A Reddit user said the whole thing started the way a lot of scary walks to the stand start: with leaves turning over in the dark and just enough noise to let your imagination sprint ahead of you. He wrote that he was walking in to his deer stand when he heard something moving through the leaves, and his mind immediately went where a hunter’s mind usually goes in that moment. He thought big cat. Maybe a bear. Something with teeth. Something that could actually be a problem.
Then he figured out what it really was, and somehow it got funnier and worse at the same time.
According to his comment, it was not one animal at all. It was what he called “demons of the underworld,” a whole family of skunks. He said there were three large ones and a few smaller ones, and instead of just crossing his path or standing their ground, they actually chased him all the way to his stand. The way he told it, this was not a quick little spray-and-scatter moment or one skunk stomping around in the leaves. It was a full skunk family moving after him in the dark while he tried to get to the stand without getting lit up.
He said he had never run so fast in his life. When the original poster asked the obvious follow-up — “They chased you?!” — the hunter came back and said that was the only explanation he could think of. He figured the mother had probably gotten aggressive because she had kits with her, and the rest of them just followed her lead. That tracks with another reply in the thread, where someone pointed out that mama skunks can get bold when they have young with them.
And the story somehow kept going after the chase.
The same hunter said the skunks did not just run him off and disappear. After he got out of there, they went into his food plot and started “frolicking,” playing around and making little noises for about an hour. That detail is what really makes the whole thing stick. He did not just get chased by skunks on the walk in. He then had to sit there knowing the little maniacs had taken over his food plot like they owned the place. In the end, he said he ran back to his truck too. So the whole hunt basically got hijacked by an aggressive skunk family that first chased him through the dark and then turned his setup into their own playground.
Other people in the thread piled on with their own skunk horror stories, which only made his sound more believable. One person said the only animal they had ever run from in the woods was a skunk. Another said they once stepped over a log while bird hunting after sunset and literally stepped on one. Someone else said skunks will puff up, stomp their little feet, and stand their ground until you back off. So even though his story sounds ridiculous at first, the rest of the thread made it pretty clear that a skunk encounter in the dark can get weird fast, especially if there are babies involved.
The story he told was simple but unforgettable. He was walking to his deer stand, heard leaves moving, assumed it might be a predator, and then realized he was being chased by three adult skunks and several little ones. He ran harder than he ever had, got to the stand, watched them take over his food plot for the next hour, and eventually ran back to the truck instead of trying to wait them out. Of all the things that can go wrong on a hunt, getting overrun by a skunk family is not usually the first one that comes to mind. But the way he told it, it was memorable enough that he clearly was not ever going to forget that walk in.
What do you think — if you heard rustling on the way to your stand and discovered it was a skunk family actually chasing you, would you try to hold your ground, or would you be sprinting for the truck too?
Original Reddit post: What is the scariest thing you have seen/ experienced when hunting?
