Here is the epilogue.

I have killed a lot of animals in that trap. I’ve also just plain shot a lot of “pests”, but it gets harder rather than easier with time. Killing the porcupine was upsetting and I regret it. It has made me rethink a lot of things.

One concrete outcome involves three blind mice. I found them, in their nest, in an empty bee hive I had in my bee yard. The hive died in the late winter or early spring. I was too lazy to carry all the pieces back up to the barn, so I left it in place. The equipment is fine sitting outside… it might be better to store it that way… but in doing so you put out a vacancy sign for mice.

The yard is surrounded by an electric fence that the mice can get through but predators can’t. The other hives in the yard offer more protection. The bee boxes are big, and clean, and water tight. The bees seal every little gap with propolis. All the mother mice has to do is climb in, chew through five or six frames of wax to make a space for a big round nest, and have her babies. Finding an empty hive in a bee yard is a mouse bonanza.

So I often find mice in bee equipment. I won’t mince words. I kill the mice, sometimes not nicely. A few days before the porcupine, I found a nest in a hive body. I picked up the nest full of blind baby mice and threw it in the grass. I didn’t cackle and say, “go feed the crows” but I might as well have.

Two or three days later, I was in the bee yard again. I checked the equipment, and, as I kind of suspected, there was mother mouse and her three, now larger, babies, and a nest that was to mouse nests what a “limper spare” is to a regular tire.

Mommy mouse fucking splits when you open the hive. There is no doubt she is going to live to have another litter. There’s not a moment of hesitation when the man is in the yard. I threw the babies, no longer blind, back in the grass. I didn’t yell, “I said ‘feed the crows’” but maybe I should have. Then I moved some equipment back to the barn and rearranged what was there to obliterate the Mouse Hotel.

You mention your father’s passing and the sensitivity it brings to all death. My mother’s death anniversary just passed. It’s on the same day as my birthday, so when people say “Happy Birthday” I think of my mom because it is the day I started life with her and the day my life with her ended.

I have a friend who just died from esophageal cancer. His older brother, who was also a friend, died about two years ago from the same illness. I went to dinner with my friend’s widow and two teenage children. They were doing very well but it was impossibly sad. His death is a huge loss.

Somewhere in the middle of all these events I killed the porcupine. The realization that it was a mistake started in my brain and metastasized to my heart over a couple of days, prompting me to write the post.

While I was writing the Medium article, I checked the bees. I found Mommy Mouse and her three, now adolescent, children in the same, less-perfect-for-mice hive. “OK,” I said, “You win.”

I don’t want them to chew more frames, so I moved the boxes with frames to the barn, but I used a small array of equipment — — a bottom board and some slatted racks with a outer cover — to make a mouse hotel. She didn’t hang around to watch my construction, but two of her babies did. When it was completed I picked them up and fed them into the opening. When I was carrying some of the equipment up to the barn, one of the siblings popped out, so I put down the hive, took out the frame it was on and walked it back to the bee yard. The book end to me in my green hat walking the dead porcupine to the swamp is me in my bee suit carrying a frame with a young mouse on it back to the bee yard.

Young mice are very cute. Their heads and feet are big and their fur is like velvet. It was very calm on the frame, looking over the edge like a dog with its head out of the window of a car. The walk was no more than sixty yards, but in that short span I was smitten. I thought, “Maybe I should keep it as a pet.” I kept mice as pets when I was a kid.

I guessed that the best thing to do was let the mouse be a mouse. I put the frame up to the entrance and it walked right in to find its siblings.