Driving a wooded road wreathed with fern and bramble, I spot a dark divot ahead. My fingers clench the wheel. I brake.
It’s a body — dark-haired, no bigger than a cat.
The boys jump from the truck before the engine stops. They poke the body with the ballpoint pens we all slip into the pockets of our khaki uniforms, where ink pools in the seams.
“What is it? Weasel?”
“A mink, I think,” I say.
Dead but intact. Chunkier than the torpedo of a weasel.
“What killed it?” they ask, in the unison of twins. Teenage twins, blond and bronze from the summer camp sun.
The walnut-brown body is as curvy as a nut. Fur sleek and unmussed. The boys flip it and find their answer in the belly: porcupine quills.
“Can we skin it?”
Eager faces look to mine.
Can they see my confusion? Can they see I do not share their strange instinct?
I would leave her to lie in the tall grasses. A gift to the carrion eaters — crows, beetles, brother minks. Sinking into soil. All but bone and quill.
Instead, I nod.
They skin the mink and pin it to a wood plank to cure in the sun. The hairless pink body they fling deep into the woods, indeed to feed its brothers.
I dream she was a fur-farm escapee tasting freedom. I pretend her fate was always sealed: pelt preserved, flesh discarded. I imagine there’s a world where boys leave well enough alone.
Kathryn Ganfield is a nature writer and teaching artist in the river town of St. Paul, Minnesota. Her work focuses on family, environment, and the climate in crisis. She was a Loft Literary Center Mentor Series Fellow, Paul Gruchow Essay Contest winner, and two-time Pushcart nominee. Her prose appears in Water~Stone Review, Creative Nonfiction, and River Teeth, among other literary journals. Find her online at kathrynganfield.com.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Jared eberhardt
