Remembering a stinky friend, Blossom.
For many years Blossom the skunk lived under Audrey Tournay’s verandah along with her brood of skunk kits.
Submitted photo
Last week I was definitely reminded of my advancing old age. Carol and Connie, two of the pupils I taught a long, long time ago (in the 1960s) in St. Catherines – when Muskoka was merely a place one might visit in the summer – came to the sanctuary on visiting day.
I was sitting with them on the verandah, remembering the days at school, when a Rosseau friend stopped by and I introduced them.
“I’d like you two meet these two young women,” was my trite intoduction.
When we were alone again Connie looked at me with a smile twisting her lips just slightly.
“Thank you for the ‘young,’ she said.
I was a bit puzzled until she finished. “In two years I will be getting my old age pension.”
Anyway, she was certainly old enough to remember the very first wild animal orphan I ever had. It was at Lakeport High School. In the staff room an irate teacher, Beth (I forget her last name), took a seat across the lunch table from me.
“Skunks!” she grumbled. “Under my front porch. Stinky skunks! I got rid of the mother and now I find she left two babies. Two baby skunks! What am I supposed to do with them?”
I heard myself say, “I’ll take them.”
That was likely the only time in the history of Lakeport that two skunks spent the next day in the staff lunchroom.
Those two skunks grew up at my home in the country near St. Catherines. I expect their great, great, great grandchildren are living there yet. Here in Muskoka I evidentially have a skunk living under my front porch now. No proof. Just the comments of passing humans.
Perhaps my sense of smell is highly underdeveloped, but I rarely detect the presence of a skunk by its mere smell. However unaware I may be almost every visiting day when people stop to talk to me, someone will say, “Oh, I smell a skunk.”
Up until this year I would rightfully acknowledge that, likely I would have one or two tiny kits in my lap. You couldn’t handle them, but I would certainly expect you to admire them. This is the first time in all the 40 years that I have not had at least one skunk kit. However, I still hear the same comment – people still smell a skunk.
I blame a skunk of more than a dozen years ago, a skunk with the typical name – Blossom. I think I’ve had skunks with every traditional name from Stinky to Rose and many have never been named. Every skunk, which I have raised and released, several hundred of them, has had all the appropriate shots. I think the area owes us at least the credit for reducing rabies, very rare around here. Blossom, however, lived her entire life with her den under my front verandah and all the valley in which to roam free.
She was a relatively famous skunk. Her picture was in an assortment of newspapers across both the United States and Canada. Visitors used up all sorts of film on her beauty. She was the star in a documentary for the BBC in London, England. For the crew she spent an entire day being followed and filmed. She was patient and obedient and beautiful of course. She refused to spray. Back in England they had a cartoonist draw a strip of a skunk spraying to complete their documentary.
For the first few years of her life, I would see Blossom come out from under the verandah with two or three kits dancing along behind her. She never permitted the kits she raised, to be tame, even I was not allowed near them. Wild skunks they were, and when they were old enough they went away into the wild.
Then one year, Blossom did not make her usual appearance.
Though I have occasionally had the privilege of seeing a skunk slip under the steps and vanish in the darkness under the verandah, none has ever given me a single second of attention. Still, I have to accept the fact that my sense of smell is under-developed. But tradition is important. I miss having at least one kit.
(Audrey Tournay is the executive director of Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary and a regular contributor to he Beacon Star.)