My nearest neighbor had never been to the wilderness. He lacked imagination, too, and a ready pen. Yet he promised not to kill my three skunks in the stump; a rather doubtful pledge, perhaps, but at least a beginning toward the new earth I hoped to see. Now it was perfectly well known to me that skunks will eat chickens if they have to. But I had had chickens--a few hens--and had never been bothered by skunks. I kept my hens shut up, of course, in a pen--the only place for a hen outside of a pie. I knew, too, that skunks like honey, that they had even tampered with my hives, reaching in at night through the wide summer entrances and tearing out the brood combs. But I never lost much by these depredations. What I felt more was the destruction of the wild bees and wasps and ground-nesting birds, by the skunks. But these were trifles! What were a few chickens, bees, yellow-jackets, and even the occasional bird’s-nest, against the hay-devouring grubs of the June-bug! And as for the characteristic odor which drifted in now and again with the evening breeze, that had come to have a pleasant quality for me, floating down across my two wide acres of mowing. February passed gently into March, and my chickens began to hatch. Every man must raise chickens at some period of his life, and I was starting in for my turn now. Hay had been my specialty heretofore, making two blades grow where there had been one very thin one. But once your two acres are laid down, and you have a stump full of skunks, near by, against the ravages of the June-bugs, then there is nothing for you but chickens or something, while you wait. I got Rhode Island Reds, fancy exhibition stock,--for what is the use of chickens if you cannot take them to the show? The chickens began to hatch, little downy balls of yellow, with their pedigrees showing right through the fuzz. How the sixty of them grew! I never lost one. And now the second batch of sitters would soon be ready to come off. Then one day, at the morning count, five of one hen’s brood were gone! I counted again. I counted all the other broods. Five were gone! My nearest neighbor had cats, mere barn cats, as many as ten, at the least. I had been suspicious of those cats from the first. So I got a gun. Then more of my chickens disappeared. I could count only forty-seven. I shifted the coop, wired it in, and stretched a wire net over the top of the run. Nothing could get in, nor could a chicken get out. All the time I was waiting for the cat. A few nights after the moving of the coop a big hole was dug under the wire fence of the run, another hole under the coop, and the entire brood of Rhode Island Reds was taken. Then I took the gun and cut across the pasture to my neighbor’s. “Hard luck,” he said. “It’s a big skunk. Here, you take these traps, and you’ll catch him; anybody can catch a skunk.”