Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 January 1884 — Fighting a Skunk. [ARTICLE]

Fighting a Skunk.

I was once on a visit to a sheep-farm-ing brother, far away on the southern frontier of Buenos Ayres, and among the dogs I found there was one most interesting creature. He was a great, lumbering, stupid, good-tempered brute, so greedy that when you offered him a piece of meat he would swallow your arm, and so obedient that at a word he would dash himself against the horns of a bull, and 'face death and danger in any shape. But, my brother told me, he would not face a skunk—lie would die first. One day I took him out and found a skunk, and for upwards of half an hour I sat on my horse vainly cheering my cowardly follower and urging him. to battle. The vefy sight of the enemy gave him a fit of shivers, and when tha, irascible little wretch began to advance against us, going through the performances by means of which he generally puts his foes to flight without resorting to malodorous measures—stamping his little feet in rage, jumping up, sputtering and hissing and flourishing his brush-like, war-like banner above his head—then hardly could I restrain my dog from turning tail and flying home in abject terror. My cruel persistence was rewarded at last. Continued shouts, cheers, and hand-clappings began to stir the brute to a kind of frenzy. Torn by conflicting emotions, he began to revolve about the skunk at a brisk gallop, barking, howling, and bristling up his hair, and at last, shutting his eyes, with yell of desperation, he charged. >1 fully expected to see the enemy torn to pieces in a few seconds, but when the dog was four or five feet away from him the fataldischarge came, dropped as if dead. For some time he lay on the earth perfectly motionless, watched and gently bedewed by the victorious skunk; then he got up and crept, whining away. Gradually he quickened his pace, finally breakinginto a frantic run. In vain I followed him, shouting at the top of my lungs; he stayed not to listen, and very speedily vanished from sight—a white speck on the vast, level plain. At noon on the following day he made his appearance, gaunt and befouled with mud, staggering forward like a galvanized skeleton. Too worn out even to eat, he flung himself down, and for hours lay like a dead thing, sleeping off the effects of these few drops of perfume.— London Field.