It's a sleek, tiny creature with bright, inquisitive eyes.  At a distance, easily overlooked if it were not that the tall man holding it had his arm crooked, and a slender leash hanging down, swaying as he walked.  As the distance between us closed my husband recognized the man and realized that he was carrying his little weasel.  We had seen them both on several occasions over the years.  Although the first time had been with another little animal, since gone, and this was its replacement.

Dogs, he tells us, even very large ones come up close to sniff the weasel and none of them exhibit any kind of hostility to it, in his experience.  Sometimes the dog owners are alarmed, calling their dogs off, but he calms their fears.  Dogs obey him, he said, with a grin, where they often ignore whatever their owners direct them to do.  They sit docilely at his feet, and he allows them to smell the little creature who itself exhibits no fear.

He carries it when the occasion demands, when they're approaching a situation he cannot fully anticipate.  Otherwise, the very small, and quite beautiful little animal prefers to wander along on its own, on leash.  The leash is its outdoor companion; occasionally the weasel will insist, and the man will allow it to wander off in the underbrush, leash trailing.  He has not yet had an occurrence that he couldn't control.

And because of its great curiosity, it becomes readily bored, so that they tend to wander off to other exploration opportunities rather than to return to the same woodland trails time and again, which explains the few times we've come across them previously.  Winter or summer, they venture out together; when snow is on the ground the little weasel prefers to burrow through it than attempt to clamber over it.

It has an intense curiosity about everything surrounding it, including me, sniffing my hands in rapid sniffing motions, looking up at me, scrutinizing details about me that I cannot imagine might be of any interest to a creature faced with another of nature's creations when there is such a size disparity.  What might it be thinking?

One more time when I regretted not having my handy little digital camera with me.