was far from the big muskrat's mind in that crucial moment.
Not panic, but a fierce hate blazed in his usually good-natured eyes.
With a swift, strenuous kick of his powerful hind legs, he shot
downward upon the enemy, and grappled with her in the narrow tunnel.

The mink had seen him just before he fell upon her, and quicker than
thought itself had darted up her snake-like jaws to gain the fatal
throat-hold. But long success had made her over-confident. No muskrat
had ever, within her experience, even tried to fight her. This present
impetuous attack she mistook for a frantic effort to crowd past her
and escape. Half careless, therefore, she missed the fatal hold, and
caught only a mouthful of yielding skin. Before she could try
again--borne down and hampered as she was by the muskrat's weight--a
set of long, tenacious teeth, crunching and cutting, met in the side
of her face, just at the root of the jaw.

This time the muskrat was wise enough to hold on. His deep grip held
like a vise. The mink's teeth, those vindictive teeth that had killed
and killed for the mere joy of killing, now gnashed impotently. In
utter silence, there in the choking deep, the water in their eyes and
ears and jaws, they writhed and strove, the mink's lithe body twisting
around her foe like a snake. Then, with a convulsive shudder, her
struggles ceased. Her lungs had refused to hold the strained breath
any longer. They had opened--and the water had filled them. Her body
trailed out limply; and the muskrat, still maintaining that inexorable
grip, dragged her out through the water-gate which he had so well
kept. Out in the brown, blurred light of the current he still held her
down, jamming her head into a patch of bright sand, until the ache of
his own lungs gave him warning. Then, carrying the body to the
surface, he flung it scornfully over a root to await the revival of
his appetite, and proceeded to calm his excitement by a long,
elaborate toilet. Steely dark and cold the waters of Bitter Creek
slipped by between their leafless, bushy banks. And inside the dome of
the house in the alders the thick-furred muskrat colony slept
luxuriously, little dreaming of the doom just averted from their
door.

When the Moose Cow Calls

The smell of the burning rubbish heaps--the penetrating November
smell--spread up from the clearings and filled the chilly, windless
evening air. It seemed a sort of expression of the cold sky, those
pale steel-