Rotting Skunks, Burial At Sea, Romantic Decay, And The Conviviality Of The Dead

Our friend Travis found me a dead skunk, in January, where he was camping near the Santa Barbara coast. He kindly saved him in an ice chest until I could retrieve him, but it was a few days, and a warm winter, and by the time I took possession of the skunk he was in pretty rough shape. The skunk had been flattened by a truck, overrun with vermin, frozen and defrosted and frozen again, and when I got down to the business of skinning him, he was the deadest dead thing I had ever seen. I couldn’t even identify the parts of his body. His jaw had been shattered, his teeth jutting through his face in a hideous O like a lamprey’s mouth. His back legs were gone. Inside, his organs were completely liquefied: where I expected to find his bowels or stomach or liver was just a swollen bag of goo.

I had done a bunch of reading on how to skin a skunk without activating its scent glands but it was clearly unnecessary: the skunk had already discharged his scent before he died, and that smell mixed with the smell of putrefaction to make one of the worst odors I’d ever encountered. I had to skin him outside, wearing two layers of heavy-duty disposable gloves, then bleaching all my tools and stripping off my clothes on the back porch before I came inside the house.

Still, I tried. I cleaned and salted and disinfected and soaked the skin over and over in different chemicals, trying to arrest the process of decay. At some point it became clear this skunk wasn’t going to…