“There is a heat vent in the floor beside my bed that I step on or over every time I get into or out of bed,” I told my friends, Maretta and Vernon.  “One day I leaned over the end of the bed to get my shoes, and froze in mid-action as I saw a large garter snake coming up out of that vent.  It was halfway out.  It was the realization of my worst suspicions about such dark and dusty holes.  I grabbed a shoe, pinned the snake to the floor with it, pulled the rest of its body through the vent, and holding it by the tail, carried it outside and threw it as far as I could.  It’s been months since that happened, and I still can’t go by that vent without thinking about that snake.  It was right where I always step in my bare feet.”

“That’s pretty bad, all right,” they agreed, “but I think I’d rather have a garter snake under the house than skunks.

“When we bought our current house, the lady that lived there before us left 12 cats.  I’m allergic to cats,” Vernon said.  “I stood out in the yard with a slingshot encouraging the cats to go live somewhere else.  I didn’t know it then, but the lady next door was a cat woman.  There were cats everywhere, and I don’t think she appreciated the way I treated them.

“One day I realized that we had a skunk under the house.  It went off under there.  That made me go off, too.  I set a live trap to catch the skunk, but every morning all I had in the trap was another cat.  My friend, Hawkins, said that I could release the cats out on his farm, so I took a cat a day out there.  I never did catch the skunk, but one day someone stole my trap.”

“Skunks follow you, don’t they?” my wife commented.  “Didn’t you have skunks under your house in New Mexico, too?”

“Oh, boy, did we have skunks!  They made a big ruckus under there.  It was amazing.  So was the smell.  It permeated our house.  At church we noticed people sitting two pews in front of us start sniffing the air and commenting that they smelled a skunk.  At times we had the whole center section of the church all to ourselves.  Our boy went to school one day and someone said, ‘Did you bring a skunk to Show and Tell today?’  It was bad.  We couldn’t get rid of the smell.

“I became an expert skunk trapper.  My father-in-law taught me how.  He told me to bait the trap with fried bacon.  I put bacon in the trap, and here came the skunks!  I hauled a lot of skunks out into the desert.

“There was a family of skunks living under the house.  There were four little ones.  They were as cute as they could be.  I couldn’t figure out how they were getting under there.

“There was an access door to the crawl space that was hinged at the top.  If you were under the house you could push on the door, and it would swing out and up so that you could get out.  I decided that when the skunks were outside they must have been able to get their claws under that door and raise it up.  I waited until I thought they were all out one night, and then fixed it so that nothing could go in or out.  We got rid of the skunks, but it was weeks before we got rid of the odor.”