TRAPPING DOWN STREAM.
To catch mink successfully you must have open water. I very seldom set for mink when water is all frozen up. Did you ever notice that you made your best catch of mink on a snowy or rainy night? Now, why is this? It is because your tracks and scent were either washed out or covered up by snow. A mink is not a hard animal to catch if you have water and weather just right, and you are careful about setting your trap. But he is a very shy animal, and boys if you are not careful to study his habits you will pay dear for every pelt you get.
CHAPTER XIII.
EXPERIENCED TRAPPERS' WAYS.
At first when I started to trap I thought I could catch mink every time, says an Iowa trapper. That was three years ago this last February. Well I caught two mink that spring and seven the next winter and sixteen the next. That was the first season that I was able to catch every mink that trots or lopes my way, big, little, old and young are treated all alike; sometimes it takes a mink three or four days to come out of a hole when you track him in.
A water set is a pretty good set for mink but you cannot find many springs that you can set a trap in the winter time, so I set dry sets for them. At a hole is a good place. Put a piece of muskrat carcass in the hole to keep the rabbits from going in and set a Blake & Lamb trap in the entrance. Chop a hole in the frozen ground large enough for the trap and cover it with tissue paper and thinly with dry dirt. Be sure to put some dry material of some sort under the trap to keep it from freezing down, have the surface of the ground level after it is covered over with dry dirt so you cannot tell just exactly where the trap is yourself, or in other words don't have a high place where the trap is when it is covered over. Fasten the trap to a drag of some sort. If you fasten to something solid the mink will pull out if he is only caught by the toes.
I caught two mink one winter that only had three legs. They were the ones that pulled out of my traps because I had the trap fastened too solid. One mink I caught was only caught by one toe and was tied to a little brush drag; when I tracked him up I found that he had gone about ten rods. When I got in sight of him he got stout and pulled out and started off at a pretty stiff gait, and I had to let the dog catch him for he was geared up too high for me to catch.