Minks, Shrews And Men In A Winter Swamp

A mink has the peculiar humpbacked posture typical of the weasels. This, coupled with legs that arc very short in relation to body length, gives the mink the look of a caterpillar whose body follows and records the contours of the land rather than bridging them. But the mink is such a caterpillar as never was for grace and agility. Flow is the right word. Like water on glass, like mercury on a counter, the big male mink flowed across the frozen stream in front of us. Then he turned toward the beaver dam. As he moved along he paused frequently to look about, sniff and scratch, but the pauses were made so quickly and smoothly that it seemed he was never entirely still. At about the place where we had the glimpse of the first mink, the big male came to a water hole and skipped about the edge for a few moments. (We thought then that there might be the remains of a kill at this place since all the minks we saw stopped there. But when we came up there was only a maze of tracks. Apparently it was only curiosity as to who had gone before them that brought the minks to this hole.) The big male dived into the water, crossed the stream under the ice, emerged on the left bank again and bounded away toward the beaver pond.

As soon as he left, two more, smaller, minks came out on the ice from the left. They were not really running together but just happened to be going the same way at the same time. We stood motionless for 15 minutes and for most of that time had at least one mink to watch. They followed the same general pattern as the big male, coming out on the ice from the marsh on the left and going upstream to the water hole. From there some would continue on land or underwater to the pond, while others would double back, apparently to repeat the route. Allowing for duplication, we thought we saw seven minks in all. The wind blew directly across the stream, out of the swamp, and with the possible exception of the last one, none of the minks appeared to know that we were there.

The last mink was very small. We thought of it as a female, perhaps a yearling. Her coat and tail were a bit ragged. (At first we were amazed, grateful to see any sort of a mink, but we quickly became connoisseurs, critics of mink conformation and condition.) When she came onto the stream she turned toward us rather than upstream as the others had. It seemed that she might run right between our legs, but 10 feet short of us she stopped and sat up on her haunches, squirrellike. She held her head high and raised her nose, showing the white blaze that all minks carry on their throats. Under the blaze we could plainly see her beating pulse. She peered, straining her poor eyes, and sniffed hard with her good nose. Finally, almost contemptuously she dropped down, turned around and went upstream. She did not go in alarm, but simply it seemed because she had decided on the evidence of her nose that there was no profit for her in coming toward us.

Perhaps she gave some warning. More likely it was time for the minks to den up for the day. In any event she was the last, though we waited for a while longer. We had had enough anyway. There can be too much of anything and certainly too much of such an extraordinary thing as observing, unobserved, wild minks in the snow.

We went on, picked up our traps (we had one pretty little cloudland deer mouse), explored a new section of the swamp, ate our Kingwood hotel lunch and then began the 150-mile drive home. All during the afternoon and evening we could not get the minks out of our minds or conversation. What we had in mind was the clear vision of how they had been in the snow, but to sustain conversation we talked about peripheral things:

If what we had seen was a fair sample, how many minks were ranging the whole swamp.

(Smugly—with superiority) Those who do not go into a winter marsh are poor, indifferent men.

How long we would wait if we wanted, say for the sake of photographs, to see the same sort of thing again.

(Unanimously) The unimportance, the undesirability for our purposes of having to fiddle with a camera at such a time.

Lee, who rarely summarizes or abstracts, had not the last but the best word.