My Daemon
A daemon, according to novelist Philip Pullman, is a manifestation of a person's soul in animal form. To learn more about them, read Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. To learn more about mine, read on.
My daemon, Sanuye (pronounced "Sa - nyoo - wee")[1], is a western spotted skunk. If you only know about the striped skunk, you may be interested to meet this kind. They have patches of white on black, not long stripes, and they're smaller, more agile, more weasel-like[2], than striped skunks. Striped skunks are rather fat and don't seem to have had any proper exercise for a few million years.
My relationship with skunks goes way back. When I was a kid, I used to pretend to have a pet skunk, and my friend Sam Borgeson and I used to play a game where we were skunks who lived in giant redwood trees. This game was the epitome of oddness -- the sort of thing that could only evolve in little kids' brains -- but it was fun, and it left me with a fondness for skunks.
It turns out that skunks' personalities are rather like my own. They're stubborn and kind of self-centered -- at least in the sense that they like to do things their way. They're also very curious and will investigate just about anything, sometimes to their detriment.
Back when I played the skunk game, I didn't know about the spotted skunk, or if I did I didn't think much of it; in popular culture "skunk" means striped skunk (genus Mephitis). But since then I've learned more about skunks, and myself. I think my daemon is a skunk because their character really is like mine. But I'm not fat, not by a long shot. So I think the Spilogale genus is more my kind of skunk.
I can't remember when I first became aware of spotted skunks, but I knew about them by the last few years of high school. One of them appeared in a story I wrote in senior year, or maybe junior year. The skunk appeared in a character's dream and told him something. The story was called "Kinduhagen", or some such nonsense thing. I can't for the life of me remember what the story was about. I wrote a lot of strange stories back then.
The Handstand Thing
The skunk in that story did a handstand[3]. All spotted skunks do that when they want to warn potential predators that they're about to do what skunks do when they get mad.
Sanuye does it too. One cool thing about having daemons is you can actually ask them about themselves, and learn something about the animals whose forms they take. I was curious about what spotted skunks think they're doing when they do handstands.
I asked Sanuye about it one day. I can't remember my exact words, but I must have used the word "clown" somehow, like, "Do you know you look like a clown when you do that, or --" In any case her response was, "Clown!" I apologised for my wording and said I meant it in the nicest possible way.
She said she was surprised, because when she did the handstand, she'd always thought she looked really scary!
I couldn't help laughing, though I tried to suppress it. Then I asked what was so frightening about a small animal lifting its feet and tail above its head.
I thought she'd be stumped by this, but she wasn't. She smiled a bit mysteriously. "Well," she said, "when other creatures see me stand on my hands, they know instantly that I have powers. They don't know what powers, but they don't care. They just think, 'That is no ordinary animal -- it's conjuring spirits -- it's preparing some terrible spell -- it's -- run!'"
She said, "When I do a handstand, it feels like it does to a witch, when she waves her hands over her cauldron, and the winds start stirring and the shadows move and howl. When I do a handstand, I feel like I have the power to take over the world -- I feel like the most powerful animal in existence!"
Then she said, "It doesn't work so well with humans, though. They just look at me and go, 'What the--?' It's kind of demoralizing."
Spotted Skunk Species
There are two rather similar North American species of spotted skunk, putorius and gracilis, eastern and western respectively. Both are of genus Spilogale.
I think Sanuye is gracilis. That's based on her size and markings. The eastern spotted skunks are slightly bigger than the western ones, and the western ones have a bit more white. Sanuye is about the size of a ferret, but with a less elongated body. Her poofy tail makes her seem larger, though. A lot of her mannerisms are kind of ferret-like too.
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[1] The name is Native American Miwok, and means "red cloud at dusk". I call my skunk-daemon Sanuye because dusk is her favorite part of the day, and her white and black patches are like the mixing of day and night.
The Miwok lived in northwestern California, most of them around the western slope and foothills of the Sierra Nevada.
[2] The taxonomic classification of skunks is still debated. Following the work of Dragoo and Honeycutt (1997), most taxonomists put them in their own family, Mephitidae, whereas traditionally they've been part of the family Mustelidae, weasels. Although skunks are similar to mustelids in a lot of ways, the conclusion of Dragoo and Honeycutt's work is that the similarities have mostly to do with weasels' and skunks' retention of primitive characteristics, not with their sharing a sufficiently recent ancestor to warrant their both being in the family Mustelidae.
[3] Video of spotted skunk doing handstand. This is on Jerry Dragoo's skunk site. This guy has been very important to skunk study and classification.