Skunk Surprise

Holy crap. This right here is the real reason for having a blog. Couple this with my spider stories and you have an idea of the true freak show that is my life.

Brutus and I had a great weekend: Long walks, games of kong, beanbag/movie night...what more could a dog and his human companion want out of life? Apparently HE felt that a little excitement was lacking.

Sunday night at 9 pm, Brutus casually strolls to the back door. I am always at my dog's beck and call, so I jump up to let him into the back yard for a while. At 9:15 pm, I hear a sound I've never heard before. Similar to a small dog bark, but somehow I couldn't place it. "Dear God," I thought, "the neighbor's Chihuahua got into the backyard and Brutus is killing it!"

I ran to the backyard and called Brutus' name sharply. No response. I called him again and saw definite rustling near the fig tree. I ran to the vicinity, mostly afraid of what I was about to find and saw some foreign lump of fur lying near the base of the tree. I didn't have a flashlight with me and it's dark back there behind the garage, so I didn't realize what exactly was going on until Brutus began to rub his face in the grass over and over. And then I knew the awful truth: Brutus had killed a skunk.

It's amazing how long it takes for that smell to really take effect. I went back into the house, got my flashlight, and came back to confirm that the little bugger was dead. I suppose because we were outdoors, the smell still hadn't hit me. Brutus headed back to the skunk, and I yelled at him to get in the house. Get in the house? A dog who has been sprayed with liquid death? Yes, that's what I said, fool that I am. When I got to the living room, he was already back in his beanbag, looking truly mortified for not only screwing himself, but making all social gatherings at our home an impossibility for the next two to four weeks. When I grabbed the bath basket and called him to the bathroom, he didn't even hesitate to jump into the tub.

Now, maybe you're familiar with the resultant odor of a skunk spray...perhaps you've smelled it in your neighborhood, or in your car as you drove past roadkill skunk. But let me tell you, until you've experienced it in its purest form, you have no idea what a sinister creature the skunk really is. It's like having onion juice injected directly into your tear ducts and sinuses, at least that's the best description I could come up with at that particular moment. It was not stinky, it was poisonous. I still have pain in the space behind my face from the noxious fumes. We washed with both toothpaste (an internet recommendation) and his doggie shampoo, and as far as I can tell the results were decent. But truly, after being hit with that stink bomb, my nose didn't really make much of a judge.

So today he's locked in the backyard rather than hanging out and infecting my office. Hopefully my sense of smell will have recovered by 5 pm so that I can go home and discover just how ruined he really is. And if the gods be benevolent, the neighborhood skunks have learned not to enter the Clark Family Death Zone. Because love him though I may, that dog ain't the sharpest tool in the shed.