A skunk’s spray can drive humans and dogs from a whole cabin.

Evidence

The odor with which this creature, truly named Mephitis, can overpower its assailants is truly awful. We were driven out of the cabin for some hours merely by the passage of one across the corral. The bravest man is a coward in its neighborhood. Dogs rub their noses on the ground till they bleed when they have touched the fluid, and even die of the vomiting produced by the effluvia. The odor can be smelt a mile off. If clothes are touched by the fluid they must be destroyed. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 135

Categorization

• CANDY: Perfect campfire tidbit: the narrator, Evans, and Edwards are all routed from their cabin simply because a skunk walked past the corral, and dogs rub their noses raw on the ground.
• SHARE: Send to whoever loves frontier-naturalist anecdotes — a striped skunk clearing out an entire cabin by mere passage is exactly their flavor of detail.
• XREF: Echoes the pioneer-writer tradition of Annie Dillard and other nature essayists who make a single animal’s chemistry the center of a scene.