The Mink by Jana Harris

      Danielle Henry CC



from The Armageddon Horse,
Essays & Observations from the Farm, a climate change memoir


 The Mink                                                                                                                                                                                                for Ann who is about to re-marry



      I guess I didn’t tell you about my mink. No, not a coat or a hat. 
      There used to be several fur farms in our neck of the woods.  Back when our little Timberlandia was one of the northwest epicenters of methamphetamine production, mink farms operated as an excellent cover for meth-making shenanigans.  Dilapidated homesteads at the end of long rutted driveways housed meth kitchens and the old barns in back of them housed thousands of minks crammed together in cages.  Both these enterprises emitted a heavy odor of cat piss. 
      Then sometime in the early twenty-tens, Baja ice flooded the local market.  Mexican meth was a cheaper and more reliable product, and the brotherhood that marketed it had a robust business plan, so the number of independent meth kitchens dwindled.  At about the same time a lone wolf animal rights warrior started liberating the minks. Law enforcement suspected that some fur farmers uncaged their own animals, turning them out into the wild in order to claim crop insurance benefits, but nothing was proven. The mink farms went bankrupt. Some of the newly emancipated minks moved into my pasture and equipment sheds and horse barn. Most migrated further up the mountain to the old earthen dam that keeps the river from devastating our town.  Behind the dam is a reservoir that supplies water to a city on the coast with a population of over a hundred thousand.
      Minks are small nocturnal creatures in the weasel family; long thin bodies with a tail shorter than a rat’s and luxurious sleek fur. The live ones have cute pink noses, glittery eyes, lacerating claws, weigh about as much as a kitten, and hiss like cats.  They hunt rabbits and rodents larger than they are. Semi-aquatic, they relish fish and frogs.  Occasionally they eat each other. If a young mink isn’t trapped, shot, cannibalized, or hit by a car, it could live to be as old as ten.
      For some reason a mink set up residence in our house. At first I had no idea what it was, but the way it was toying with the dog from the protection of its hiding place behind a metal cabinet in the kitchen, I thought it was a stray kitten.  Stray felines usually arrived by mewing at my door, not by falling through the dropped ceiling of our mud room like this critter had. (And like the two possums that were fighting in the attic two years ago. They had collapsed the same ceiling, falling onto the mud room floor.)  While I was trying to conduct a phone conference with one of my more problematic adult creative writing students (Ivy League, a dentist, entitled, had to have everything his way (so why ask me to critique his work?), three children,  five years happily divorced from his orthodontist wife who was never emotionally available enough, hated his patients, regretted not marrying his first love because she didn’t want children, yatta, yatta— sometimes I had a hard time relating to his problems, excuse me, poems. )  The dog, Ali (short for Alouette), a hundred-pound Alsatian cross (think Hitler parading Blondie on the terrace of Eagle’s Nest, only less disciplined) had cornered the mink behind a kitchen cabinet, upset the glass wine bottles in the recycling bin as well as several plastic half-gallon vodka jugs, and toppled a stack of old newspapers waiting to be garbage can liners.  Her mighty tail whirled like an electric fan (it was a hot day, so this wasn’t unwelcome) causing the dust buster and other kitchen gadgets –rolling pin, colander—to clatter to the floor. The dog, now in high gear, barked frantically at the top of her lungs right next me, while drooling profusely.  
      My student was oblivious to the background noise as well as my comments delivered, due to circumstances, in a halting voice.  He said that he’d shown the poem to his mother who liked it as written, and that he was going to show it to his men’s group to get their feedback. I thought, or what passed for thinking with a canine kangaroo barking in my ear, if you are in your fifties and still need approval from your octogenarian mother as well as your men’s support group—all this pushback just because I suggested your poem needed a better, more complete title—you should be paying a therapist, not me.  Sometimes teaching eroded me like a logged hillside after a heavy rain. Meanwhile, the mink seemed to be enjoying Ali’s attention. When the dog backed off a little, I swear the mink started to purr.
     That was a few days ago, but fur baby is still here in the house somewhere. Okay with me because minks eat mice, and I don’t like poisoning or trapping rodents—I’m always afraid the stupid dog will poke her nose where she shouldn’t. First thing every morning, when my husband, followed by the dog, comes into the kitchen to make an espresso, he spies the mink peeking out at him from somewhere. After gulping her kibble and canned animal byproducts, Ali searches the mudroom closet and behind the washer-dryer for her newest toy, housemate; I don’t know what to call it. I’ve been racking my brain for the perfect name for a mink that has decided to take a huge evolutionary leap.
      Since all the wolves have left the area, the mink has few predators other than humans. In the wild they are hyper territorial and seldom allow other minks into their neighborhood, including their mate. They also, on occasion, eat their young.  Here’s my question: Minks like wetlands, marshes, river banks.  They live a solitary life underground in the burrows of other animals that they’ve hunted down or in cavities made by streams and trees. So why has Zaza (I finally found the ideal name for her) chosen to take up residence with the enemy and relocated in the attic or on the tops of cupboards of a house? Why the change in habitat?  And why here specifically?  What skewed the mink’s ages-old instinct for strict boundaries? 
      Sometimes when I’m in bed at night, I think I hear Zaza in the wall purring as if she knows something I don’t.  Remember that earthen dam further up the road in the mountains that I mentioned, the one where many of the newly liberated minks relocated? It’s WWII era and has both vertical and horizontal cracks in it.  Is the mink’s sudden rehoming instinct a signal of impending peril? I can’t let this alone even though I need to move on to other challenges: cleaning the kitchen, repairing the ceiling in the mud room again, negotiating the broken health care system, fixing climate change.  
       You?  What are you up to? I mean, other than, like Zaza and possibly me, about to start a whole new life.                     



​
Jana Harris has taught creative writing at the U of Washington and at the Writer’s Workshop in Seattle. She is editor and founder of Switched-on Gutenberg. Most recent publications: You Haven’t Asked About My Wedding or What I Wore; Poems of Courtship on the American Frontier (U of Alaska Press) and the memoir, Horses Never Lie About Love (Simon & Schuster

​