Page 63 - Ninety Miles From Nowhere

The school house was built of adobe and was therefore very warm in winter (once the walls were heated) and cool on the hottest days.
We had a wood stove and sometimes one of the fathers would bring us a pickup load of wood. If we ran out before more arrived, the children and I provided our own and had fun doing it. The only kind of wood readily available was cottonwood which grew along the Alamosa River and dead wood lay in profusion everywhere. But I will say this: cottonwood is the poorest excuse for fuel I have ever seen. It doesn’t give off much heat per pound and it leaves as much ash as it had wood to begin with.
The only community entertainment there were the programs we put on at school, and especially the dances, given in the school house two or three times during the school year. As was usual with all the dances in the entire country, people came from miles around, from Datil, Pie Town, Quemado. Everyone had fun and there was no rowdiness to spoil the party.
The three McCracken children and I walked about a mile to school each day. Several mornings the boys found evidence a skunk had been under the school through the ventilator in the concrete foundation. They decided to try to trap him, so set a trap, with a small chain fastening it down, in the entrance hole.
The following morning the boys left for school early to look at the trap before anyone else arrived. When Dorothy and I got there, the boys had caught the skunk in the trap and Buddy was trying to slip a gunny sack over its head while Wilson
dragged it by the chain. They had heard a skunk could not throw its scent while in motion, so Wilson was going at a pretty good pace while Buddy half ran behind him, leaning over trying to put the gunny sack over the skunk. Finally he said, “Snookum, you’re going to fast!” and Snookum stopped dead in his tracks. Instantly the skunk sprayed Buddy - all over the front of his shirt.
I had always thought a skunk just sprayed an odor into the air. Now I realized it was a liquid of a greenish-yellow color and it soon became stiff on Buddy’s shirt. Most skunk odor from a block away makes people nauseated, but never in my life have I smelled anything like that - right in our faces. I sent Buddy home to change his shirt, because I knew he could not breathe with that odor so close to his nose - and neither could we!
Now the real problem began, for in the excitement Wilson had released the chain and the skunk was running around free but dragging the trap on one leg. I thought we could not let him go that way because he would catch his chain on something and die a slow death of starvation. The most humane way would have been to shoot him, but we had no gun at school, naturally.
The only thing left was for everybody to throw rocks at him. A rock big enough to kill the skunk could not be aimed with any accuracy, so we all used small stones and tried to hit him on the head. Finally one small rock did the trick and Wilson was able to remove the trap.