More than a decade had passed since I’d been there, but the set location was as familiar as my wife’s face. And right then, Jill’s face was split by an ear-to-ear grin as she peered over the edge of the concrete wing wall at her first mink. The big male was suitcased in the jaws of a #110 bodygrip trap, its silky fur glistening with frost and early sun.
The little trap had done its work quickly and efficiently. The trap and its metal stabilizer were still in place where Jill had positioned them the day before, tight against the vertical wall in the grassy run I’d been confident we’d find there. The mink had died so quickly it hadn’t even disturbed the grass.
And when I walked across the blacktop and looked at the corresponding wing wall on the north side of the road, there was another boar mink in another bodygrip trap. And this one was mine.
BACK DOWN SOUTH
We were on an odyssey of sorts. I hadn’t run a mink longline since leaving the flat country of central Arkansas nearly 15 years ago, and although Jill had developed into a good upland trapper in our new home in the Ozarks, she’d never trapped water-based critters.
We’d been talking about going back to my old stomping grounds “down South” for several years, but you know how it is. Other things always got in the way,
