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.