30 The Carnivora. 
to project its abominably disgusting secretion to a considerable 
distance, like the skunk. Of this latter animal I have had some 
most unpleasant experiences in South America. Long before 
I made the personal acquaintance of a skunk, I had heard many 
descriptions of the horrible effects of an encounter with the 
creature, and felt rather disposed to twit the narrators with the 
possession of a too squeamish stomach. It was not an easy 
matter for one whose organs of scent had never been assaulted 
by anything much worse than the odour of decomposed pig— 
which is assuredly bad of its kind—to credit the assertion that 
men had’ been made thoroughly ill, and deprived of all taste for 
food for days after receiving on their clothing the ejection from 
a skunk’s anal gland. At all events, I did not in the least 
realise the possibility of this until I had had olfactory demon- 
stration of the fearful smell the beast can make. 
Coming home one day, jaded and hungry, just in time for 
dinner, I walked into the sitting-room of the “Estancia” house, 
and before I had time to recover from my surprise at seeing no 
preparations for the meal, I was literally almost knocked down 
by what I may, without serious exaggeration, term a blast of 
stink such as no adjective, even in the richly expletive Spanish 
language, could describe. Rushing out of the room, I met the 
Basque cook carrying a dish towards the wool-shed, who, seeing 
my disconcerted expression, broke out into a broad grin. “Where 
are you going?” I asked. “Dinner in the wool-shed to-day,” 
he replied laconically, with the grin still on his face. At the 
door of the wool-shed I met Don T——., who with a bland smile 
inquired whether I would like my dinner served in the house 
with the skunk. He then explained that one of these brutes had 
either gone into or under the house, and behaved himself after 
the manner of his kind, and thus rendered it uninhabitable for 
some time at least. We had to live as best we could in the 
wool-shed, until the place had been “deodorised” by burning 
dry cow-dung on the mud floor, and shutting all the doors and 
windows. I never went into the house again for three days, and 
then the prepotency of the skunk asserted itself over the cow- 
