Skunked! Read Online Free

some other time. I’m pretty sure it’s sleeping right now, and I hate to wake it up.”
    Dr. Pritzker gave me a funny look but that didn’t bother me. I was used to it. Lots of people gave me funny looks.
    By now Stinky was eating all sorts of fruits and vegetables and bugs, along with tidbits left over from our family meals. In fact, he’d eat anything we put in front of him. Granddaddy, the source of all knowledge, explained that skunks are “omnivores,” which is a fancy way of saying they’ll eat anything from popcorn to crickets to fried chicken. One day Travis presented Stinky with a whole pecan, which frustrated the kit to no end, as he was unable to crack the thick shell with his tiny teeth. Finally Travis cracked the nut open for him, and Stinky greedily inhaled the contents.
    Winky was still using the bottle but slowly improving. The hardest thing was keeping his brick warm. We were constantly running in and out of the kitchen while trying not to draw too much attention to ourselves.
    One day Travis and I walked into the barn and heard a terrible racket. We ran to the back, where Ajax, Father’s prize bird dog, was barking and pawing at the skunk cage. Stinky and Winky growled back at him from the far corner, doing their best to look large and fierce.

    â€œNo, Ajax!” we screamed, but he was too excited by the presence of not just one captive varmint but two of them. He must have figured this was his lucky day.
    I grabbed him by the collar and pulled him away, but he fought me like a wild thing and jerked loose.
    Stinky stamped his feet.
    â€œNooo!” I cried.
    Stinky turned his back.
    â€œNooooo!” I cried.
    Stinky let fly.
    Ajax took a direct hit in the face. He howled and pitched over backward, pawing at his muzzle and uttering horrible screeches. The poor dog screamed and thrashed as if he were being tortured (which, if you think about it, he was).
    Travis and I could only stand there with our mouths open, staring at this terrible and ridiculous scene.
    When Father got home from work, Ajax was lying in his favorite place on the front porch. Reeking. You could smell him from miles away.
    Father glared at the dog. “You, sir! Get off the porch! You’re banished for a week. Don’t come back until you’ve improved.”
    Ajax flattened himself and slunk away, looking very embarrassed. Unfortunately he went to his second-favorite place, which was under the porch, and although we could no longer see him, it turned out to be not a whole lot better, nose-wise.
    Father turned on us. “You two. Do you know anything about this?”
    Travis said, “Well, we—”
    I elbowed him. “No, sir,” I said.
    â€œNo, sir,” Travis echoed. Father scowled at us. We stared at our boots.
    â€œPfaw!” he said, and strode into the house.
    â€œWhat do we do now?” said Travis.
    â€œI guess we better wash Ajax,” I said glumly.
    â€œUgh.”
    â€œExactly.”
    I knew that plain old water would not fix the stench.
    â€œStay here,” I said. “I’m going to talk to Granddaddy.” I went inside and knocked on the door of the library, where he spent much of his time.
    He called out, “Enter if you must.” He said that because he preferred to be left alone. He preferred to live what he called A Life of the Mind. This meant that he liked to sit quietly, and read lots of books, and think about things. So what kinds of things did he think about? Everything, as far as I could tell: birds, dinosaurs, fossils, volcanoes, tornadoes, the weather, the planets, the stars. I hadn’t yet come across anything he hadn’t thought about. I hoped he’d given some thought to skunks and dogs.
    â€œGranddaddy, what’s the best way to get the smell of skunk off a dog?”
    â€œAh, I take it one of the dogs has had a mishap with the family Mephitidae?”
    â€œYep, a mishap right in the face.