In early spring when the ice breaks up in the watershed and recedes from the banks and beaver lodges, when the snow evaporates on the rocky shorelines and melts into the cattails and carex and cutgrass, the muskrats come out of their homes bursting with life and blinking. Lone muskrats leave their home waters and make a wandering exodus, across the muddy and matted land, over roads and through peril to find new waters and mates to make new colonies.
I sat on the south-facing bank of the big steelhead pool on the Flute Reed River, with a warm south wind coming off the cool snowy woods, and a muskrat waddled under my legs. He was a small muskrat by my standards, dragging a line of the year’s first green shoots and white roots. He stopped a few feet away hunched over away from the bright world, like Chuchundra from “Rikki- Tikki-Tavi.”
Maybe he’s small because this is a world of scarcity: there is no emergent vegetation in this part of the Flute Reed – in fact, there is no submerged vegetation. No place for a hut. Only cracks in the Earth’s crust to delve into and scratch out a living, and dirty roots and dry greens to eat.
Once when I was in grade school back in the suburbs, we were all outside and some boy discovered a muskrat fallen into the deep window-well below our classroom. The children all crowded round and stared and pointed and made noise. The window well had rails around it and was too deep for any of us to climb in or out. I was called over to identify this thing, and I looked down and felt very knowledgeable and very sad and called it a muskrat.
I was a schoolboy muskrat trapper, and was extremely familiar with the ins and out of the muskrat – literally. His or her white toenails and webbed feet, the orange incisors and little forepaws, tiny ears and eyes. Oh! The tail was flat like a crocodile’s and scaled along the sides but with long black hairs laying down the top ridge. And how the blue guts were gassy! And there was downy gray under fur and long brown guard hairs – and together they made faux mink fur, which I sold for around three bucks a pelt.
Nowadays, regarding the muskrat, I just sit and think about them, and thank the spring when I can see one again.
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