Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown by Michael Cunningham Page B

and numbered—they are always at least slightly humiliated. The cats, being freer and more ubiquitous, are not visibly owned at all, and they travel the streets and beaches with aristocratic certainty. They are beauties, these cats. There is, in Provincetown, almost no visible evidence of the scrawnier, more ferretlike and skittish specimens—I can only imagine that those nervous, bony types are relegated to alleys and backyards by their more prosperous brothers and sisters, the great glossy fifteen-pounders with royal heads and heavy, voluptuous tails who are never spooked by dogs or pedestrians; who are prone, on occasion, to nap in the middle of a sun-warmed street.
    As for wild animals, Provincetown is most prominently host to a thriving population of skunks. Skunks are everywhere there. Since they are nocturnal, you won’t ever encounter a skunk in daylight, but if you walk around late at night, after eleven or so, when the streets have begun to empty, you can hardly avoid seeing one or two or more. Though they fully possess their own animal dignity and sport those white stripes that go incandescent in the streetlight, they are not the most imposing of creatures. They are among nature’s pedestrians and trash-pickers. They waddle brazenly back and forth across Commercial Street, right in the middle of town, scavenging. If you leave them alone and go about your business, they will do the same.
    The residents dogs know better, but visiting dogs, being uninformed about the consequences, often chase skunks, and of course, just when they’ve got one cornered, as they are congratulating themselves on their courage and skill, the worst happens. One summer Kenny and I were having dinner with friends when our host’s Scottie was sprayed by a skunk. Since the dog’s owner was too drunk and stoned at the time to do much beyond register his dismay, Kenny and I took care of it as best we could. We had heard tomato juice was the only remedy, and so we rounded up all the tomato juice we could get from the neighbors, though we had to fall back on ketchup, tomato puree, and tomato soup, since actual tomato juice was not available in the required amounts. We put the dog in a tin basin and poured all the tomato products over her. It worked, more or less, but I can tell you that a skunk’s spray, close up, has a quality entirely different from those zones of reek you may have passed through on highways. It is worse than foul. It is the smell of annihilation. It has no parallel I can think of. It isn’t rot, it isn’t sulphur or ammonia; it is just indescribably bad, in a category of its own. You taste it when you breathe. You feel it infiltrating your nose and lungs. It was, in its way, a remarkable experience, though I wouldn’t care to repeat it. It was a reminder, the most potent one imaginable, that nature is very good at what it does; that that which survives is so clearly meant to do so.
    If skunks and cats are the petite bourgeoisie of Provincetown, its most stolid and crankily respectable nonhuman citizens, other animals live there at a more ephemeral but insistent remove. On the remoter edges you may see a fox every now and then, bright russet, usually standing so still (it will have heard you coming as if you were a freight train) that you may not be sure, at first, that it’s a living thing at all—it is the very embodiment of the word attention . I have seen deer out in the dunes and, once, a doe and fawn browsing among the grass in the cemetery.
    A hardy population of racoons and opossums and the occasional coyote moves more furtively than the skunks but with similar determination among the scraps and leftovers of late-night Provincetown. Late one night last summer, when my friend James and I had gone to retrieve our bicycles from where we’d left them, on the lawn in front of the Universalist church, an opossum came out of the bushes and stood directly in front of me. It was young, not by any means a baby but far