Mystery Mink

This box was planted in honor of a beautiful, but aggressive, chocolate-colored mink that chased me down the beach one day after I stumbled on his nesting spot.

Clues…

Just recently I moved into my new home here along the water. We minks tend to move around a lot and I was getting restless at the old place, so I decided it was time for a change and wanted to get settled in before winter. I looked at several places along the lake here in West Michigan, and finally it came down to choosing between a place up north near Stoney Lake and this place. The critters that lived in this cozy little burrow before me were very tidy and I just moved right in.

It really is a nice place, with large boulders for walls and a clean sandy floor. Outside my door are grass-covered sand hills and two small popple saplings that provide shade from the mid-day sun. The lake is only about 25 feet down the path so I can swim and fish whenever I want. I have great views from here — lake sunsets to the west, a desolate stretch of State Park beach to the north and if I stand on my tippy-toes on my roof, I can see the top of the lighthouse across the channel at about 30 degrees east of due south. The street I live on is a gently curved rocky breakwall that acts as the northern arm around a harbor where lake meets lake. There isn’t much traffic here, just an occasional early morning fisherman and sometimes kids from the campground playing hide and seek among the rocks in the summer.

Because I don’t see a lot of people, my attention was piqued the other day when I noticed a woman walking toward my street from the beach parking area. There was a camera around her neck and I figured she was just a tourist coming to take pictures of the lighthouse. But not long after she had climbed up onto the rocks, she stopped — up there towards the beach, just past that “Y” in the path. I studied her intently as she looked around to see if anyone was watching (guess she didn’t see me), and then pulled a plastic container out of her pack. She checked to make sure it was sealed tightly and then buried it in the sand, under a small rock, right there between those two boulders with yellow paint. After that she snapped a few pictures of the water and walked back to her truck.

I waited until she was gone and went over to investigate, hoping to find some fish or something else worth eating. But it was just a plastic box containing a pen and a little book, and the strangest thing — there was a soft pink block of some sort with a picture of a critter who looked a lot like me carved into it! Hmmmm, humans… they play the strangest games!