THE MINK

This little fur-bearer, whose color has been painted darker than it is, singularly making his name proverbial for blackness, is an old acquaintance of the angler and the sportsman, but not so familiar to them and the country boy as it was twoscore years ago.

It was a woeful day for the tribe of the mink when it became the fashion for other folk to wear his coat, which he could only doff with the subtler garment of life.

Throughout the term of his exaltation to the favor of fashion, he was lain in wait for at his own door and on his thoroughfares and by-paths by the traps, dead-falls, and guns of professional and amateur trappers and hunters, till the fate of his greater cousin the otter seemed to overtake him. But the fickle empress who raised him to such perilous estate, changing her mood, thrust him down almost to his old ignoble but safer rank, just in time to avert the impending doom of extermination. Once more the places that knew him of old, know him again.

In the March snow you may trace the long span of his parallel footprints where, hot with the rekindled annual fire of love, he has sped on his errant wooing, turning not aside for the most tempting bait, halting not for rest, hungering only for a sweetheart, wearied with nothing but loneliness. Yet weary enough would you be if you attempted to follow the track of but one night's wandering along the winding brook, through the tangle of windfalls, and across the rugged ledges that part stream from stream. When you go fishing in the first days of summer, you may see the fruits of this early springtide wooing in the dusky brood taking their primer-lesson in the art that their primogenitors were adepts in before yours learned it. How proud one baby fisher is of his first captured minnow, how he gloats over it and defends his prize from his envious and less fortunate brothers.

When summer wanes, they will be a scattered family, each member shifting for himself. Some still haunt the alder thicket where they first saw light, whose netted shadows of bare branches have thickened about them to continued shade of leafage, in whose midday twilight the red flame of the cardinal flower burns as a beacon set to guide the dusky wanderer home. Others have adventured far down the winding brook to the river, and followed its slowing current, past rapids and cataract, to where it crawls through the green level of marshes beloved of water fowl and of gunners, whose wounded victims, escaping them, fall an easy prey to the lurking mink.

Here, too, in their season are the tender ducklings of wood duck, teal, and dusky duck, and, all the year round, fat muskrats, which furnish for the price of conquest a banquet that the mink most delights in.

In the wooded border are homes ready builded for him under the buttressed trunks of elms, or in the hollow boles of old water maples, and hidden pathways through fallen trees and under low green arches of ferns.

With such a home and such bountiful provision for his larder close at hand, what more could the heart and stomach of mink desire? Yet he may not be satisfied, but longs for the wider waters of the lake, whose translucent depths reveal to him all who swim beneath him, fry innumerable; perch displaying their scales of gold, shiners like silver arrows shot through the green water, the lesser bass peering out of rocky fastnesses, all attainable to this daring fisher, but not his great rivals, the bronze-mailed bass and the mottled pike, whose jaws are wide enough to engulf even him.

Here, while you rest on your idle oar or lounge with useless rod, you may see him gliding behind the tangled net of cedar roots, or venturing forth from a cranny of the rocks down to the brink, and launching himself so silently that you doubt whether it is not a flitting shadow till you see his noiseless wake breaking the reflections lengthening out behind him.

Of all swimmers that breathe the free air none can compare with him in swiftness and in a grace that is the smooth and even flow of the poetry of motion. Now he dives, or rather vanishes from the surface, nor reappears till his wake has almost flickered out.

His voyage accomplished, he at once sets forth on exploration of new shores or progress through his established domain, and vanishes from sight before his first wet footprints have dried on the warm rock where he landed.

You are glad to have seen him, thankful that he lives, and you hope that, sparing your chickens and your share of trout, partridges, and wild ducks, he too may be spared from the devices of the trapper to fill his appointed place in the world's wildness.

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