried treasure, but I had fun doing the map. You got the accent down pat.

Chuck, fortunately, it died suddenly and peacefully.

Shelly, no odor. Still, we had to bury the thing.

Anonymous said...

So that's where Bob's name comes from...

vanilla said...

Grace, *grins*