CATEGORY: CENTRAL OREGON
PHOTO: WHITE SKUNK (CIVIT CAT)

The first thing I did in the way of structural changes to the house in Tumalo was to tear out the end of the kitchen and build 8 feet on to the end of it for an eating nook.  The eight foot addition extended beyong the kitchen toward the front of the house overlapping the living room for another six feet for a laundry and then a small outside porch.

While this new addition was still under construction, a packrat got into the house.  The house only had two bedrooms and I had given one to each of the children while I slept in a sleeping bag on the living room sofa.  This pack rat got through into Eric’s bedroom, up behind the drawers in the chest of drawers where I kept my clothes and ate the back out of my beautiful hand knit light blue mohair sweater (fortunately I had enough yarn leftover to repair it).  I had heard its little claws going click, click, click, across the kitchen floor at night.  I set traps but couldn’t catch it until someone told me to set a trap in a length of stove pipe and put it someplace where I knew the critter was getting through.  I put the stove pipe where I was building a closet for Eric’s bedroom, and that was the end of that plunderer.

After I got the kitchen addition enclosed, I woke up one night to hear the same sound of clicking claws, only this time it was in the living room very near where I was sleeping.  I thought, “Oh, oh!  Another pack rat!”  I almost picked up my shoe to throw it in the direction of the sound.  But I didn’t.  Instead, I yelled, “You get out of here!”  The clicking sound stopped, but a few minutes later I heard it again out in the kitchen, which meant that these little night marauders can pull in their claws when they want to.  I turned on the lamp at the head of my bed.  I cleared off the coffee table, picked it up and laid it top-to-door across the opening into the kitchen.  This was a cased opening: it did not have a door.  Then I stood up on the hearth, reached around into the kitchen and turned on the kitchen light.  At first I didn’t see anything.  Then I saw a big fluffy white tail protruding from under the refrigerator!   The space under the refrigerator was maybe a little over an inch.  How could this be?  This tail must be fastened to a spatula and someone had drug it there with a wire!  I stood perfectly still and waited.

After a while the fluffy tail backed slowly out into the room.  Attached to the other end of it was not a spatula, but a little body.  I had enough past experience with wild animals to know it was a civet cat.  These are small versions of a skunk.  Unlike a skunk, which is always black with two white stripes down its back, civet cats come in a variety of black and white patterns.  This one’s body was white with small black spots.  After it emerged from its slot under the refrigerator, it circumnavigated the kitchen.  It went under the toe space of the kitchen cabinets, on around behind the wood cook stove and right under where I was standing.

That was when I fell in love!  It was so CUTE!!!  It was shaped like a pear that had somehow been flattened like a bar of soap.  It was just a little soft furry pancake of a thing with a fluffy tail that was bigger than all the rest of it!  I thought, “What harm could it possibly do–the sweet little thing?”  It disappeared into the dark maw of the unfinished end of the kitchen.  I left the coffee table across the doorway and went back to bed.  After that I would always put the coffee table across the doorway in the evening and often heard click, click, click in the kitchen during the night.  I didn’t go so far as to put out food for it, but almost.  I did turn on the light often enough to know that it wasn’t just the white one, but also a black one with white stripes and a black one with white dots.

Winter came.  There was snow on the ground.  One evening, Eric and Jari and I went into Bend to a movie.  When we came home, we built a fire in the heating stove and were sitting around it waiting for us and the house to get warm.  We were excitedly talking about the movie, gesturing with our hands and laughing, when ALL OF A SUDDEN a little black civet cat, came out from under the desk next to the kitchen doorway.  I realized with trepidation that I had failed to put the coffee table across the doorway before we left.  All three of us saw it at the same time and we stopped talking simultaneously.  In mid word!  In mid gesture!  Our freezing in place must have been like those mammoths that had been found frozen in Siberia with green grass in their mouths.  Our new guest came into the room a few steps.  When it saw us, it did a dainty little dance with its front paws.  Then it did the strangest thing: facing us, it stood up on its front feet and did a complete back bend so that its tail was on the floor and its little business aperture was pointed dead at us.  Oh Shucks.  These adorable little animals were also acrobats!  I wondered afterwards if I hadn’t seen it actually stand on only one foot while it was doing this.

We didn’t breathe for what seemed at least three minutes.  Then our budding gymnast unbent itself and casually walked out into the kitchen and disappeared.  I immediately put up the coffee table.  I went to bed.  The next morning I decided the time had come to find where our little cuties were getting in.  I found a hole in the unfinished wall between the future laundry room and the living room that had been disguised by wall board waiting to be installed.  I nailed a board over the hole.  Enough is enough.

However, then they started coming UNDER the house.  We could hear their scratching noises.  I went out and shoveled dirt all around the house, but they simply dug their way in anyway.  Oh well, they were such charming little things.  Why shouldn’t they be warm under our house?

One night, in the middle of the night, the neighbors dog started barking, first a distance away, and then right outside our house.  The neighbors lived at least a quarter mile away.  What was their dog doing here?  Suddenly the whole house was filled with the sickening odor of SKUNK.  One of them had done its signature thing under the house, and this time had not restrained itself.  The smell had come right up through the floor boards.  As I gasped for breath, I hoped the dog had not escaped unscathed.  Eric, who had a cold, came staggering out of his bedroom.  He said, “Wow! That sure does clear your head!!!!”

The next day, I shoveled away the dirt, put BOARDS all around the house, and shoveled the dirt back against them.  That was the end of SKUNKS in and around our house.  Later, I read in an animal encyclopedia that skunks shoot by lowering their hind end, and raising their tail, but that civet cats do the back bend thing and let you have it while practicing to be circus artists.