Truth About Rats and Dogs

by Jacqueline Pearce

  Mom turned to greet them—a little too eagerly, I thought.

  “No one listens to me in this house,” I grumbled into my soup. At least I could complain at the animal club meeting next week. Erika and the others would understand.

  “Oh, and Conner,” Mom said, turning back to me and lowering her voice, “don’t say anything about the rat to anyone—especially your grandmother.”

  School

  “Green light for the shelter,” a girl’s voice announced close behind me as the grade sixes filed into the classroom on Monday morning. I glanced back as Erika Leveson and Mercedes Sharma squeezed past me. Their eyes met mine, and we exchanged grins. Green light meant the arrangements had been made for the club to visit the animal shelter for our Wednesday meeting.

  Perfect. Doing something with animals would be way better than just talking about them. True, we did spend time with Daisy, the guinea pig in Mrs. Ferguson’s class, but she was already well looked after by twenty-five grade two kids.

  Since we’d formed the animal club back in November, we’d met every Wednesday after school. Mrs. Ferguson had volunteered to be our sponsor because she liked animals and thought kids could learn from them. The grade twos took turns feeding and taking care of Daisy every day, but on Wednesdays the animal club members helped change the bedding and clip Daisy’s toenails if they needed it. We’d also made Daisy a larger habitat out of a big box with places for her to explore and hide. It was more interesting for her than her small cage.

  Besides helping with Daisy, the club also talked about animal issues and worked on projects. In December we’d had a big Remember the Animals campaign and collected old blankets, towels, animal toys and stuff that we donated to the local animal shelter. We’d also invited guest speakers to come and talk to us. Our first guest speaker had been Erika’s mom, who told us about her job as a vet. She’d also taken us on our first trip to the animal shelter. But that visit had just been a tour. This time we were actually going to help out.

  Everyone settled into their seats and grew quiet as Miss Chien, our teacher, greeted the class and walked to the front of the room.

  “Please take out your math books,” she said.

  There was a low rumble as people reluctantly fumbled the fat textbooks out of their desks and set them on top, flipping the pages open to last week’s work. Miss Chien wheeled out the overhead projector. “Okay, you know the drill. Pass your workbook to the person to your right, and we’ll check the answers to last week’s work.” Miss Chien has a soft voice, which somehow manages to ring out across the room.

  I flipped open my workbook and handed it to Jake, who sat to my right. Then I took the workbook from the girl on my left. My eyes went to the answers on the screen pulled down over the blackboard, then down to the page in front of me. I made the first tick with my pencil.

  Would we get to walk the dogs, I wondered. Tick. It would be so cool if we got to walk the dogs. Tick.

  “Conner.” It was Miss Chien. Had she called me more than once? “Brianna’s mark, please.”

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry.” There were a few snickers as I quickly tallied up the marks on the page in front of me.

  “Nine out of ten,” I read out.

  Miss Chien noted the mark in her record book and went on to the next person. I glanced at Jake. Had he already called out my mark?

  Jake caught me looking, raised one eyebrow and tilted my workbook so I could see where he’d penciled in five out of ten. Not so good. I slumped back in my seat and waited for the rest of the marks to be read out.

  Something knocked my foot, and I looked up as Jake’s left leg withdrew under his seat.

  “Boring,” Jake mouthed when he’d caught my eye.

  I nodded.

  “Hand the books back now,” Miss Chien was saying,

  “and we’ll go over the questions you had trouble with.”

  There were several moments of shuffling as workbooks were returned. Before I could turn and take my book from Jake, he’d tossed it onto my desktop.

  “Thanks a lot,” I said.

  I picked up the book and looked at the five X marks, sighed, then scanned the textbook until I found the first problem I’d gotten wrong. If Alice knit a sweater out of two balls of wool, and each ball of wool was twenty-two meters long, how many centimeters of wool did Alice use? I knew the problem was simple, but I couldn’t get my mind around it. I tried to think of the numbers, but instead I kept picturing a ball of red wool lying on a carpet in a cozy living room. A fluffy black and white kitten leaped out from behind a chair and batted the ball of wool. The wool rolled across the carpet, and the kitten scampered after it. Maybe there’d be kittens at the animal shelter.

  No, probably not yet. Kittens were usually born in the spring, and that was a couple of months away yet.

  “Conner, what about you?”

  Startled, I looked up at Miss Chien.

  “Are there any problems you’d like to go over?” Miss Chien asked.

  I shook my head quickly and looked down at my desk.The eyes of the whole class were on me, making me wish I could disappear. If I needed to ask Miss Chien for help, I’d rather wait until after school than ask in front of the whole class.

  A hand went up on the other side of the room, and

  Miss Chien turned.

  “Can you go over question four?” Mercedes asked. I shot her a grateful look. It was the wool question. I tried to concentrate on Miss Chien’s words as she went over the problem step by step, writing out the numbers and equation on the blackboard. Finally, it made sense. But if they meant twenty-two multiplied by two multiplied by a hundred, why didn’t they just say so? Who cared about a non-existent sweater and an imaginary ball of wool? Now, if the textbook writers had asked us to consider dogs . . .

  If Conner walked his dog two blocks, and each block was twenty-two meters long, how many centimeters did Conner and his dog walk? Four thousand, four hundred centimeters. How long would that take with the dog stopping to sniff every few centimeters?

  Reluctantly, I pulled my attention back to the classroom again. The rest of the day and two more whole days to go until the animal club meeting.

  Disappointment

  Wednesday afternoon finally arrived. The air was cold and the gray sky seemed close—as if snow might be on the way.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come with us?” I said to Jake as we headed out of the school. Jake had his backpack slung over one shoulder and a basketball tucked under his other arm.

  He shook his head. “Nah. Too many girls.”

  “If you came, there wouldn’t be,” I pointed out.

  Jake shrugged and dropped his backpack at the edge of the school basketball court. He bounced the ball.

  “Want to shoot a few hoops?” he asked.

  “I don’t have time.” I could see Erika and Mercedes waving from Erika’s dad’s blue minivan. I hesitated beside the court, anxious to get going, but feeling things weren’t quite right with Jake. I wished he could see how great the animal club was, but he never wanted to talk about it. He was a good friend to joke around with, but anything more serious than bike stuff and sports didn’t seem to interest him.

  “See ya later,” I finally said.

  I hurried to catch up to Erika and Mercedes. Annie Chang was there too, looking a bit impatient, her hands stuck deep in the pockets of her blue jacket. Mercedes was pulling on a pair of bright multicolored gloves. They matched the beads strung on strands of her long black hair, and her coat was bright red. I don’t normally notice what girls are wearing, but Mercedes always stands out. Next to her, Annie and Erika looked kind of colorless. But Erika’s smile was bright as I walked up to them.

  We piled into the van, the three girls talking and giggling. The beads in Mercedes’ hair clicked as she climbed into the backseat. I sat down quietly in the seat behind Mr. Leveson, feeling out of place. Maybe Jake had been right about there being too many girls. I wished Sean, the other guy in the club, had shown
up today. Once we started driving, though, the girls calmed down.

  “I wonder if we’ll get to walk the dogs,” Erika said from the seat beside me.

  “I hope so,” I told her.

  I wondered if they ever got any Jack Russells at the shelter. It had been four days since the first rat sighting in our yard, and Dad hadn’t caught anything in the trap he’d put out. I’d seen more droppings on the garbage can lid too, so the rat was still around.

  “I asked my mom about getting a dog again,” I said.

  “Really?” Mercedes chimed in from the backseat.

  She and Annie stopped their conversation and leaned forward.

  “What did she say?” Erika asked.

  “No, as usual,” I admitted, not able to keep the disappointment out of my voice.

  The girls made sympathetic noises.

  “But we do have one pet we weren’t expecting,” I said, trying to make a joke of it.

  “Really?” said Erika.

  “What?” Mercedes asked eagerly.

  “A rat.” Mom had told me not to talk about it, but I figured it was okay to tell the animal club.

  “Ooo!” Annie said, wrinkling her nose. “You mean a real rat?”

  “Yeah. I mean an uninvited one,” I clarified.

  I told them the story of what had happened on Saturday. They laughed at my description of Mom and the broom, but agreed that the right kind of dog might be good for keeping unwanted rats away.

  “What about a cat?” Mercedes suggested. “Do you think they’d let you get a cat?”

  “No, they don’t want any pets,” I said heavily. “Besides, even if they let me get a cat, I’d still be wishing I had a dog.”

  Erika smiled sympathetically.

  “Well, you can visit my dogs any time you want,” she said. Her eyes locked on mine for a moment.

  “And you’ll see plenty of dogs today at the shelter,”

  Mercedes added.

  Under her red coat, Mercedes was wearing a multicolored shirt that she called her “lucky shirt.” I wondered if maybe visiting the shelter meant as much to her as it did to me. She wasn’t allowed to have pets either, but not because her parents didn’t want any. Her apartment building didn’t allow them.

  The van pulled into the shelter’s parking lot.

  Mr. Leveson walked into the reception area with us and waited until a shelter worker came out to greet us. The woman, who was short and wide, introduced herself as Mini.

  “I’ll be back to pick you up around five o’clock,” Erika’s dad told us before turning to leave.

  Mini looked us over. Her serious expression and the short military cut of her red hair made her appear severe and a bit intimidating.

  But then she grinned and said, “All right. You’re anxious to get to work, I can see.”

  We smiled back at her.

  “Come on,” she said, turning and gesturing for us to follow.

  We walked past the reception desk, and Mini pushed open a door that led to the dog kennels. When the barking hit my ears, I felt a prickle of anticipation. A whole row of dogs in kennels was waiting, eager for attention. Would Mini assign each of us to a dog or would we get to pick our own dogs?

  We stopped in the hallway on the other side of the door, and Mini pointed to the left.

  “The dog kennels are down that way,” she said.

  “We know,” Mercedes said. “We’ve been on a tour.”

  “Oh good, so you know your way around.” Mini looked serious, but her eyes were smiling. “Then you know that the cat room and the small-animal room are down this way?” She waved a hand to the right.

  We nodded.

  “You can hang your coats here,” she said, pointing to a row of hooks on the wall.

  I took off my jacket and prepared to move toward the dog kennels.

  “We’re really glad you’re here to help today,” Mini said as she started walking in the opposite direction, obviously expecting us to follow.

  I hesitated, meeting Erika’s eyes. She shrugged and motioned with her head that we should follow Mini.

  Reluctantly, I turned away from the kennels.

  “We had a big seizure of small animals earlier this week. Mice, rats, gerbils, a rabbit. You name it. I think the pet store was only keeping the rats and mice alive to feed them to some big expensive snakes.”

  “That’s awful,” Erika said.

  “Snakes need to eat too,” Mini pointed out. “But you can’t be cruel to the animals just because they’re going to become snake food. The conditions they were living in were not good, and being fed alive to snakes is not a humane way to die.” I looked at her, feeling confused.

  “Don’t we get to walk the dogs?” Mercedes asked.

  Mini stopped in front of a glass-windowed door and turned back to us.

  “Our regular volunteers have already walked the dogs today,” she said. “But we sure need some help with these guys.”

  She pushed open the door. Erika was right behind Mini, and I heard her gasp. When we’d come for our tour, the small-animal room had been almost empty. Now, as I came up behind Erika, I could see that the room beyond the door was piled almost to the ceiling with cages. Most of the cages were wire, but some had glass or Plexiglass sides like terrariums. As I followed Mini into the room, I saw that the cages held mice, rats and assorted other small animals. My heart sank.

  Rats. Instead of spending an afternoon with dogs, I was going to be spending it with a room full of dirty creepy rodents.

  A scuffling sound in a cage beside me caught my attention, and I turned to look into the bead-like black eyes of a brown and white rat. It stood on its back legs, its forepaws held up over its chest, its nose twitching. I could see its long yellow teeth. In the next cage, two white rats clutched the bars of their cage with pink paws like little human hands. I repressed a shiver.

  Someone slapped me on the back, and I jumped.

  “I didn’t like them at first either,” Mini said with a laugh, her voice loud in the small room. “They made me nervous. Those mice move so quickly.” She gestured to a cage in which two mice were running together on a squeaking wheel. A third mouse had just scampered up to the roof of its cage and hung there upside down.

  “And those tails…” she added with a fake shudder.

  I bent to peer into a cage where several rats slept, one on top of the other, their long, bare, scaly tails entwined.

  “I always thought those tails were creepy,” Mini said.

  “I was actually kind of scared of the rats,” she admitted, “but I’m starting to find them quite lovely.”

  Lovely? It wasn’t the word I would have chosen. But, I had to admit, they weren’t as scary as I’d imagined when I discovered we had one in our yard. They were even kind of interesting.

  “You know the saying ‘dirty rat’?” Mini went on. “Well, it’s not true. Rats are much cleaner than people realize.” She pointed to a rat that was licking its paws and rubbing them over its fur. “Like little cats.”

  “What’s this one?” Mercedes asked. The animal she pointed to looked something like a brown rat, but its body was rounder and its nose wasn’t pointy. I couldn’t see if it had a tail.

  “That’s a degu,” Mini said. “They’re originally from South America—the Andes I think. Whoever first brought them to North America thought they’d make good pets, but they don’t. I’m sure they’d rather be back in their mountain burrows. This one bites, so be careful.”

  “What do you need us to do?” Erika asked, stepping forward.

  “I need you to hold the animals while I clean their cages.” Mini gestured to the soggy shredded newspaper at the bottom of one of the cages.

  Mini opened the top of the cage beside me and reached inside. She withdrew her hands, gripping the brown and white rat around its middle.

  “Here,” she said, plunking the rat down on my chest. “You hold this one. I call him Oscar.” I felt a flash of panic. I didn’t want the rat on m
e. Despite my fear, my hands automatically rose to stop him from falling off. At the same time, I could feel his tiny claws digging through the fabric of my shirt, getting a grip of his own. Beneath my hands, his fur was soft, but a little coarse. His body felt warm, and I could feel his heart beating. I relaxed slightly.

  Then the rat started climbing toward my head, and I felt another stab of panic. Horror movie images of vicious killer rats leapt into my mind. I looked to Erika for help, but Mini was loading a rat from a second cage into her arms.

  “Don’t worry. They’re very friendly,” Mini said, as if guessing my thoughts. “They’re just curious. Their eyesight isn’t so good, but their sense of smell is, so they’re going to want to sniff you.”

  I pulled my rat down where I could get a better look at him. His nose and whiskers were twitching like crazy. His face was grayish brown, his nose slightly pink. I noticed for the first time that his whiskers were kinked—as if he’d stuck a paw in a light socket and gotten zapped. I looked over at the rat Erika was holding.

  Its whiskers were completely straight. I turned back to Oscar and noticed that his ears stuck out a bit at the sides of his head, too. Perhaps he was a bit of a rat oddball. He seemed to be looking right into my eyes. His twitching nose reached up.

  “Hi, Oscar,” I said, feeling a bit foolish. I glanced up to see if the others had noticed I’d started talking to a rat, but they were all busy with rats of their own. Mercedes seemed to be having a genuine conversation with hers.

  “Oh, hold still!” Annie told her rat as it tried to escape her grasp. It popped out of her hands for a moment, like a slippery bar of soap. Annie squeaked and caught it again.

  Mini was grinning as she pulled the wad of disintegrated newspaper out of the first cage—careful to lift it by its dry corners—and stuffed it into a large black garbage bag. She did the same for the second cage.

  “We change the food and water every day,” she explained, “and everything else—lock, stock and barrel— three times a week. We scrub the bottoms of the cages, wash the food and water dishes, put in clean newspaper and fresh wood shavings.”