This Side of the Pond

Just when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the wildlife of Wyoming, along comes a critter determined to prove you wrong. As I grabbed my purse and water bottle on Monday morning and prepared to leave the house, my husband hollered for me to wait a moment.

“Don’t go on a wander,” he said, implying that I’d left myself plenty of time to ramble around the back yard for no reason. This was not the case – as usual, I was a mere 30 seconds from running late for work.

Nevertheless, I wanted to know why I was being urged to resist this particular temptation, if only because it’s not the usual sort of warning I get from my spouse. “Try not to trip over the stepping stones again,” sure, or, “You’ve forgotten your lunch for the third time this week,” but he’s never outright banned me from taking a stroll.

A few days before he issued the warning, the live trap had once again been fetched from the wood shop and dusted off, ready to be pressed into service. The goal was to make sure the local bluejays have enough to eat, because a raccoon had once again been raiding the bird feeder.

The seed stash is currently contained in a wood-and-wire box on the end of a long string that dangles from the end of a flimsy branch on a tall tree, several feet above the ground. However, as I’m sure I don’t need to explain, it doesn’t really matter where you hang those things.

Your feeder could be halfway up a skyscraper, surrounded by broken glass and barbed wire and capable of emitting an electric shock and the raccoon would still shrug its shoulders and thank you for the buffet. This is not ok, so either the bird feeder has to go or the racoon does.

We don’t get trash pandas in our part of the canyon often, but it wasn’t the first infiltration. The year before last, we captured and re-homed what must have been an entire family of the hungry little miscreants.

Don’t tell anyone, but I enjoy the process because, though I am fully aware of their habits and I don’t want them anywhere near my dogs, I can’t help but find racoons adorable. Their little fuzzy faces, their wobbly backsides, their wiggly noses – how am I meant to resist that level of cute?

I’ve been trained in the realities of the wilds, though, so I’m unlikely to wander up to a racoon and squeeze its puffy little cheeks. I want to, but I won’t.

Consequently, I always experience a thrill of excitement when the bird feeders suddenly start draining their contents overnight, because it means I get to ogle the fluffiness from afar while everyone else is being practical and actually dealing with the problem.

So when my husband said the trap had been successful during the night, I was ecstatic. What better way to cheer up a Monday morning than to coo over its furry contents? Perhaps I might be interested to go on a wander after all.

Unfortunately, the trap had only been partially successful. It had made a capture, but it had failed to lure a raccoon.

Instead, the creature that was at that moment staring unblinkingly into the depths of my very soul from just a few feet across the yard was…a skunk.

This, even to me, is not as good as a racoon. Skunks might be equally fluffy, but even Pepe Le Pew gives me a moment of pause.

I might be relatively new at all this, but I did immediately spot the conundrum. We might have stopped the skunk from wandering around spraying stink on things, but we also had no way to make him go somewhere else without first spraying stink on us.

And indeed, as I walked to my vehicle, the skunk continued to stare at me, and I could see exactly what he was thinking. “Sure,” he whispered directly into my mind. “But which one of us is really trapped here, hmmm?”

Advice was sought from the game warden, who gave us permission to get rid of the skunk as we saw fit. Trouble was, we didn’t really see a fit way.

Eventually, an approach was decided upon: sneak up on the skunk with a tarp, preferably not from behind, and then move the trap while its contents were still figuring out what was going on.

Seems reasonable, right? It works great until you realize that the direction the skunk is facing is not going to be the direction the skunk will be facing once it spots you, and that’s going to be true no matter how many angles you try in your attempts to creep up on it.

And thus began the show. My poor dad-in-law walked his designated 10,000 steps for the day just approaching and backing away from the cage; meanwhile, the skunk whirled in circles to present the threat of its natural weaponry.

It was a dance that continued for some time. While all this was going on, my husband and mom-in-law closed all the windows and waited indoors by the air conditioning units, ready to switch them off if the skunk decided it had had enough. The trap was positioned precisely between our two homes, about 30 feet from both, and we knew we’d be smelling this event for days if it got funneled into either one of them.

I’m relieved to say that Dad-in-law got rid of the critter in the end, but not without collateral damage. It didn’t manage to spray him or the houses, but it still made its feelings clear.

For the rest of the day, the ripe scent of skunk floated through the area, posing more of a threat than the creature that made it ever did. Even when I got home that evening, a full ten hours later, there was a whiff of resentful skunk hanging round the yard.

If you happened to drive through the canyon on that day and caught the scent of success upon the air, we apologize for assaulting your nostrils. I think it’s safe to say the skunk got his own back – literally, if you think about it. I guess even the smallest and smelliest of God’s creatures are still perfectly willing to remind us that we don’t have nearly as much sovereignty over nature as we’d like to think.