Covid slaughter

We weren't good enough for mink, I guess. Never caught one anyway. We'd dream of finding one right there in one of our sets, but all that fancy never dawned into reality. Muskrat pelts were worth a couple of bucks back then--I don't remember how much, because money wasn't the object of all those early mornings. Getting up and out there amid the cold October dawns was the reason we put down a trap line, why we stole out of bed before anyone else in the family. We must have sold the pelts we'd taken, a couple of dozen maybe, once the freeze came. I don't remember getting paid real money. But we never got a mink. They were mythic, still are.

They were, I was sure, a great deal smarter than we were could have hoped to be. They stalked the river banks we'd walk every morning, giggling as they'd pass one of our traps. We were just kids to them--and the fact is, we were, sixth or seventh graders maybe. There were mink out there along the river and in the culverts and wherever else we carefully set and staked our traps, and every night we'd close our eyes and every morning we'd be out there, some glossy mink was forever the dream. We'd have arrived--boys turned finally into men--if some frost-bespeckled morning we'd come up on a set and find, right there before our eyes, a perfectly lovely mink. Never happened.

Then again, I don't know that I could have handled the thrill.

They're killers. There's nothing about the bloody vocation to which they are called that endears them to anyone, but the Creator blessed them with marvelous, soft fur, a shiny coat that, way back then sewn into a collar or stole or coat, would have far way beyond our families' means. Only the gaudy rich dressed in mink, and we certainly weren't among them. High fashion put a price on their heads, and, I suppose, made them something like deity right there on Onion River.

Twice, as of late, I've seen one loll through our back yard, look around warily, then climb the rocks on the retaining walls like some sleek mountain goat. One of them scurried up the thin trunk of one of our quaking aspens with the liquid grace of a cat. I had no idea they were such practiced climbers. 

Just exactly how researchers uncover such things I don't know, but it has become clear and even tragic that mink are the only animal species so far discoverable who are capable of catching Covid-19, passing the virus along to each other, and even passing it on, once again, back to human beings. Other mammals have picked up the virus from us, but none, so far, have been capable of passing it along, specifically back to us.

That makes them dangerous, which is why Denmark has determined that its giant population of "farmed" mink--mink bred and reared in cages, mink who never see a day of freedom, must be slaughtered en masse. I could say "euthanized," but slaughtered somehow fits. Nineteen million of them--the Danes are really into mink--are being killed as we speak, a victim of the coronavirus.  All the ranch mink must die.

You don't have to travel far from the Onion River today to find massive mink farms. Most of my family is buried in a little rural cemetery near the lakeshore where the silver roofs of a huge mink farm seem to creep ever closer. Good people make their livings breeding and selling mink for the kind of fur coats significant numbers of people now despise because of the way we've already industrialized their slaughter. Now, in Denmark, 19 million are going to be killed. You have to look deeply to find a sense of calling in farming ranch mink. But I should talk--right now, behind me, the highway is full of cattle trucks.

I don't like to think about what Denmark finds necessary. Even though sixty years have passed since those glorious mornings on the Onion River, pursuing the almost mythical mink we never caught or even saw, I can't help but feel the endless slaughter so deep within me that it touches my soul.