No one tells the first-time homeowner to watch out for skunks. The mice and what-might-be rats our older cat sometimes catches by the back door never faze us. The wild turkey, I just had to convince myself I was really seeing, on a busy residential street, even, and not just on a bottle. Deer wander everywhere, from suburban front lawns to freeway shoulders to three doors down from us—where what looked like a doe blinked, looking just as startled as I was.

Skunks appeared unbidden and without magic, never inspiring the double take I gave the wild turkey, nor the aura of tentative wonder shrouding the doe. One skunk got closer than any of these creatures did, except for the cat-caught mouse I occasionally have to dispose of. One was arm’s length away as I passed a crash course in skunk control one weekend afternoon, the first June in our new home. Skunk whisperer I am not. To twist and truncate a cliché, at skunk control, I—well, you know.

Skunks seemed to be roving signs we were now in a borderline neighborhood: single-family homes and duplexes age into their second century as more and more landlords rent lordly homes to us more itinerant folks. Shells of homes slowly waste away a few doors down from persistent survivors. The neighborhood seems to know it abuts three other enclaves with currently far superior fortunes. This one has waited long enough for its turn. The city has its corridors, its stretches claimed by urban blight, blocks that are almost striated by fossil fields of former prosperity and bust. Animals, with all these influxes, have left their marks, too. What we thought were marmots or neutrinos grow dismayingly large here, scurrying up riverbanks and showing the ferocious confidence that one hopes to see only in dogs, maybe wolverines. We once mentioned a prominent one we had passed on the way to a dinner party. We were told by the hosts, the creatures were in fact woodchucks. We still found their burly bodies unwelcome, if more familiar now, for their stubborn, looming persistence.

The skunks were stealthy, blackly blending in at night but for white dorsal stripes that don’t look as cute on the actual creatures as they had in the cartoons featuring Pepe le Pew. Obvious judgments creep into one’s connotations, whenever one writes about skunks. They skulk along, creeping toward you or away, mostly as black as midnight. They slink by at dawn and dusk, crepuscular creatures who would always be on twilight walks of shame, if they only shared our chagrin. Neighborhoods with skunks aren’t unscathed, but skunks are not the local residents whom one wants outsiders hearing about. They are the bats of quadrupeds, mysterious shriekers in photo-negative worlds so startlingly inverted from everyday reality, you don’t realize it’s your shrieking you’re hearing, not theirs. They are in fact not making a sound. Though they belong to the order Carnivora, no such animal looks like it has the right to be that substantial. They could not possibly turn up in ways suggesting they had been otherworldly, and they’re yet right there, in one’s own backyard. They could not really be sitting there on the lawn, seeming to look right at you. Yet one blinks, doubting one’s own equivalents of my bat analogies—it really is there, after all. My familiar, backyard space is harboring creatures, seemingly from other worlds.

And yes, that was quite enough time, putting off getting to their scent. Scratch ’n sniff books we read as kids do not even come close. Biology has selected its mutations well to get scents that poor, that distinctive, that offensive. One knows which yards had been skunked from several front yards away. One senses scents persisting, coming home late in the afternoon, and knowing one had already sniffed the same pungent cloud when leaving home that morning. One does not merely avert one’s eyes at roadkill sites, but internally plugs one’s nose, speeding by with windows shut, only breathing relief when several blocks down. One saw—one smelled, with dreading anticipation, one of them present on one’s own lawn and wondered how long one had to avert the stench.

One realizes, only after writing these paragraphs, one has removed first-person “I” from sentences straying too close to skunks, as if I am uncomfortable being the “I” in these scenes. One night, even so, I and a cat lay in bed when my partner inspired a spray, one floor down and at the other side of the house. The smell still had the power to awaken me—for what I think was the first time in my life the sense of smell ever had. It had a digestive, stomach-upset pungency to it, and one wondered, half-awake, not only what had gotten the skunk angry, but what the skunk had eaten lately. Whether scents varied with diet. Whether mating had anything to do with it. Whether anything, short of emergencies, family tragedies, could have been worse things to get you out of bed.

Reclaiming the “I,” I looked, then, for skunk equivalents of essays I have read, like Seattle reporter James Gardner’s article “Consider the Pit Bull.” Consider, even though you probably won’t want to, the skunk. They’re closely related to ferrets and weasels, with scents distinguishing three kinds of skunks from the rest of the order, pig-shaped or pig-nosed skunks standing out even more from the rest. They can grow to be huge in the world’s exotic corners, but they are native to the Americas, increasingly suburban—urban, even, if their presence in my neighborhood counts. They neither see well nor move fast, so they navigate by smells and sounds. Swift great horned owls swoop in as their most successful, natural predators. Minivans on highways—any vehicles, really, fast enough to appear from nowhere from a near-blind near-weasel’s point of view—are the leading manufactured ones. They are predators, in turn, to rats, insects, and especially bees. Skirmishes of stingers and sprayers must be especially fraught affairs. Bags of cat food in our indoor back porch, and the occasional mouse, unlucky enough to be caught in our house, may actually have drawn the skunks ever closer to our home.

Funny how I keep getting away from the smell. It comes from two anal glands, meaning these relatively blind creatures fart out tear gas as their best defense. They may in a way be as embarrassed to fart as humans are, as their smells are by orders of magnitude stronger, and as reserves of stink are depleted for several days after they spray. So, I propose a thought experiment here: imagine if your strongest strategic move were to turn tail and fart lethally at your enemies as you fled the other way. Imagine knowing that that would be all you could fart for several days to come. You would be boldest if you faced away from your fears. You would come to prize your awful scent, knowing how dear it was. You would probably not be able to count how many days since you last let one fly.

We do know how long they’ve had bad, but also surprisingly, good reputations. The English derived the name skunk from the Algonquin tongue in the days of the Massachusetts Bay. For Indigenous peoples, skunks serve as clan animals or totem figures, as many Native Americans’ distinctly scented, sylvan kin. Skunk hides, hung over doorways, supposedly ward off disease. Native lore teems with opossums transforming into skunks, lost or wayward children remembered as skunks, and malodorous places—including Chicago, apparently—deriving their names from the pungent notoriety. For Native Americans, skunks were kin, but for the English, as early 1630s sermons suggest, they symbolized sin, as most native creatures, human and animal, did. Spanish language takes a different track, dubbing them zorillos and zorillas—little Zorros, in appropriate outfits. They’re polygynous, too, meaning a zorillo, or a jack, mates with more than one zorilla, or sow. What about the collective noun for a group of skunks? That would be surfeit, of course. So, according to taxonomists and grammarians, any number of skunks greater than one, any case of uno mas zorillos, would be an excess. By definition, any more than one is too many skunks.

They rarely live longer than a year in the wild, but a decade in captivity—and they do not merely live in captivity, but domesticity. Seventeen states allow keeping skunks as pets. It seems the fight in the thirty-three others pits the skunk lobby on the one hand (who knew?) against health officials, concerned with warding off rabies, on the other hand. Various state skunk aficionado groups (again, who knew?) recommend removing the offensive anal glands within a kit’s first weeks of life. Some, especially in the UK, argue that leaving kits scentless and defenseless is inhumane. One removes their capacity for awful aromas and then has to live with one’s self, knowing one has acted inhumanely. Either that, or one gets one of the most pungent reminders nature offers of how humane you had bothered to be. I am honestly not certain with which aficionados I would side. I wonder if kits still try to spray, then realize what has gone wrong, and then know they can no longer fart tear gas whenever they want to. What happens, when one’s kit, one’s little gunless Zorro, learns that he’s defenseless? They’re regarded as intelligent creatures, but are they enough so, they turn, one supposes, into little, existentialist skunks, woefully without reasons for their own stinky beings?

One had turned, in any event, into our itinerant resident. He—assuming he was zorillo—nested in a Rubbermaid garbage bin alongside our driveway, shifting noisily, leaving to retrieve branches and garbage, and feeling, it seemed, quite at home. I got the willies. Trash day approached. Would I wheel a skunk mobile out with the rest of the refuse, to the curb and probably back again? I debated it, I’ll admit, the last few afternoons beforehand, weighing the relative cuteness of the kit—assuming from the size he was young—against the stench that might befall the garbageman or me.

I flopped open the bin’s lid and observed: very calm, sleek chiaroscuro, contently lying in garbage as though entitled to it. Beady blacks betrayed no consciousness he was unwanted. Spoils, rottings, clippings rose up as scents, but better than stenches that could have been. Stale, thrown-out anticipation still hung, even festered, in the dirty atmosphere. I think we made eye contact, myself standing several feet away from the bin that I looked directly within, but remember, they don’t see very well. So at this point, I risk projecting something anthropomorphic onto, of all things, a skunk.

I shut the lid, pivoted the garbage bin slowly on its wheels, so as to tip it, angle by ever lower angle, until it lay horizontal. The lid flopped open and lay on the driveway, creating an enticing path, I hoped, for a skunk to follow. A whole plastic bin potentially contained the stink, should he decide I was worth blowing several days’ supply. No sounds of rustling, no rocking in the bin—though he had to know his world, his nest had shifted with him still inside.

I drew out the broom I’d selected from the garden implements, bumped the bin rhythmically, gently, not very loudly, for a few beats, then paused. This I repeated several times, thumping plastic at intervals, walking around, far in the clear, glancing tentatively back in the bin. The first glance, he sat there, wholly unfazed. The second, he’d realized another creature thought something was up. I didn’t bang louder, more often, more insistently—I just gave him the hint that the door for leaving was open. Anytime amid the thumping he wanted, he was free to go. I wasn’t hunting him or domesticating him, I didn’t want him either to spray or to stay. I started to wonder, rapping on rubber for the fifth or sixth interval of beats, if he knew or intuited this. Did I mention, each time I went around to the front of the bin, I stayed far in the clear? Have I mentioned, all of this time, he still hadn’t moved?

Yet finally, he did: he crept, skulked, slunk, loped, whatever weasel family members do for locomotion, to leave a nest they don’t wish to leave, when it seems they know, too, not much is at stake. He lingered a moment at the rim of the bin, glanced back in my direction, stripes quivering, pig-nose scenting something in the air that wasn’t him. I kept the plastic reverberating, wanting to keep the former nest less enticing, less comfortable, for the beat. The willies had left me with optimistic determination, but I wavered, lingering a little, just as he did, only a plastic bin between us, my residence on this lot and in this driveway not one season longer than his.

Then, like a shot, he sped across the backyard, resigned, it seemed, to escaping, sans spraying. It seemed to me he slunk dejectedly, disappointed at abandoning a nest, or perhaps, if he was a jack, uncomfortable at heading back to one of his sow’s lairs, to see his favorite jill. Shoulders stiffened as he alighted on a fence with surprising agility, then was over it, loping along again. I ask myself how confidently I’m reading a skunk’s body language, sensing anger, dejection, or just pragmatic retreat in an animal I already know I risk anthropomorphizing. Still, a long, quiet moment after he’s left the backyard, I scent the breeze just to know he hasn’t sprayed, decide I can right the bin, feel creeping self-consciousness that I’ve done the right thing. I didn’t hurt him, didn’t threaten him, allowed him to leave with his skunky spunk intact. I did not apply his species’ bad reputation, but dealt with him, mano on zorillo, man vs. skunk. I do not mean him here to represent any human neighbors whom I would wish to chase away, no populations, contagions, viruses metaphorically covered by his stink—not even his or our status as new, not entirely welcome dwellers in this emptying-out, urban hood. My bin, my beating rhythm, neither contained him nor scared him. We can still say, their white stripes and stealthy blackness occasionally dotting the neighborhood, he left us as new residents, too, unskunked and unscathed.