CHAPTER ELEVEN—SKUNKED AT SPY POND

 

Spy Pond, Continental Village. Year, 2014.

     My experience hunting raccoons with Cliff Holmes and his grandfather led me to trap them as well as hunt them. Between the ages of 12 and 15 I became an avid young trapper and hunter. I read the monthly magazine "Fur, Fish and Game" from front cover to back cover, and learned how to make scented bait's for individual animals that I trapped. I borrowed old traps from Cliff Holmes and bought a few new traps.

     I recruited Paul Kuty and later his younger brother Raymond. Paul was my age, and he and his family lived on Putnam Road near the junction of Birch Lane. Paul's neighbor, Wayne Matthews, joined us on our hunting trips but I don't recall that he joined us on the trapline. He lived on Steuben Road.

     We used a pellet gun while hunting and trapping. I can't remember which of the boys owned the pellet gun. Our traps were baited and set to catch raccoons, mink and muskrats. In the early 1950's these animals thrived in Continental Village.

     Paul Kuty and I established a long trapline which stretched from the Beaver Pond north of the Monument to below the dam at Cortlandt Lake. We used size 1, 1 ½, and 2 metal jump traps. The first two sizes of traps were single coil spring, the larger size was double coil spring. We placed these traps in places where we thought there was a reasonable prospect of catching a muskrat, mink, or raccoon. One of the traps, I recall, was placed under an old apple tree near the cattails on Spy Pond. It is now an area of neatly manicured lawn down to the water's edge. The location was less than 30 feet from the place where I disabled a croaking bullfrog with a large rock on a whim.

     We thought that we could trap a raccoon because we saw raccoon footprints in the area. We used sardines for bait. It was autumn, and the mornings were cold.

     Paul and I did not check the traps at the Beaver Pond daily. We checked them every two or three days, usually after school or on weekends. Before getting on the school bus in the morning, we checked the traps that were distributed along Sprout Brook, Cortlandt Lake and Spy Pond. We woke up early, met near Paul's house on Putnam road, then walked our trapline.

     On the fateful cold morning that we discovered a skunk in our Spy Pond trap, Paul had the pellet gun. From a safe distance we loaded one pellet at a time and started to shoot at the trapped skunk. We took turns pumping and loading the pellet gun and then shooting.

     The skunk was still alive after a dozen shots hit it, but it had not sprayed us. We decided to get closer, within 15 feet. Paul pumped the pellet gun much more than required for the next shot. He hit the skunk in the head. The skunk leaped dramatically into the air, spun its tail toward us, sprayed a thick cloud of green-tinted vapor at us, then fell down and died.

     We were surprised. We looked at the skunk, then looked at each other. We knew that we had been hit with the spray. The stink was awful. Our eyes watered. The spray was on our skin and on our clothes. I don't remember the conversation that followed but it was colorful.

     We had been thoroughly skunked, and we had to go home and get ready for school. Paul pulled a hold-down stake from the trap chain loop, and dragged the trap and dead skunk, still held in the trap by a leg, along the ground to the road. I followed him.

     When we reached Highland Drive near Spy Pond outlet, we split. I ran home around the south end of Cortlandt Lake. Paul walked home around the north end of the lake, dragging the trap and skunk across a little wooden bridge over the inlet to the lake, then to Steuben Road and finally to his home on Putnam Road. He left the trap and skunk in the woods near his house.

     As I recall subsequent events, Paul's mother made him wash in the basement, then gave him a new set of clothes and coat. The stink of the skunk was still on his skin as he boarded the school bus and walked quickly past the bus driver, Mr. Frost. He settled in the back seat by himself. Mr. Frost had a head cold and did not smell Paul's newly acquired fragrance. A few of the students near the back of the bus did smell him, and they created a major stir as they took new seats near the front of the bus, laughing and joking about the "skunk in the back seat."

     I had a slightly different experience at home. My mother refused to let me in the house. She threw a towel and soap out the front door and told me to wash in the lake. The outside temperature was about 40 degrees F.  I knew that I would miss the bus if I went to the lake to clean up, so I hid near the small barn between my house and the Boyd's house until the bus arrived. Then I got on the bus, moved quickly to the back seat and joined Paul.  The voices of the children on the bus got noisier as the bus circled Gallows Hill and drove along Dogwood Road. "Phew!" and "Double phew!" and "Two rotten skunks in the back seat," and other comments considerably worse. Children were laughing and complaining as they crowded near the front of the school bus.

     When the bus reached the public elementary school, most of the students got off. The parochial students stayed on the bus for transport to Peekskill and Assumption School. But unlike all the other school mornings, this one was memorably different.

     The elementary school Principal came out from the school building to the school bus just as Mr. Frost was closing the bus door. He knocked on the door and Mr. Frost opened it. "Mr. Frost," he said, looking up and down the seats, "are there any students on this bus who smell like a skunk?" Not waiting for a reply from Mr. Frost, the principal walked past him until he came to me. "Aha!" he said triumphantly. “This is one of them. Stay in your seat, young man. Don't mingle." (As if I wanted to.) Then he walked to the front of the bus, scolded Mr. Frost, and told him to wait for another passenger. He went back into the school and came out with Paul Kuty. He put Paul on the bus, and told Mr. Frost to drive the two of us home after the Assumption School stop.

     Paul and I were pleased with the way it turned out. We had the day off—no school. It took three days and lots of scrubbing for the skunk odor on our bodies to disappear.