CLAYTON TRIBUNE (Georgia) 07 May 08 Lessons from the king of the skinks (Justin Raines)
Two things happened the other day that triggered a strange flashback of childhood nostalgia. Lifting a wet stack of cardboard off the grass in my backyard, I unearthed a nest of blue-tailed skinks. Then, later the same day while looking for a missing sock in the dark caverns of the closet, I found my old favorite book titled "101 Self Defense Techniques of KUNG-FU."
Ninjas, mantis hands and tiger claws have always fascinated me. My favorite childhood cartoon was Hong Kong Phooey. Before swimsuit issues, my most treasured magazine was a black and white catalog loaded with cloaks, smoke pellets, blowguns and other implements of the Chinese fighting arts.
A neighborhood friend and I had an impressive collection of throwing stars, nunchucks, butterfly blades and fighting chains accumulated at county fairs and truck stop knife displays. We honed our skills by climbing oak trees with bear claw attachments strapped to our hands and feet. At night we watched cheap ninja flicks and tried our best to mimic the crane's beak and flying roundhouse kicks seen on the screen. Since there were no hooded impostors to battle, we declared war upon the detested blue-tailed skink.
After one of my family cats developed a crooked neck and began stumbling around the yard like a drunkard, our veterinarian diagnosed it with skink poisoning. According to the vet, a cat who ingests one of the lizards will be permanently disfigured. Shortly after, my father issued a death warrant for all reptiles in our yard, and the Great Skink Roundup began.
Skinks are vile-looking creatures with lidless slices of eyes peering out of a snake-shaped face. The big ones get nasty red heads as the striping along their sides fades into indigo with age. We put them on the same slimy pedestal as the feared and despised cottonmouth water moccasin occasionally encountered in ditches and lakes.
On sunny afternoons, the skinks would crawl beyond the cool shadows beneath the house to warm their cold blood on logs and rocks.
My friend and I were terrified of the skinks. We believed them to be highly venomous with sharp, razorous fangs. Therefore, we attacked them only after dressing in our ninja cloaks, holding battle chains and throwing stars.
Sometimes we got lucky and killed on our first shot. Other times the skinks slinked back below the house, and we were forced to pursue them in the dark. Those were scary times. Chasing the skinks in their element put us at a clear disadvantage. Even our weapons provided little encouragement in the damp, musky underbelly of the house.
One afternoon we came face to face with the skink king. He was a huge redheaded male the size of a squirrel that jumped up from some old lumber and hissed at us like a cobra. We swung our chains at him and even tossed a couple of ninja stars, but we missed and the skink king gave up no ground, so we ran.
Weeks went by and we caught glimpses of the king, but we never again were brave enough to hunt him under the house. One day, we decided to abandon our traditional weapons and resorted to using slingshots.
The skink king met his match while sitting on a pine log. I nailed him between the eyes with a ball bearing that left a clean, bloodless hole in his skull. Then something strange happened.
As the daddy of all skinks lay twitching and dying in the straw, something within my heart shifted gears. Other than maiming a cat that I never liked in the first place, what had skinks ever done to me? Why did I create and harbor such hatred toward them? Was it just because I was told to hate them and ordered to kill?
In the end, I took the time to hand-bury the skink, and I never hunted them again. Soon after, I even gave up the fighting arts of ninjitsu and kung-fu to pursue catch-and-release bass fishing. As a young boy reaching adulthood I was just beginning to fully understand that I had the power to directly affect the well-being of other living creatures. Abandoning my hatred for skinks was a big lesson from the book of "live and let live."
Wow, what a flashback.
Lessons from the king of the skinks

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