Cleaning Up My Karma

I have frequent wildlife encounters in my kitchen. For years I have bought the mousetraps (of which there are none better) and had the unpleasant duty of adding tiny forlorn corpses to the household trash. This fall, during the first cold snap (known, no doubt, as the beginning of the "season" to the frequenters of my rodent resort), I invested in a live trap, hoping to shorten my sentence in hell. Now my morning chore takes me out into the fresh air, down the trail between the deer droppings in the back pasture, to perform an act of liberation. There is just this niggling suspicion--that each morning I am releasing the same mouse, who regards a long walk and a warm night in stir as a fair trade for sharp cheddar.