A friend of mine–Bruce–had a pet skunk that he kept in his apartment, where it was about as house-trained as a cat. It had its own kitty litter thing in the bathroom, and we would feed it raw hamburger and eggs, and it was relatively affectionate like cats sometimes are. Occasionally at night, though, it would get territorial with Bruce’s new friends coming over to visit, and at such times it would stamp its little feet in a cute way, then spray you in the face with this incredibly foul, noxious fluid that would burn your eyeballs out. Then we would all live on the beach for a couple of weeks until the apartment aired out. That’s how we rolled in Southern California in those days. We were pretty laid back.
I mention this as prologue to the afternoon years later, when my beeper went off, and I was paged to the ER to evaluate an adult who had just been brought in by ambulance. My office was in another part of the hospital, and while I was walking through the corridors I was reminded of my sunny adolescence as I met the unmistakable essence of skunk rolling like an awful fog up the hallway. Once I arrived in the ER, I didn’t need anyone to point out who I was supposed to be evaluating–which was a good thing, really, since the place was pretty much empty: patients, doctors, family members, nurses, social workers, orderlies, receptionists–everybody had cleared out.
Except two unhappy EMT’s from the ambulance, and this emaciated guy wearing a sort of breech clout and vest that he obviously made himself out of maybe a dozen skunk skins. He hadn’t tanned them, so of course they were rotting (this was September, the end of summer), which only added to the flavor of the encounter. It was memorable. The first thing I did was order the three of them outside into the courtyard, and tried to get up wind of him. I wasn’t worried that he would try to escape: there was no place on earth he could hide, and besides, you could see he was starving. It’s true he was also floridly psychotic and paranoid, but he was tamed by the lethargy induced from his long want of food. He was actually in a bad way.
He had spent months out in the woods, and the woody terrain bordering the farmland of a nearby town. It turned out that everybody knew he was out there: farmers spend a lot of time outside in the summer looking at their crops, the weeds, the weather, rain clouds and so on, and folks noticed this young man in various stages of nakedness roaming around in the miles and miles of forested countryside. He wasn’t harming anyone, and so in the egalitarian way of stoic New Englanders ever since Robert Frost, they let him do his thing. Also, they were really busy this time of year.
Whatever crazy, fearful thinking first led him out into the woods, after he was there a while the most important thing on his mind became food. It is hard for a person in a disorganized, disheveled mental state to find and capture enough edible materials–whether animal or vegetable–to keep his body sound for months on end. The only things that he could find to eat, and that would not try to run from him, were the skunks. They don’t run: they stand their ground and warn everything else to get away, fast. So he could kill and eat skunks–and then after his fashion, he made clothing from their hides once he lost whatever he was wearing when he first left his civilized mind in whatever place he once called home.
I suppose it’s true everywhere, when you think about it, but in the part of New England I’m talking about, skunks are in finite supply. There’s just not that many of them,
not enough to support a large and clumsy predator forever. So after he had killed and eaten all the skunks he could find, the only other thing that wouldn’t run away were the cows out in the pastures. It must have taken a while for him to figure out how to attack a cow, or to get hungry enough to try, but he eventually shot one with a bow and arrow he got somewhere, and that was too much for the area dairymen, who had a tough enough time trying to make a living without having people shoot their best milkers with toy arrows. One of them called the police, and that in the due course of events led to my chance to meet him. It was as natural as breathing: find someone in skins shooting arrows at cows, and bring him to the Emergency Room to see me. I’ll sort things out.
This time, however, I wasn’t given a chance. No community can afford to have its ER shut down, so while I was outside with him, a team of people with a large van came to collect him and bring him to New Haven, where there were facilities that could handle the particular challenges my guy presented. They bundled him up in some sort of cloaking fabrics, and off they went. I never saw him again.
POSTSCRIPT
Over dinner one night I mentioned the encounter to a friend of mine, Gary Young, who was as moved as I have been by the passions stirring my scared hunter. So Gary wrote a poem, which is published on page 225 of his book, Even So: New and Selected Poems. You can also read it here (It is a prose poem):
In Western Massachusetts, a man wandered into the woods to live alone. He tried hunting, but the only animals that stood their ground, the only animals he could catch were skunks. The man was sprayed, of course, but he caught them, ate them, and dressed in a cloak of rancid pelts. When he was found, the scent was on his breath, his skin, and when I heard his story, I thought, comrade.
Blue Islands, Blue as Ink 