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Updated: July 5, 2025
As he watched, he saw Peter Mink's head, on its long neck, flash out from beneath the overhanging bank of the brook. "What are you doing up there?" Master Meadow Mouse called. "Fishing!" said Peter Mink promptly. "Aren't you a long way from the water?" Master Meadow Mouse inquired. "With a pole, one doesn't need to stand right at the water's edge," said Peter Mink.
A moment later Jerry Muskrat bobbed up beside them. You see, they had swum clear across the Smiling Pool and of course they could swim no farther. So Billy Mink's swimming party was a great success. One morning when big round Mr. Sun was climbing up in the sky and Old Mother West Wind had sent all her Merry Little Breezes to play in the Green Meadows, Johnny Chuck started out for a walk.
The tent-flaps of Brown Mink's lodge were lifted. He was caught in a mad onrush; he was howled at; spat upon. Finally, a bruised, exiled traitor, more despised, if possible, than before, he fled skulking away. And here was no hope for his honour!
So he left Billy Mink's duck where he had dropped it and trotted very, very softly up the Lone Little Path to try to catch the thief who had stolen his plump chicken. No sooner was his back turned than down out of the Lone Pine floated the great shadow, and when a minute later Reddy Fox returned, Billy Mink's duck had also disappeared. Reddy Fox could hardly believe his eyes. He didn't smile now.
Then, before she could make other observations, her mind was entirely preoccupied with a large, firm hand that grasped her elbow, and seemed to half lift her slight weight from step to step. Miss Mink's elbow was not used to such treatment and it indignantly freed itself before the pavement was reached.
The trail they made, overlapping that of the rabbit, but quite distinct from it, varied according to the depth of the surface snow. Where the snow lay thin, just deep enough to receive an imprint, the mink's small feet left a series of delicate, innocent-looking marks, much less formidable in appearance than those of the pad-footed fugitive.
The crone joined in the laugh. Then, "Standing Buffalo may enter," she said, and respectfully led the way into the wigwam. The pariah heard, yet did not pause. But when, among the dogs again, he cleaned at the deer hide with short, swift strokes, a light once more flamed up in his dull eyes a light unlike the one that had burned in them at Brown Mink's fireside.
Rabbit saw that the stranger was very thin. She did not know that no matter how much he ate, he would never be what you might call fat. That slimness was something that ran in Peter Mink's family. The Minks were always slender people. Being a kind-hearted soul, Mrs. Rabbit went back to her kitchen. And soon she brought Peter a plateful of the best food she had.
If the mink met a muskrat or a rabbit in his travels, or came upon a grouse, or quail, or a farmer's henroost, he had the supper he was in quest of. I followed a mink's track one morning upon the snow till I found where the prowler had overtaken and killed a muskrat by a stone wall near a little stream. The blood upon the snow and the half-devoured body of the rat told the whole story.
Then without the teeniest, weeniest bit of noise, it floated back into the Lone Pine and with it went the plump chicken. Reddy Fox, still with his wicked, selfish smile, trotted back with Billy Mink's duck, but he dropped it in sheer surprise when he discovered that his plump chicken had disappeared. Now Reddy Fox is very suspicious, as people who are not honest themselves are very apt to be.
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