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The Skunk

A story about prejudice and mob mentality

By Marco den OudenPublished 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago 9 min read
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The Skunk
Photo by Elisa Stone on Unsplash

The skunk, thought Teddy, was a loathsome creature. It was to be avoided. Shunned. If you got too close it would turn on you and spray you with its secretions. Secretions so vile they would burn the eye and sear the nostril.

Teddy was ten and he knew about skunks. Two years ago, their dog Rusty came home smelling of skunk. They had put Rusty in the tool shed for the night and in the morning his Dad gave Rusty a bath. It helped, but not much. Rusty was banned to the shed for several days.

With tousled blonde hair and a mild demeanor, Teddy was the apple of his parents’ eyes. He was a straight A student. He rarely argued with his parents or his teachers. Though he didn’t wear glasses, he was considered a bit of a nerd. He was, in fact, what some people would call a goody two-shoes.

Nevertheless, he did have a circle of friends, the local kids he hung around with. And when not in school or at home, he and his friends were an adventurous lot. They would roam the woods behind the farm he lived on. They would hike along the river, even crossing the railroad bridge and climbing down the girders to the cement footing to watch trains go by overhead. Because his parents trusted him, they gave him a lot of latitude. They were liberal and did not believe in keeping kids on a short leash.

Now other than in picture books and road kill, Teddy had never actually seen a skunk. He just knew they should be avoided. They were little stinkers, quite literally.

Teddy’s attitude towards skunks was not an unusual one. The word skunk has been used as an insult since the 1840s. To call someone a skunk is to call him a stinker. A lowlife. Someone of bad repute. Teddy played cribbage and knew that if you lost badly you were the skunk. “Ha ha! Skunked ya!” And if you lost really badly, “Double skunk! What a loser!”

But mostly it was from personal experience. The incident with Rusty and the odd time they had passed a dead skunk as road kill. Phew! Even dead a skunk was bad news. Sure he had seen the little skunk in Disney’s Bambi and he laughed at Pepé la Pew’s failed attempts to romance a cat he thought was a skunk. But these were cartoons, not real life.

So when Teddy and his friends, the gang as they liked to call themselves, saw a skunk emerge from a burrow on his Dad’s farm one summer day, they were simultaneously fascinated and disgusted. There were seven of them, all around Teddy’s age give or take a year or two. Teddy’s younger brother Jake was one of them.

They watched the skunk waddling away from them for a short while when one of the boys got it in his head that the skunk, vile little critter that it was, should be more than just a target of their disgust. He picked up a rock and tossed it at the skunk. From a safe distance, of course.

Soon another joined in, and then another, and it didn’t take long until five of the boys were hurling rocks at the skunk, shouting and whooping their superiority. “Take that, you stinker!” shouted one.

“Dirty rotten skunk,” hissed another.

Teddy, mild-mannered boy that he was, resisted joining in at first. “Come on, Jake, let’s go,” he said.

But the others taunted him. “Come on, Teddy! Pelt him! Toss a rock at the skunk!”

“Nah!” he replied. “Leave the skunk alone. He’ll just spray you.”

“Not if we keep a distance,”retorted the oldest, most aggressive boy. “Come on you wimps. Throw a rock at the stinker.”

Teddy and Jake hesitated. He took Jake’s hand and turned to go.

“Chickens! Brawk! Bawk! Bacaw! Come on, Teddy. Everyone’s doing it ‘cept you and Jake.”

“Yeah! Don’t teach your kid brother to turn his back on his buds, Teddy! You’re part of our gang. We stick together.”

“Yeah, Teddy. Come on! Be part of the gang.”

After much cajoling Teddy finally picked up a small rock and threw it. The rock missed and he was taunted again. “Can’t hit the side of a barn, you wimp!”

He picked up another rock and let fly. It hit the back of the skunk. The other boys cheered. “Good one, Tedster! We knew you could do it!”

Caught up in the excitement, Teddy and Jake both started to toss rocks at the now wobbling animal.

The boys were making quite a ruckus with their whoops and shouts and it so happened that Teddy and Jake’s father was working within earshot in a nearby hayfield. He stopped his work and walked over.

“Hey!” he shouted when he saw what was happening. “Stop that!” And he started to run to the scene.

The boys stopped except for the oldest boy who picked up one last stone and defiantly threw it at the creature.

“You boys should be ashamed of yourselves,” he shouted. “Teddy! Jake! Home! Now! I’ll deal with you later.”

“You’re gonna get it!” sneered one of the other boys.

Teddy’s Dad turned red with anger as he turned on the boys. “Get out of here! All of you! Go home! Now!” he shouted. “And don’t think you’re getting away with this!”

That afternoon, after work, he went home. Jake and Teddy were in their room. He called the boys down and took them out to the woodshed. He pulled a switch from the woodpile and waved it around a bit.

“I could punish you,” he said. “I could give you a sound thrashing. Give you a taste of what you gave that skunk. But I’m not going to do that.”

He paused and looked from one boy to the other. “Why did you boys do that? Why did you get involved in such needless cruelty? I thought I’d taught you better than that.”

“But Dad, it was a skunk,” whined Jake.

“All the other boys were doing it, Dad,” Teddy offered.

“It may have been a skunk, Jake, but she was one of God’s creatures. The skunk is a gentle animal that harms no one.”

Turning to Teddy he said, “Teddy, I want you and Jake to take a lesson from this. Two lessons actually. One is not to judge what you don’t understand. Don’t judge based on a groundless prejudice. The skunk has a reputation. But it is not a reputation of being dangerous. It has a reputation because of the defense mechanisms it was endowed with by nature. It uses its spray to defend against predators that might kill it.”

“But,” he continued, “There’s a more important lesson here. Don’t let others do your thinking for you. Don’t get caught up in something you know to be wrong just because everyone else is doing it. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

The boys nodded.

“Let me tell you something about the skunk you injured. It was badly wounded, you know. I had to send my foreman to put it out of its misery.”

Teddy and Jake felt awful. They didn’t want the skunk to die. Just to be chased away.

“My foreman determined the skunk was female,” their dad continued. “A recent mother. He searched for its burrow. He found five kits inside.”

“Did he kill them too?” Teddy choked out the words. Tears were welling in his eyes. Jake was sobbing as well.

“No. He took them to the local SPCA. They will be nursed until they are old enough to be released into the wild. Do you boys want to see them?”

Both nodded.

“Good. We’ll go tomorrow morning.”

The next day they visited the pound and saw the baby skunks up close. The veterinarian told them skunks made good pets. He could remove the stink glands from one of them and they could have it as a pet if they wanted. Both boys nodded. Their Dad smiled and nodded too.

Their new pet wasn’t old enough to go home with them for a couple of weeks, but when it did, the boys loved that animal like no pet they had ever had before. They called her Daisy.

Every year they would take a trek out to the edge of the farm where Daisy’s mother was buried and remember.

Being a wimpy kid, Teddy experienced his share of bullying as he grew older. When such incidents happened, he remembered Daisy’s mother and her cruel fate. An outcast, shunned because she was different.

Teddy always had a few close friends growing up, but he never joined a gang again. He never got caught up in the mob mentality. He always had a soft spot for those who were different, even though he was pretty much conservative in his ways. He admired the rebel, the independent thinker, the innovator who followed his own path.

And he hated prejudice with a passion. Teddy went out of his way to be a friend to those he saw bullied or harassed. One time he even got beat up for his efforts.

One year a new kid came into the class. He was from India and some of the boys taunted him, imitating his accent and calling him names. Teddy became the new boy’s best friend. They were friends throughout their college years and beyond. While in university, both of them became active in the civil rights movement.

Recently, Teddy, now in his late seventies, was waiting in a plaza for his wife when he saw a young hooligan punch a Chinese man and utter some racial epithet.

“Stop that!” he shouted angrily and ran towards the scene waving his cane. The coward fled and Teddy helped the man to his feet. And he thought of Daisy’s mother and the most shameful day of his life.

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About the Creator

Marco den Ouden

Marco is the published author of two books on investing in the stock market. Since retiring in 2014 after forty years in broadcast journalism, Marco has become an avid blogger on philosophy, travel, and music He also writes short stories.

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