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Updated: June 25, 2025
"Blind mule," put in Slum, vaulting to a seat on the bar. "Mule?" questioned Shaky, with profound scorn. "Guess you ain't worked around his layout, Slum. Skunk's my notion of him. I 'lows his kickin's most like a mule's, but ther' ain't nothin' more to the likeness. A mule's a hard-workin', decent cit'zen, which ain't off'n said o' Julian Marbolt."
It seemed a fool thing to do, and I had no particular use for walking all that way; but there was no other means of accomplishing the twenty miles through the bush from Caraquet to Skunk's Misery. Aside from the fact that I had no desire to advertise my arrival, there was no wagon road to Skunk's Misery. Its inhabitants did not possess wagons, or horses to put in them.
But if it sounds as though a narrow, stone-choked valley were no citadel for a man or men to have hidden themselves, or for any one to conduct an industry like making a secret scent to attract wolves, the person who said so would be mistaken. There was never in the world a better place for secret dwelling and villainy and all the rest than Skunk's Misery.
A few nights after the skunk's little affair with the timber wolf he returned to the clearing from which he had purloined the fat duck. Much to his disappointment he found the building protected against four-footed marauders and, though the same enticing odour drifted to his nostrils, he was unable to gratify his appetite.
I remembered the boy I'd left cached in Skunk's Misery and something else, that had been in my head ever since wolves and the smell of a Skunk's Misery bottle seemed to go together. "Two Frenchmen were run in for using wolf dope in Quebec province last winter, for I've an account of their trial somewhere that I cut out of an Ottawa paper.
Thirsey's got the croup, an' Atherton's away, and there ain't anybody to go for the doctor. O what shall I do, what shall I do!" She fairly wrung her hands. "Hev you tried the skunk's oil?" asked Grandma eagerly, preparing to get up. "Yes, I have, I have! It's a good hour since she woke up, an' I've tried everything. It hasn't done any good.
The whole hollow was a maze of narrow, winding tracks, between rocks and under them, sometimes a foot wide and sometimes six, that Skunk's Misery used for roads. What its citizens lived on, I had never been able to guess. Caraquet said it was on wolf bounties, which was another thing that had set me thinking about the bottle I had spilt on my clothes.
"What on earth is Skunk's Misery?" "A village at least, a den of dirt, chiefly; off this road, between Caraquet and Lac Tremblant." I was thankful to have something to think about that was neither her, or me, or Dudley.
The Kitten struggled vigorously, and at last got its claws into the Skunk's eye and gave such a wrench that the ill-smelling villain loosened its hold a little and so gave the Kitten another chance to squeal, which it did with a will, putting all its strength into a succession of heartrending mee-ow mee-ows. Yan's heart was touched.
Presently she said dully that there had been no stranger there; I was the only one she had ever seen. It was likely enough; a Skunk's Misery messenger had more probably taken the wolf dope to Collins. I asked casually if she had any more of the stuff I had spilt on my clothes, and where she had got it, and once more I ran bang up against a stone wall.
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