I first came across the volume entitled Natural History Sketches Among the Carnivora (1885) several months ago in the wildlife section of Powell's Books. I had come there looking for a book on the Platypus and picked it up out of mild curiosity. Moments later I swore out loud as it caused a new route in my complex and criss-crossing network of fetishes to form: a lust for accounts from the romantic era of science. When sometimes, in the course of your studies, you were compelled to chase down a specimen and shoot it in order to completely understand its nature.
Actually, the full title:
Natural History Sketches Among the Carnivora:
Wild and Domesticated.
With Observations on their Habits and Mental Faculties.
Netting lions. Hiring natives. Writing a straight-faced account about how dogs love the taste of beer.
Listen:
"Riding home one moonlit night, my horse hesitated at a bit of soft ground, and, knowing his habit - perhaps he had badly been bogged at one time - I struck the spurs hard into him, being well aware the place was only felock deep. At that instant a dark object started from under his feet, and I was overwhelmed by that once "felt," never-to-be-forgotten stench! The horse, no doubt, had perceived the brute, and would have avoided it, but my unfortunate irritation had driven him on, and we got the whole benefit of the skunk's discharge. What the horse thought of it I do not know, though he did not appear disconcerted. For myself, it was misery to ride another half hour with that reeking stench under my nostrils. On arriving home, I turned out the horse, shuffled off my trousers and boots (which certainly had received some of it), left them on the grass, and appeared to my astonished friends, who had just sat down to a game of "cut throat euchre," totally denuded to clothing as to my nether man. The laughter having subsided, the case was considered one worthy of some commiseration. No one else of the party had ever suffered equal misfortune, or, I might say, incurred the indignity inflicted on me by that contemptible beast. I had given one of the peons a dollar to burn the trousers the next day - they were past saving - and scrub the boots for a couple of hours with soap and soda. However, I could not make up my mind to wear them again, and it is doubtful whether anyone ever rode that horse again. Whenever a mount was wanted, and the peopn asked which he should saddle up, the answer always contained the caution, "but mind, not that dark grey."
