Skunk 
along the sides of the tail, and a white stripe down the 
forehead. Sometimes the white is almost restricted to the 
patch on the neck, and in the other specimens the stripes 
are united, making the whole back white. 
Range. New England to Virginia and Indiana, replaced to the 
North and South by closely allied varieties. 
The skunk belongs in the same group with the minks and 
weasels, all the members of which are capable of emitting a 
powerful, almost suffocating odour when angry, and this undoubt- 
edly gives them a decided advantage in a hand-to-hand com- 
bat. But the present species has made itself notorious by per- 
fecting this gift to a degree that furnishes it with a complete 
defense against all but the most desperate enemies. The general 
effect on the race is very noticeable. 
No longer being compelled to be forever on the alert to 
escape or repulse the sudden attacks of an enemy, the little 
beast of the black and white fur has grown fat and lazy. It 
still retains much of the slender and graceful form of the weasels, 
but has allowed its muscles to become soft and tender, and so 
burdened with fat as to render rapid and prolonged exertion 
almost an impossibility; its flesh in the meantime having become 
palatable to every meat-eating creature, not even excepting 
man. All those who through want or curiosity have ever tasted 
it, agree in pronouncing it equal in flavour and tenderness to 
that of any four-footed creature: while no one, not even an 
Indian or a wolf, will eat the flesh of a mink or weasel unless 
rendered desperate by hunger. Is it not possible that the peculiar 
quality of the flesh of these weasels has been developed partly 
as a safeguard P 
For large, warm-blooded game of whose flesh it still retains 
the fondness characteristic of its family, the skunk must depend 
on luck or strategy to supply the want of the agility which its 
race has thrown away. During the summer and autumn this 
loss is hardly felt; grasshoppers, crickets and the like are to be 
picked up everywhere in abundance, and compose the regular fare of 
the species; snakes are also caught by them in considerable num- 
bers, and birds’ nests containing eggs or helpless young are to be 
had for the seeking. The short burrows of the field-mice seldom 
reach many inches below the turf, and the nests containing the 
young mice are easily uncovered. 
