Alackaday!

 For only the second time in my illustrious career of wordleing, I failed. And the word wasn't that hard. Then I saw something I hadn't seen in about 5 or so years, what looked like  a mouse scuttling across the floor near the kitchen door. The old saying goes that if you think you might have seen a mouse, you most likely have. So I broke out a new pack of Tomcat Snap Traps from several years ago. I slathered the death trap with peanut butter and placed it under the hutch, just in case my intuition was correct, and a rodent is present.

   I was in the other room no more than half an hour later, deciding which stack of paperwork I can trim down, when I heard the strangest sound, a kind of metallic-sounding clicking, quite rhythmic. I followed the trail of sound and saw that the mousetrap was now against the leg of the kitchen table, and a mouse had its front leg and apparently part of its jaw caught in the snaptrap. It had dragged the trap quite a distance, considering its small size, and but for being hung up by the table leg, I don't know where it may have ended up.  It was a dark brown, furry little animal, and it was in acute distress.

    I hate to see any animal in pain, but also hate even more having to deal with it. I took a large grocery bag, and somehow was able to enclose trap and mouse in it. The struggle was still quite intense so I just threw bag and contents out the front door. I looked out the window a while later, and the bag was still throbbing. I didn't look again until much later. By then, the bag had disappeared, maybe blown away by the wind, and the now motionless  carcass of the mouse was still in the trap. 

   So my last duty was to enclose my hand in a plastic newspaper bag, pick up the trap and dispose of the body in the trash can. Hey, somebody's got to do it.