Free The Phantom in the Mirror by John R. Erickson Page B

he would reach the hole in fifteen seconds.

    I went straight to the spot and blocked his path. He waddled forward, raised his head, wiggled his nose, and stared at me with his beady little eyes.
    â€œScram, Rosebud. The choir’s practicing and you need to run along.”
    As I’ve already mentioned, skunks don’t seem to have any fear of dogs—or much of anything, really—and Rosebud chose to ignore my warning. He had it in his mind to go under the house, and by George, I think he would have walked right between my legs, if I’d let him.
    I didn’t, of course. I stopped him with a sharp growl. He wiggled his nose and started forward again. This time I stopped him with something more substantial. I clubbed him over the head with a paw.
    Suddenly his tail fanned out and he hopped up on his front legs. Then he darted to my left . . . his left . . . he darted to the left and tried to make an end run on me. At that point, I found it impossible to avoid getting involved.
    Over the years, I had tested out several techniques for skunk work, and the one that worked the best was the one I used. I abandoned the soft touch and went to Sterner Measures.
    I jumped him, grabbed him behind the neck, and pitched him up into the air.
    WHOOSH! SPLAT!

    By George, that got his . . . cough, choke, arg . . . attention. All at once he had that tail spread out and he wasn’t looking for bugs . . . cough, choke, arg . . . anymore, although it was a little hard for me to see exactly what he was . . . wheeze, arg, snork . . . doing because my eyes were suddenly stinking.
    Stinging, that is. But the important thing is that I’d gotten his full undivided attention, and with a skunk, that’s important.
    Step Two calls for more of the same, only the second time I pitched him toward the yard fence—a not-so-subtle hint that I wanted him to leave. I grabbed him behind the neck and gave him the old heave-ho.
    In return, he gave me the old whoosh-splat, and did I say that I kind of like the smell of skunk? Let me back up and rephrase that. A little of that stuff goes a long way, and after a dog has been off Skunk Patrol for a few months, he tends to forget what happened the last time he did it.
    In close quarters, in hand-to-hand combat, those guys REALLY STINK. But the nice part about skunking is that once you’ve taken the first hit, you hardly notice the second, third, and fourth, because that first one knocks out all your sensory equip­ment, and we’re talking about sparks, smoke, shorted wires, blown circuit breakers, and all the lights out on the control panel.
    I survived the first hit, lost all my instruments, and kept barking and pitching that little feller away from the house, until he finally got the message.
    By that time, the singing inside the house had stopped. Doors flew open and people were outside and I heard them talking about “skunk in the yard” and “pew-weeee!”
    Then I heard Sally May’s voice above the others. “Loper, your dog has done it again! We can’t even have a party without him . . .”
    â€œNo, now wait a minute, hon. Look here. Some­body left the crawl space uncovered. Hank kept the skunk from going under the house.”
    â€œOh. You really think so?”
    Suddenly I was surrounded by a crowd of admirers. All the members of the church choir had come out into the night to congratulate . . . well, ME, you might say, for heroic actions and service above and below the call of duty.
    A few voices stood out above the murmur of the crowd. Let’s see if I can remember them:
    â€œWhat a wonderful dog!”
    â€œYes, Sally May’s so lucky to have him!”
    â€œGee whiz, I wonder if they’d take a thousand bucks for that dog.”
    â€œOh no, they wouldn’t sell Hank, not for any amount of money.”
    And so forth. I sat there in the middle of the adoring masses, drinking in their praise and trying to appear