Mid-May, 1986. While wheel measuring Mountaintown Creek Trail (1) down an easy grade close to its namesake stream, I walked around a bend and hit the brakes. Up ahead, only 30 to 35 feet away, a striped skunk held the middle of the tread as it glanced back over its shoulder to see what had come clicking down the path. The sighting was a complete surprise. I had never encountered a Southern Appalachian skunk abroad during mid-day before, and just thirty seconds earlier would have considered the possibility of such a sighting as wasp-waist slim to none. The skunk neither ran nor walked away; it manifested no outward fear whatsoever. The cat-sized mammal remained where it was, giving me ample opportunity to note the white streak between its eyes, and the judicial white wig on the back of its head that forked and flowed into V-pattern stripes below the ridge of its back.
After a long appraising look, the polecat sauntered ahead. It nonchalantly zigzagged from one side of the track to the other for a sniff, stopped altogether for longer sniffs, then strolled straight ahead with short, small-footed steps. The skunk quickly taught me the appropriate pace and spacing for a new hiking partner. When I crowded to within 20 feet, either by failing to stop promptly or by impatience with the poky tempo, the striped skunk considered my approach a misdemeanor tailgating infraction. After each transgression, the polecat turned its dark and seemingly alert eyes my way and gave me a warning look: The Look, the hold-it-right-there-Buster, big-stick look. The Look reminded me of the quick glance shortstops give to look the baserunner back to third before firing the ball to first. That look says I know you’re there, don’t even think about advancing. And that’s what this mephitid’s stare said: I know you’re there, don’t even think of advancing; in fact, you had better back up a bit, better get back to third, a safe place where you won’t get gunned down and gassed out.
I always heeded The Look’s advice, a silent admonition about personal space between fellow walkers in the woods. I never tested the tensile strength of the malodorous mammal’s tailgating rule; each time I backed down by backing up two appeasing paces to the rear. After all, I didn’t want to run the little fellow off the trail. Or worse.
I never pressed closer than 20 feet, and Pepe never raised his bottle-brush tail or stamped his dainty feet, the first steps in a choreographed warning mechanism. A warning sequence that is all bluff and bluster right up until it isn’t. All hat and no cows until the instant stampede of stench blasts from a double-barreled squirt gun.
The skunk always snuck a quick glance at me whenever it stopped. And whenever I approached too closely, which I often did because I enjoyed the game, the skunk gave me The Look until I backed up a bit. It was my fourth day out alone, so I started talking to the little guy, us being new hiking buddies and all. The first thing I said was something about him being slower than continental drift. Pokecat—that was his new hiker handle—was not much of a talker, but his expressive eyes and demonstrative body language made up for his lack of verbal skills.
Pokecat continued to communicate his need for a minimum of 7 yards of personal space with brief glances and The Look when necessary. He had a good point. With all the wild land around us and close to five and a half miles of trail, why should one hiker crowd another? Seven or eight yards of walking room was certainly a reasonable expectation.
I quit crowding the black-and-white stink bomb, stopped moving in for the big-stick stare. He didn’t seem to notice my newfound kindness. He continued down the track as before, moseying intermittently ahead, apparently calm and carefree, his gait humped and unhurried. His dawdling pace reminded me of hiking with some of the botanists I knew. He moved ahead ever so slowly, his legs short and his belly low clearance. He stopped to investigate a scent on the side of the path. I clicked off 13 more feet and stopped to write nature notes. He glanced back, then advanced at daddy longlegs speed. Then I moved, tethered lockstep to the business end of an insouciant skunk.
I tagged along, remaining out of provocation range of Pokecat’s onboard spray gun. After we had hiked together for 372 feet, the route curled to the right away from the clear-water creek. The skunk ambled straight ahead at the bend, abandoning the footpath and angling down toward the low bank of the mountain stream. Completely assured he could walk softly wherever he pleased, instincts innocent of firearms and fastball rocks, Pokecat never looked back as I clicked around the curve. And so ended the slowest and most memorable short stretch of trail in my Southern Appalachian hiking life.
The first peculiar detail about this encounter, which occurred close to noon by sun-angle guess on a bright summer day, is that skunks are devoutly nocturnal or nocturnal and crepuscular. Prior to 1986, I had never walked up on a skunk after the sun had risen above the high Southern Appalachian horizon. In fact, outside of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, I had never seen a polecat pussy-footing around in the sunshine before. All five of my previous striped skunk sightings (2) had taken place along the same 2.1-mile stretch of trail in Georgia’s Cohutta Wilderness: the upper-elevation section of the Rough Ridge Trail from its East Cowpen junction to its Sugar Cove connection. But all of these meetings, at the beginning of backpack trips and long dayhikes, had taken place in the gray light of dawn before the sun had crested the Blue Ridge to the east. Each time I had slept in my vehicle at the Three Forks Mountain Trailhead and set an alarm to wake while it was still dark.
I knew the two highly unusual occurrences in combination—a polecat rambling about in bright diurnal light and willing to share a trail with me—constituted a rarity that had little likelihood of repetition. But still, this prolonged, occasionally eye-to-eye experience gave me hope I might bump into another wild mephitid, if only for a moment or two, along a Mountain South trail at high noon again.
During the late 70s, I had a close-call encounter with a striped skunk at the Cades Cove Campground in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This skunk, however, was a campground pest whose circadian clock had been recalibrated by food reward. I spotted the freeloader at my dog’s food bowl at around six on a summer evening. Fortunately, I caught sight of the polecat a moment before my dog did, giving me just enough time to leap to her rope before she tore into that blundering imbecile of a defenseless creature—or so she thought. She knew nothing of the skunk’s warning coloration, a long-remembered black-and-white shield to the initiated, nor had any clue of the olfactory assault her charge would trigger. I reeled her in and tied her off close to the picnic table. Her straining-at-the-leash barks and growls, plus a few chunks of gravel bowled in underhand, drove the intruder from camp. The tenting neighbors to either side, who had fled across the road, expressed their relief.
Two years after I trailed the Mountaintown Creek skunk, I spotted another one at the far end of the second wildlife opening along Flats Mountain Trail (3). That striped skunk quickly retreated into the woods, its white V wedging the way, as soon as I stopped to raise my binoculars. And that was it. That skunk was not only abruptly gone, but the glimpse also did not qualify as a full-daylight sighting. I had started hiking in the early dawn before sunrise, and the overcast sky was still a misty gray when I reached the nearby opening. So now, thirty-four years and thousands of trail miles later, I still have not come face to face—or face to raised tail—with another walk-about skunk during the bright daylight hours.
Notes
1 The 5.6-mile-long Mountaintown Creek Trail is located just southeast of the Cohutta Wilderness in the North Georgia mountains (Chattahoochee National Forest, Fannin and Gilmer Counties).
2 I was reasonably sure, enough to indict but not convict, that my first four sightings were of the same striped skunk.
3 The 6.0-mile-long Flats Mountain Trail skirts the southwestern boundary of the Citico Creek Wilderness, approximately 16,226 acres, for most of its mileage in the eastern Tennessee mountains (Cherokee National Forest, Monroe County).
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Skunks were classified as members of the Weasel family (Mustelidae) until modern molecular analysis transferred them to their own family (Mephitidae). Five skunk species—striped, hooded, eastern spotted, western spotted, and common or American hog-nosed—live in North America. All five inhabit at least a small portion of the United States, and all five find suitable habitat in Texas. The striped, which occurs in all forty-eight contiguous states, is by far the most common, widespread, and well known skunk in the U.S.
Members of the Mephitidae family are the only mammals that have slowly turned their scent glands into a weapons-grade defense mechanism: a highly concentrated stew pot of the devil’s own putrescence, nozzled and metered like a long-range nose spray. The acidic ingredients in skunk spray are highly sulfuric compounds known as mercaptans, so at least you’re assured of getting an all natural and organic dose of highly effective deterrent.
I have since learned that striped skunks can back blast up to 12 feet with disgusting accuracy. Aiming for the eyes, they often squeeze off four to six nauseating rounds in rapid fire through twin nozzles: a double-barreled six-shooter locked and loaded with big-stick stench. The striped skunk’s scientific binomial (Mephitis mephitis) comes from the word mephitis, which my nearly seven-pound New Oxford American Dictionary defines as follows: “N (noun) a noxious gas emanating from something, esp. from the earth. a foul or poisonous stench Origin early 18th cent.: from Latin.” So, as you can see, this mephitid’s scientific name—genus and species—translates to foul stench, foul stench, doubly foul stench—one mephitis for each scent-gland firing tube.
Striped skunks are reluctant chemical combatants. They do not play their big stick, big stink hold card unless they absolutely must repel a predator. If the threat isn’t serious, or serious yet, polecats frequently squeeze off a small-sample whiff, a slight spritz of Pepe Le Pew stink pot as a friendly warning. They diffuse most threatening encounters by lifting their tails, stamping their front feet, and giving fair warning by hissing and growling. If the would-be predator fails to decode their body language, skunks twist into a U-shape so that both eyes and backsides are staring at the intruder’s face. If that final warning fails, they shoot a stream of noxious yellow liquid right at their antagonist’s eyes. This weapon of mass stench can cause gagging, pain in the sensitive membranes of the nose and mouth, even temporary blindness—all of which make it easy for skunks to stroll away like they are walking the beach with a parasol.
When retreating from predators they can’t see, striped skunks will release a back-fired cloud of mephitic musk that usually stops pursuing animals dead in their tracks. Skunk kits come into the world armed and ready to reek. They are capable of spraying before their eyes open: boom, adorable little stink grenades born willing and able to pull the pin.
The reason you see and smell so many dead striped skunks along the roads, in addition to their instinctive over reliance upon their warning coloration and predator repellent, is that they are attracted to carrion as a food source. This habit means they frequently add themselves to the splatter. And once splattered, they inadvertently bait their brethren to the carrion corridor. Scientists would call their self-inflicted carnage along highways a negative feedback loop.
Mephitis mephitis suffers from a second glaring gap in the efficacy of its biological defense mechanism. Due to evolution’s constant fencing—thrust then counter thrust, safety then terror—the Great Horned Owl is now the skunk’s only systematic predator. This fierce and powerful raptor, known as the tiger of the night, is not bothered by the doubly bad odor, at least not enough to forego a large and slow-footed meal.
Random mutation and natural selection designed the skunk’s pelage of prominent white V against black as a can’t miss-can’t forget warning coloration. But the owl’s own evolution circumvented the skunk’s predator repellent and turned the white stripes into landing strips. And now when the large, cat-eared owls hunt below a bright moon, the skunk’s warning white turns double-cross traitor, turns into runway lights leading to a lethal landing.
