The other day I went rabbit hunting. We have about two inches of fresh snow. I got one rabbit and found a fresh mink track so I concluded to follow him. Inside of a hundred yards I found another hole where he came out dragging something. I still followed. Another fifty yards further I found where he went in another hole (it was in a bog) and found a muskrat half eaten up and a fine place to set two traps.
I had no traps with me, so I marched home about four miles and got two traps all rusted up and tied with a piece of copper wire. I greased them up with sewing machine oil and started back. When I got to the place it was getting dark and I had to set the traps by match light.
I will tell you how I set the traps to fool the mink so he could not smell the traps or machine oil. I took the muskrat and rubbed all over the traps with the bloody side and set the traps one in each hole, and took an oak leaf and smeared blood on and laid it on the pan of each trap, and then laid the muskrat in the center of the two so he would have to cross either trap to get the rat. I then covered the hole up with the same dirt and moss that I dug out, and went home. At five o'clock the next morning I left home to get my prize.
I got there by daylight and there was Mr. Mink caught in both traps, one on each foot. He was the largest mink I got that winter. He was brown and when stretched measured exactly thirty-five inches from tip to tip.
I almost always trap mink in the winter with blind sets, says a Wisconsin trapper, by chopping a place for the trap so it will be, when set, about level with the surface of the mink's trail in front of the holes that the mink makes in the snow. I then take cat tails that grow in the marshes and spread some on trap bed; I then place my trap and next some more cat tails spread on top of trap, and last some snow which I spread over it all with a twig carefully so it will be nice and smooth. The cat tail I spread under the trap is to keep the trap from freezing fast at the bottom. I have had very good success with this set. I used to use bait altogether, but very few mink can now be caught around here with bait.
I once set a trap for a mink alongside of a log which lay across the stream, setting the trap on shore near the ice while standing on the log; there was about 20 inches of snow on the ground, so it left a space behind the trap in which I placed a piece of rabbit. The next morning I should have had a mink but instead of that the mink had that piece of rabbit, and a larger hole alongside the log showed that it had been dragged further back under the snow. I then set my trap again, tying fast another piece of rabbit, but Mr. Mink had enough rabbit for a while, so about five days afterwards I had a squirrel in it.
I then threw the rabbit away and put the squirrel in the snow along the side and above the trap, with only the tail out of the snow. About three days more and something had happened. The trap laid sprung in the place I had set it and in it was the tip of a squirrel's tail, and the squirrel I had laid for bait was gone. This might seem untrue but it is only too true, although just how it might have happened I cannot account for.
I then kicked up the snow and found that the mink had come from under the ice on the other side of the log and circled the end of the log, coming in behind the trap after the bait, all the way traveling under the snow. I have never gotten that mink, but have learned better ways since that time, and find that where mink are trapped much the blind set is by far the best.