A Mink Coat For Tricia?

A mink coat.  When I think of that, I think of wealth, luxury, affluence.  The other day I almost acquired a mink coat for Tricia.  Let me rewind and tell you the story.  The hens have been real nervous lately.  My wife theorized that something was terrorizing them.  A hawk?  An owl?  Possums?  I promptly set the trap and caught 3 possums in five days.  I thought the culprits were caught.  Good thing, because their numbers were diminishing.  We're missing a noticeable amount of hens.  But now, I thought I solved the problem.

However, on Thursday of last week, there were feathers all over the ground by the barn and the hens wouldn't even go out and eat when we fed them the hen scratch.  What in the world?  On Friday I got home and Russ had been out to the barn to collect the day's egg production.  As he was picking up eggs, he noticed a fracas in the pasture.

Or maybe not.  It appeared at first glance that a hen was taking a dust bath.  After looking more closely, SOMETHING had her.  Russ picked up a stick and ran out to rescue the hen.  He popped the predator but good, and it limped into the woods wounded.  Russ ran to the woods and caught up with the perpetrator and finished the job with a solid blow to the animal's head.

What was it?  A mink!

This vicious weasel-like creature is a little larger than a squirrel.  This one was reddish-brown in color with lighter markings on its tail and a white patch under its chin.

I was impressed that Russ was able to run after this hen-killer and catch it.  Russ was in the right place at the right time.  The mink was not!  His chicken-killin' days are done.  The hen gratefully was saved.  She was scared and visibly shaken, but she'll live to see another day, thanks to Russ.

Where there is one, there's bound to be more.  We will keep our eyes peeled for more mink mayhem.  For now, though, I think I have the beginnings of a mink coat for Tricia!

On second thought, it might be quite a while before we can kill another.  Tricia is petite, but I'd have to kill a bunch of these varmints to make a coat for her.  Perhaps I can skin the mink and make Tricia a fashionable mink fur lined mask for her to wear during the Covid craziness.  She'd be the talk of the town.  I'm gonna go out on a limb and say she'd never wear it.