ALBION — When Abbott Road resident Kim Michaud woke up Saturday morning and looked outside at her pool, she couldn’t believe what she saw.

“I got up and I didn’t have my glasses on and saw something in the pool. I thought it was dead,” said Michaud, who was momentarily worried because the object was black and white, just like her cat, Cookie. “I woke my husband and I said, ‘Something is in the pool, and I hope it’s not Cookie.'”

Fortunate for the Michauds, it wasn’t their cat.

But it was a skunk. And it wasn’t dead.

“The poor thing had no way out of the pool,” Michaud said Tuesday afternoon. “It kept trying to climb up the ladder. It was able to stand on the top rung of the ladder with its head out of the water to rest.”

Michaud said she and her husband, Paul, are fond of the wildlife that comes with living in rural Albion. Various birds and deer often frequent their yard, and the Michauds occasionally feed them. While birds and deer are usually more welcome in their yard, the Michauds still felt compelled to help the helpless skunk.

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“He couldn’t get out. He didn’t have the strength,” Michaud said. “My husband went into the garage and got a piece of landscaping fabric and laid it over the step so the skunk could try to climb up.”

While that got the struggling skunk closer to freedom, it didn’t have much strength after a morning’s worth of swimming.

Continuing to aid the animal as rain poured down, Paul Michaud reached in and grabbed the far end of the fabric to help guide the skunk onto the porch.

Safely on the deck, the skunk repaid its helpers the only way it knows how: with a spray.

“Once he rolled the skunk onto the deck, it immediately sprayed,” Michaud said. “Thankfully, it missed us and sprayed in the other direction. You could smell it, however.”

Undeterred, the animal-friendly couple continued to make the disheveled skunk more at home.

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“The skunk went about five feet toward the edge of the deck, and he was shaking and trembling and throwing up,” Michaud said. “Rain was dripping on top of him, so we got a 2-by-2-feet piece of plywood and laid it against the railing to give it a little shelter. We’re hoping it would be all right.”

Michaud said the two went back inside to avoid the rain, and when they looked back outside an hour later, the skunk was gone.

Michaud managed to capture most of the rescue on video and shared the story with her Facebook friends later that day.

“We did not think it would survive,” Michaud wrote. “We went inside the house and the skunk left sometime after that. My neighbor just reported that he saw it run across his lawn. I am glad it survived, but I hope it stays away from now on!”

Jesse Scardina — 861-9239

jscardina@centralmaine.com

Twitter: @jessescardina


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