My life's ambition is to move to Montana and raise minces.
Don't know what a mince is? Read on.
Now surely you have eaten mincemeat, generally found around Thanksgiving
time as the main ingredient in "mince pie". Well, mincemeat comes from
minces (duh!).
Minces are little boneless creatures slightly larger than a cat. Being
boneless, they don't really have a certain shape so they are hard to
describe. (Boneless? Yes. The same breeding program that brought us
boneless chicken breasts and boneless round steaks -- obviously from
boneless cows -- also produced the first boneless minces. Stop
interrupting!)
Minces are covered in brown fur vaguely reminiscent of beaver fur, although
they are not highly valued for their pelts since they roll around all the
time and scuff up their fur quite badly. Their main means of locomotion is
rolling, of course.
So what I plan to do is this: buy a not-too-steep hillside in Montana.
In the morning, I will load up the minces on a sledge with low sides and
drag them up the hill with my John Deere. Near the top, I fold down the
sides and the minces can just roll off. They graze on the way down the
hill, and it usually takes until evening for them to reach the bottom.
When they get to the bottom, I will feed them apples and raisins to give
them the appropriate flavor.
Now when it comes time to harvest them, all you have to do is bop them
on the head (OK, so you have to find it first), skin them and pop them
into the grinder. They never feel a thing. Some people get them drunk on
Jack Daniel's whiskey to impart more of a holiday flavor and what's more
they die happy.
Worst problem with minces is the sidehill gouger (see
Wikipedia entry).
The sidehill gouger is somewhat like a bobcat; no, more like a lynx but
a bit bigger. It has two short legs on one side and two long legs on the
other side. It is actually a shy creature when faced by anything larger
than itself.
It is claimed that the sidehill gouger inhabits the Rocky Mountains of
British Columbia. As far as that goes, it is true; but its tracks have
been spotted as far south as Yakima, Washington and Helena, Montana. The tracks and trails
are quite distinctive, as they run around hills rather than up, down or
diagonally. We have observed many such trails on the sidehills in
Okanogan County, Washington, between Republic and Tonasket. Scattered
reports put it as far south as the hills around San Francisco, but
due to the building of roads and such, most of that habitat has been
destroyed. (Roads are flat, right? To get around the hill, the gouger
has to cross the road and falls over, where it is often run over in
its helpless condition. They are often mistaken for dead coons and
possums.)
Now it is said by "all sources" (ha!) that the sidehill gouger is strictly
herbivorous. Poppycock! Because minces smell and taste so much like
apples and raisins (the gouger's favorite foods), they are in constant
danger from gougers. The gouger is related to its eastern cousin, the
wampahoofus found mainly in Vermont, and the two are often confused.
They are both descended from the European haggis, imported to this continent
by homesick Scots.
Well, as we said, the gouger is a shy creature. Usually what it does when it
senses humans approaching is to use its powerful front claws to dig
a hole in the hillside, after which it jumps into the hole and pulls
the hole in after itself. This behavior is similar to that of the
auger-tailed wampus. Similar to the gouger, this creature is even more shy
of human beings. Generally, it covers up its tracks, and, when a human
being is near, uses its auger tail to drill a hole where it hides. (Do I
need to mention that it also pulls the hole in after itself?) As a result,
no specimen of the auger-tailed wampus has ever been seen.
(What do you mean, you don't believe me about legs longer on one side than
the other? Don't you feel one leg getting longer than the other? I'm pulling
it!)
So anyway, when a gouger attacks a mince, what the poor defenseless little
creature can do is to roll downhill. The gouger can't go up or down a hill,
so has to run all the way around the hill to descend to the next level. But
minces don't have really quick reflexes so you do lose a few during the
season. Usually this happens when two gougers, one a right-legged gouger
and the other a left-legged gouger, come at the mince from two sides. So
it turns out that the main reason for raising minces on a hillside
(mobility -- the more they graze, the bigger they grow) almost turns out
to be their downfall.
Although it isn't a perfect life, raising minces is not very strenuous
and so is quite suitable for retired folks who like to sit on front
porches and spin yarns. Some of these folks get to write for the papers,
like Charlie
Lawson in the Reno Gazette, but I just have to rent blog space on
a server and nobody pays me a dime. But if you read this, I'd appreciate
an E-mail, rich @ this site (without the www). (I was careful about
how I said that so the spambots can't read it; hope you can figure it out.)
Well, Grampaw Jones used to say, "Truth is stranger than fact!" I reckon
this is stranger than either one....
My life's ambition is to move to Montana and raise minces.
