I've been letting the girls run free in the morning, since we live at the end of a quiet road and they have an open field to explore. They don't usually go far and almost always come right back when I whistle. But this time, though Sofia ambled back as soon as she saw me, Chica had disappeared. I whistled a couple of times and then saw her darting ahead in the darkness about a hundred yards away. And out of the corner of my eye I saw what I first took for a cat, but no, cats don't carry their tails quite like that. A microsecond later, an all-too-familiar acrid odor filled the air. Chica came rushing home looking sheepish. Before allowing her inside, I bent down and gave her the sniff test. Caramba! She must have gotten a shot right in the face. This is the fourth time she's been skunk-bombed, and I'm starting to rethink the "free run in the morning" routine.
I'm just grateful it doesn't take gallons of tomato juice to remove skunk odor from a dog. Her usual piña colada-scented shampoo did the job, gracias a Díos. Around here, tomato juice comes in little cans, for Bloody Marys, not in gallon jugs for stink removal. At the Purely for Pets blog, I found a recipe for another solution using hydrogen peroxide, just in case the shampoo didn't work. Caution must be taken not to get it into the eyes, though.
I also looked up "skunk" in the diccionario and found two Spanish words for it: mofeta (f) and zorillo (m). Maybe a female skunk is a mofeta, and a male is a zorillo. One sure thing: I'm not about to investigate which this one was!