Richard Negus: Mink Hunting: A Father's Legacy Passed Down

A day out with the Eastern Counties Mink Hunt is never dull nor dry. I ventured out with this wonderful group of eccentrics to recapture my lost youth and pass on the mink hunting baton to my son   I learned many life lessons on river banks in my early teens. I gleaned the art of stealth and concealment when watching wild trout and chub take naps, the only indication their piscine hearts still pumped was an occasional wave of a pectoral fin as they lay in their riffle beds. I discovered if I shut up and stayed still, wildlife swiftly forgets your presence. Dippers would dip, kingfishers fish and otters would gambol, either dealing death to other river dwellers or playing energetic solo sports with stones, shells and twigs. In those aquatic margins I also picked up a taste for botany, becoming well versed in the old country names for the wildflowers that delight in the lush edges. I’d challenge myself to mutter the names of tree species, plucking at the leaves of the branches that bowed to wetly kiss the bubbling surface of the running water below. Much of this sodden education was in truth a by-product of the primary reason for my being on the water, that purpose being my pursuit of mink. During my senior school years, mink hunting was for me what fox hunting was to John Jorrocks, what football was to John Motson, what shagging and drinking was to Ollie Reed. I loved it, it dogged my every waking moment and crept its way into my dreams, I wrote about it, painted its image, noted notable hunts and praiseworthy hounds. I took water temperatures and measured wind direction. I turned this humble form of venery, a form of hunting that the snootier foxhunters of the time derided as little better than rat catching, into an amalgam of science, high art and ecological survey.