What strikes me, half a century later, is that this story is primarily a tribute to my mother’s empathy for small and helpless creatures. I remember only some of the key milestones. I’m sure that she attended to the many forgotten details. I played some part, but this story and the creature in it has life, literally, only because of her.
It was probably mid spring when an errand took me to our first farrowing barn, now abandoned. It was a low-ceiling structure, with maybe four or five farrowing stalls right and left, and a shallow ditch running down the center of the raw concrete floor. My search for some wayward implement quickly evaporated when I discovered a tiny, pink, hairless creature squirming about in the ditch. A long body, maybe only a few inches. Its eyes were tiny blue jewels under closed lids. It made no sound.
A Weighty Decision
Now I clearly remember, even in those first seconds of discovery, that I had happened upon a wild thing that belonged in the wild. But my search of the barn revealed no nest, no trace of a parent, no place where it might be returned to a family. The prevailing wisdom of the time (now generally considered a myth) was that wild mothers would reject babies if they had human scent. It was either leave it and hope its mom would return to claim it. Or, as I did, scoop it up and take it back to the house for my own mother.
In the early days of our hog-raising operation, my mother would visit the new-born litters and fish out the runts whose fate seemed perilous. She had a toy baby bottle originally meant for a doll, whose tip she had clipped to form a working feeding bottle. She had eventually abandoned her Florence Nightingale endeavors when her rate of success with runts was just too low to endure.
But this little creature was a fascinating challenge. Not believing it had much of a future, she still fished out the bottle and prepared some warm milk. Miraculously, it survived the night. And another. We had a new pet in the house.
Only … what was it? Even my father, who usually had a sense about these things, wasn’t sure. Much of the decision to keep this tiny stray was just curiosity about what it would turn out to be. Certainly a skunk was one of the few realistic guesses, but its long, ferret-like body wasn’t like the common, cat-like skunks that occasionally made night-time visits to torment our outdoor Border Collies.
What to Name It?
I consulted my cherished treasure of those years: Encyclopedia Britannica. I wasn’t just going to name it Sam or Susan. It had to be something unexpected. I looked for inspiration in various Latin nomenclatures of animals in the same family, Mephitidae. That led me to such creatures as the Civet Cat (a popular but misused term for spotted skunks). The most likely candidate, the striped skunk, was Mephitis, and I just couldn’t find a riff on that. But there was the Pole Cat (not indigenous to our area, but a frequent insult), whose Latin name included this: Putorius. And thus the name: P.U. I thought this cleverly appropriate. We took to calling P.U. “him,” even though I don’t believe we ever knew if he was a he or a she.
What came next must have been constant feedings, attended by my mother. Soon black fur with a sparse white stripe sprouted along the back. Enough to suggest our suspicions were correct. He was housed in a corner of the kitchen, on newspaper, with an overturned plastic, latticework clothes basket as a cage. We learned P.U. was a nocturnal creature, crawling about his little prison throughout the night.
Incredibly, I do remember P.U. having some run of the house now and then (he was something of an escape artist). I don’t remember which of many generations of Boston Bulldog would have been our indoor family member at the time, but skunk and resident bulldog had some playful encounters during P.U.’s childhood and early adolescence.
That photo op above, for which I’m most thankful as proof of this otherwise suspicious tale, was probably early in his childhood. The adolescent P.U. was, at least in my memory, twice as large. Here’s another from that same afternoon.
My dad called up a wildlife expert, something of an Ozarks celebrity who brought critters to show off on a local TV program. Surprisingly, he came to visit, and I have a clear memory of him sitting on our living room couch, playing with P.U. in his lap, amused and charmed. He confirmed what we knew: This was not a Civet Cat or a Polecat, neither of which were native to our region. It was a skunk, though a long-bodied variety that was rarely seen in these parts. He noted that it was illegal to keep them as pets, but said no one would object if P.U. lived with us until it was time for him to return to the wild.
From the moment I’d scooped up that hairless, fragile creature in the barn, I knew that had to happen. But naturally I’d grown attached. P.U. had bright, mischievous eyes, filled with a child’s curiosity about the strange world he inhabited. He was a creature of quick movements, always alert, energetic. He easily charmed everyone in the household and occasional visitors.
Acknowledging the Inevitable
As the summer wore on, P.U. became suspicious of the bulldog, and the bulldog became suspicious of him. When the bulldog was in an aggressively playful mood, P.U. began to stand up on his front legs, tail up in the air. And, of course, the inevitable finally happened. When P.U. did spray the dog, this first evidence of skunkly adulthood was thankfully fairly faint. Only enough to leave an odor in the house for a few hours and save me from severe parental approbation. But enough to signal the end of the adventure.
I was of course the one to return him to the wild. But where? The far end of our property was wooded, and that might have been a good spot. But in my 14-year-old brain, I figured if P.U. had any chance of meeting his family, or even his own kind, it would be close to the point where I first happened upon him. Maybe he could pick up a scent to follow. Wishful thinking.
I took him out behind that abandoned barn, and let him loose. I quickly took off to discourage him from following, and because I didn’t then and never have since liked lingering goodbyes. For a few days I checked back in the area, but of course there was no sign. The tale of a boy and his pet skunk was over.
And That Is That
If I were one to not let facts get in the way of a good story, I’d be tempted to add an epilogue about the following spring, when I spotted a family of slim, striped skunks on the move, mom and dad leading the way, a few babies trailing behind. Maybe dad would look my way for a moment, our eyes connecting.
But no. The story ended on that day when I turned around and left P.U. in a weedy patch out behind a barn. Did he survive? Whether I did him a favor by scooping him up and bringing him to my mother, I’ll never know. It’s just a gentle and charming childhood memory, with an unknowable message about empathy and hope.