I am willing to kill invasive weeds. They are weeds. They are invading my country. They don’t scream. I can do it.
Beyond weeds, I struggle with
killing stuff.
As a kid I was filled from head
to toe with bloodlust, but all of that drained from me as the years drew on. I am not talking about hunting. I understand the need and validity of
that. I am talking about killing simply
because a critter has transgressed me in some small way.
I try to allow room for most
every living thing around me. I won’t
kill a rattlesnake just because it’s a rattlesnake. If I find a bug inside my house, I try to
catch it and then release it outside. All
of this might go a long way toward explain what happened at 4:07 AM yesterday morning.
Over recent weeks, mice have
been making their way into my house. I
caught two them in live traps just last week.
After catching them, I marched them out onto the prairie in front of my
house and released them.
I woke early yesterday morning
and, upon stepping into the kitchen to throw together a batch of coffee,
noticed I had caught another mouse. And
then I got to thinking about releasing this one. I have not been taking the mice very far from
my house. What if the same mouse has
been working its way back?
After my coffee started
evolving, I grabbed the live trap.
“Well, buddy,” I said to the mouse inside,” You and I will be going for
a ride in my new automobile.”
Three minutes later the mouse
(inside his trap on the passenger seat) and I were speeding away from my house
on our country road.
At the intersection where my
spur meets the main road, about ¼-mile from my house, I stopped, grabbed the
live trap, and carried it out into the juniper and sage. “This is good country for a mouse,” I announced. I opened the trap and shook the mouse free. “Have a weird day,” I called out as the mouse
zig-zagged out into the dark landscape.
—Mitchell Hegman
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