Ha! So, we'd lost power/phone/internet the morning before, and I woke up early in the dark, Saturday morning. I'd heard a scratchy/clunking sound in the night, near the other bedrooms, but it was so dark, I couldn't find anything, and went back to bed. When I got up, next, there was faint light, and the noise was still there, so I checked, again, and tracked it to a concrete-walled pit we have, which lies directly beneath the front door, and is open at the top (on either side of the porch), covered by grates. It's an odd little rectangular space, and the only way in or out (we thought) is a glass door from the hallway near the guest bedrooms. I peeked through the stick blind covering that glass door and saw a cute, little, puzzled skunk, trying to scratch a way out of it's impossible situation. Right. Now what?How did it get there? More to the point, how will it get out? A new problem, indeed. The option of opening the door into the house and letting the little guy wander around until he found the open sliding glass door to the real outside seemed optimistic, at best. And it was, like, arctic, out there. And we had no heat to warm the house back up.
I thought about just going in with a box and scooping him up and running out the door--probably getting sprayed in the process. But, there was no water with which to clean up afterwards (or enough tomato juice). Tom tried to call animal control with his dying cell phone, but no one was home. I desperately wanted to check the internet for clues as to what to do--again, the power thing. We were on our own. Tom wondered about making a corridor with cardboard (a plentiful commodity at our house) from the glass door to the slider (a winding path, say 25' long) and gently encourage him (like, with a broom) to follow it. That led to my brilliant idea of making a cardboard tunnel, open only at the skunk end and the freedom end. 
Took me an hour, and a bunch of boxes and tape, but I made a beautiful little cardboard tunnel, with three right-angled turns leading from the, now open, glass door, and the, also now open, sliding door to the back yard. We waited and watched, motionless, in the dark, dressed like Inuit, for the skunk to be curious about the Dark Cardboard Hole to Freedom. I even tried to make noise and bother from the other side of the pit (where the skunk was hunkered down defensively in the corner), dropping a couple of menacing belts out the window above him. Those belts had to be swiftly thrown outside for obvious reasons. They're still there. Either he was not a very curious sort of skunk, or he couldn't tell the difference between a Dark Cardboard Hole to Freedom and a Dark Cardboard Hole to Death. What a cynic! One way, or the other, the plan failed in a rather miserable fashion.
After three hours of Skunk Drama in the Morning with no power or heat or help of any kind, I hatched the desperate plan of just running in and throwing a towel over the stunned (I hoped) animal before he could launch a stink bomb, swooping him into a box and running outside with it.
And that's what we did. I changed into Clothes That Don't Matter (I have a bunch--ask Rachel), grabbed gloves, a couple of towels, and, with Tom right behind me with a box, we stormed in. I think he WAS a bit stunned, but he quickly regained his instinctual reflexes, turned around, lifted his tail, and squirted, just as I threw the towels on him. He was SO squirmy! Took a few seconds to get a solid grip, and he almost slipped away.
But I did grasp him, finally, and, as planned, Tom had the open box right there, whence I took the whole package, leaping over my engineering-marvel-of-a-cardboard-tunnel (a couple of times), trotting outside and down the hill. He was a small guy, probably only half-grown, and the box felt empty, as I ran. But he was in there. I set the box down, lifted the towels and ran away. He scampered, in a terrified-sort of way, down the hill (away from us, oddly), and we went back into our freezing house to disassemble the tunnel and, basically, carry on with our Week-Without-Power, but Also Without Skunk, with, really, only a hint of tell-tale residue left behind...
