Another animal that impressed us deeply and painfully was the skunk.
They were fearless little beasts and in the evening would come quite
boldly about the house, and if seen and attacked by a dog, they would
defend themselves with the awful-smelling liquid they discharge at an
adversary.
When the wind brought a whiff of it into the house, when
all the doors and windows stood open, it would create a panic, and
people would get up from table feeling a little sea-sick, and go in
search of some room where the smell was not. Another powerful-smelling
but very beautiful creature was the common deer. I began to know it
from the age of five, when we went to our new home, and where we
children were sometimes driven with our parents to visit some
neighbours several miles away. There were always herds of deer on the
lands where the cardoon thistle nourished most, and it was a delight
to come upon them and to see their yellow figures standing among the
grey-green cardoon bushes, gazing motionless at us, then turning and
rushing away with a whistling cry, and sending out gusts of their
powerful musky smell, which the wind sometimes brought to our
nostrils.
But there was a something in the serpent which produced a quite
different and a stronger effect on the mind than bird or mammal or any
other creature. The sight of it was always startling, and however
often seen always produced a mixed sense of amazement and fear. The
feeling was no doubt acquired from our elders. They regarded snakes as
deadly creatures, and as a child I did not know that they were mostly
harmless, that it was just as senseless to kill them as to kill
harmless and beautiful birds. I was told that when I saw a snake I
must turn and run for my life until I was a little bigger, and then on
seeing a snake I was to get a long stick and kill it; and it was
furthermore impressed on me that snakes are exceedingly difficult to
kill, that many persons believe that a snake never really dies until
the sun sets, therefore when I killed a snake, in order to make it
powerless to do any harm between the time of killing it and sunset, it
was necessary to pound it to a pulp with the aforesaid long stick.
With such teaching it was not strange that even as a small boy I
became a persecutor of snakes.
Snakes were common enough about us; snakes of seven or eight different
kinds, green in the green grass, and yellow and dusky-mottled in dry
and barren places and in withered herbage, so that it was difficult to
detect them. Sometimes they intruded into the dwelling-rooms, and at
all seasons a nest or colony of snakes existed in the thick old
foundations of the house, and under the flooring.
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