Some time ago, 1983 to be exact, I was on the radio in Alaska. The station KJNP, King Jesus North Pole, in, coincidentally, the village of North Pole just outside of Fairbanks. It was the evening, but the sun was bright as it always is in the far north summer, payment I suppose for the night’s death grip in December.
It was a routine evening, just monitoring a baseball game. As the game went on I heard a slight noise and there was a mouse. Since the building that housed the radio station was essentially a very large log cabin on the outside of town it probably just wandered in. There he was watching me as I sat around, earphones on, making sure the signal from the stadium got on the air. He looked at me and I looked at him. Neither of us moved. I was doing my work and he was doing his, that is being a mouse and scouting around new places.
I don’t remember exactly what I used but I did catch him. He was probably terrified but I had no intention of killing him. When the game was done I walked down the road for some distance, found a likely spot, and let him go. I know animals die, I know sometimes they have to, but I wasn’t interested in killing something for no good reason. Oh, sure, an owl or a hawk might take him later, but that’s what they do. I’m human, I have a choice.
Perhaps the mouse had a few good months left, months when the midnight sun kept things bright into the small hours of the morning and everything was abundant before the cold winds of September. Maybe he was gone the next morning. I don’t know. It just seemed like the right thing to do, let him be free.
The Beautiful Path 