ave its best black coat on. For the little
first-year minks wear dark coats, almost as fine as Russian sable.
Yes--he reflects, poking it back to the hole and retreating quickly so
that the mother will return--better leave it till the winter; for wasn't
it Koot who put a mink among his kittens, only to have the little viper
set on them with tooth and claw as soon as its eyes opened? Also mink
are bad neighbours to a poultry-yard. Forty chickens in a single night
will the little mink destroy, not for food but--to quote man's
words--for the zest of the sport. The mink, you must remember, like
other pot-hunters, can boast of a big bag.

The trapper did come back next fall. It was when he was ranging all the
swamp-lands for beaver-dams. Swamp lands often mean beaver-dams; and
trappers always note what stops the current of a sluggish stream.
Frequently it is a beaver colony built across a valley in the mountains,
or stopping up the outlet of a slough. The trapper was sleeping under
his canoe on the banks of the river where the swamp tumbled out from the
ravine. Before retiring to what was a boat by day and a bed by night, he
had set out a fish net and some loose lines--which the flow of the
current would keep in motion--below the waterfall. Carelessly, next day,
he threw the fish-heads among the stones. The second morning he found
such a multitude of little tracks dotting the rime of the hoar frost
that he erected a tent back from the waterfalls, and decided to stay
trapping there till the winter. The fish-heads were no longer thrown
away. They were left among the stones in small steel-traps weighted with
other stones, or attached to a loose stick that would impede flight.
And if the poor gyrfalcon could have seen the mink held by the jaws of a
steel-trap, hissing, snarling, breaking its teeth on the iron, spitting
out all the rage of its wicked nature, the bird would have been avenged.

And as winter deepened, the quality of minks taken from the traps became
darker, silkier, crisper, almost brown black in some of the young, but
for light fur on the under lip. The Indians say that sakwasew the mink
would sell his family for a fish, and as long as fish lay among the
stones, the trapper gathered his harvest of fur: reddish mink that would
be made into little neck ruffs and collar pieces, reddish brown mink
that would be sewed into costly coats and cloaks, rare brownish black
mink that would be put into the beautiful flat scarf