Dora grew up in the City. She’d seen rats, but she didn’t know from mice until she fell for a guy with back–to–the-land dreams and moved into a big farmhouse in upstate New York. Mice ruled but Dora could not bear to kill them with standard mousetraps. She put cardboard tubes from empty paper towel rolls along the baseboards in the kitchen. She closed off one end and waited. When a tube began to twitch, Dora jumped up and closed off the open end, then put the captured mouse in an empty spare aquarium. Before things got nasty in the aquarium, she drove the accumulated mice to the next county and released them into the woods. Dora’s children were embarrassed by the tubes but liked the aquarium. Her husband shook his head.

Years later, Dora had a bear problem in her apple orchard and called Fish, Wildlife and Parks. She took a long look at the big cigar-shaped trap used to capture the bear for relocation. It was a scaled-up version of her mousetrap, except for the aquarium part. “Could it be,” Dora mused, “that I am more clever than I think?”