The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

But the rescue came too late. At the last moment on the ice, the canine teeth of the big bear had severed the jugular vein of the female, and in two minutes after her rescue she was dead. It is my belief that at first the male did not intend to murder the female. I think his first impulse was to play with her, as he had always done with the male comrade of his own size. But the joy of combat seized him, and after that his only purpose was to kill. My verdict was, not premeditated murder, but murder in the second degree. In the order of carnivorous animals, I think the worst criminals are found in the Marten Family (Mustelidae); and if there is a more murderous villain than the mink, I have yet to find him out. The mink is a midnight assassin, who loves slaughter for the joy of murder. The wolverine, the marten, mink and weasel are all courageous, savage and merciless. To the wolverine Western trappers accord the evil distinction of being a veritable imp of darkness on four legs. To them he is the arch-fiend, beyond which animal cunning and depravity cannot go. Excepting the profane history of the pickings and stealings of this "mountain devil" as recorded by suffering trappers, I know little of it; but if its instincts are not supremely murderous, its reputation is no index of its character. The mink, however, is a creature that we know and fear. Along the rocky shores of the Bronx River, even in the Zoological Park, it perversely persisted long after our park-building began. In spite of traps, guns, and poison, and the killing of from three to five annually in our Park, Putorius vison would not give up. With us, the only creatures that practiced wholesale and unnecessary murder were minks and dogs. The former killed our birds, and during one awful period when a certain fence was being rebuilt, the latter destroyed several deer. A mink once visited an open-air yard containing twenty-two pinioned laughing gulls, and during that noche triste killed all of those ill-fated birds. It did not devour even one, and it sucked the blood of only two or three.