Mrs Frisby walked slowly home, keeping to the edge of the woods, keeping out of sight.
Justin had instantly volunteered for the rear guard. Brutus was second, and behind him, eight more; there were fifty more waiting behind them. ‘Enough, enough,’ said Nicodemus. Isabella, in tears, had run forward. ‘I want to stay, please,’ she had pleaded, looking despairingly at Justin. ‘No children,’ said Nicodemus, and her mother led her away, still weeping.
Those ten, the ten who would remain, did not face certain death, nor certain capture. The exterminators (they presumed) would make noise, especially if they cleared away the rosebush. The rats would be alerted. When the men pumped gas (as expected) into the hole, the pump would also make a noise; the air below would move as the gas flowed in. When they felt that, the rats would scramble out of the back exit, past the sealed-off cave, emerge as noisily as possible in the blackberry bramble — indeed, show themselves — and dash off into the woods.
‘But won’t they block the rear exit?’
‘Or put a net over it?’
‘We’ll give them another exit to block,’ Arthur had said cryptically. ‘One that’s easier to find.’
‘Mother, why are you so quiet?’ asked Teresa. They were sitting down to dinner for the first time in their newly moved house. ‘You seem sad.’
‘I suppose I am,’ Mrs Frisby said. ‘Because the rats are all going away.’
‘But that’s no reason. It’s true, they moved our house, and that was nice of them. But we didn’t really know them.’
‘I was getting to know them pretty well.’
‘Where are they going?’ Cynthia asked.
‘To a new home, a long way away.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow morning.’
‘Will you go to see them off?’
‘I think I will.’
‘But why are they moving away?’ asked Timothy.
‘Because they want to,’ said Mrs Frisby. Someday soon she would tell them the whole story. But not that night.
The Doctor
The next morning Mr Fitzgibbon started the larger of his two tractors, the huge one he kept in the barn, the one that pulled the combine in the autumn harvest. With help from Paul and Billy he bolted the big bulldozer blade to the front of it, rumbled it up through the barnyard gate and stopped it near the rosebush.
‘We’ll wait until they come,’ he said, turning off the engine.
Mrs Frisby could not bear to watch; and yet, even more, she could not bear not to watch. She knew there was nothing to be gained by it, nothing she could do. Yet how could she stay at home when the ten rats, including Justin and Brutus, were waiting bravely underground? She could not.
She thought at first of her watch-hole in the corner post. Then she decided against it. Nearer to the rosebush, on the edge of the woods, stood a hickory tree, its scaly bark like a ladder inviting her to climb. Ten feet up on this tree a large branch jutted straight out. On this branch, up close to the trunk, she had a vantage point from which, herself unseen, she could look down on the rosebush and also see into the woods to a blackberry bramble where, though she had never been in it, she was sure the rats’ rear exit must be hidden. She settled down to wait. It was a chilly morning, with a damp breeze and a grey mist that blew by in patches.
Somewhere near the middle of the morning a square white truck came into the driveway. It went first to the house. A man in a white coverall uniform climbed out and knocked on the Fitzgibbons’ door; it was too far away for Mrs Frisby to hear the knock, or to hear what the man said when Mrs Fitzgibbon came out on the porch. But ten seconds later Billy ran from the house to the barn, where Mr Fitzgibbon was working. The man returned to the truck and waited, standing outside the open cab door. Through the windscreen she could see that two more men sat in the front seat, and that one of them wore horn-rimmed glasses.
Now Mr Fitzgibbon approached the truck, Billy dancing beside him, apparently in some excitement. There was a conference, none of which Mrs Frisby could hear, accompanied by gestures towards the rosebush and the waiting bulldozer. The man in white climbed back into the driver’s seat and drove the truck across the grass. He backed it up beside the bulldozer, stopping perhaps ten feet from the bush. Mrs Frisby stared at it. If there was anything printed on it, it must be on the other side, away from her. Then the three men climbed out, and she could hear what they said.
‘It’s a big one, all right,’ said one of the men. ‘And look at those thorns. It’s hard to see how even a rat could get in there.’
The man in the horn-rims walked around the edge of the bush, examining it closely. He bent over.
‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘There’s the entrance hole, very neatly hidden. And look behind it — a path leading in.’
He turned to Mr Fitzgibbon, who had walked up with Billy.
‘You were right. You’ll need to bulldoze it. It would take us all day to hack our way in there. But cut it off just at the surface if you can. If you dig too deep and open the hole, they’ll get away.’
He added: ‘You’d better tell the boy to keep back. We’ll be using cyanide, and it’s dangerous.’
Billy, after some argument, was dispatched to the back porch, where Mrs Fitzgibbon was also watching.
One of the men had walked around to the far side of the bush, the side near Mrs Frisby’s tree.
‘Doc,’ he called, ‘here’s another entrance in the bush, and there’s a hole just inside it.’
‘Doc’ was the man in the horn-rims. He was a doctor, Mrs Frisby thought; Doctor Somebody. He was in charge.
‘Can you get at it?’ he asked.
‘Not very well. Too many thorns.’
The man who was a doctor walked around and looked at it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Anyway, that would be the escape hatch. We’ll find the main hole nearer the middle of the bush.’
He turned to Mr Fitzgibbon, who had mounted the tractor. ‘Okay,’ said the doctor. ‘Can you push it that way — away from the shed?’
Mr Fitzgibbon nodded, and the motor started with a roar. He pulled a lever and flexed the heavy steel blade up and down, bringing the bottom edge to rest just even with the ground. The blade was fully eight feet across. He pulled another lever; the wheels, with tyres as tall as windows, dug in and the blade scraped forward.
The bush fought back, then yielded angrily, snapping and crackling before the inexorable thrust of steel. A single sweep, and a third of it lay, a writhing heap of thorns, in a pile twenty feet away. The ground trembled under the wheels, and Mrs Frisby thought of the ten rats huddled below. Supposing the weight collapsed the earth, caved in the storage room and trapped them? Another sweep, and a third. Only a thorny stubble now stood where the bush had been. On the porch Mrs Fitzgibbon covered her eyes with her hands, and Billy cheered in excitement,
Plainly exposed were two holes — simple, round rat holes. There was no trace of the small mound nor the elegant arched entrance. Arthur had done his work thoroughly. Mrs Frisby wondered for a moment at the second hole. Then she remembered his saying: ‘We’ll give them another rear exit to block.’ Of course! They had dug another hole, most likely, she thought, just a dummy, leading nowhere.
The men in the white suits went into action. The back doors of the truck were opened and a long, flexible pipe unrolled. It looked like a fire hose, except that at the end, instead of a nozzle, there was a round plunger like a big rubber ball cut in half. One of the men donned a mask with a glass visor and a tube that ran to a pack on his back. A gas mask.
The masked man pulled the hose over to the centre rat hole and pressed the plunger over it, covering it completely.
From the back of the truck the other two took a large box made of wood and wire, almost a yard wide, and placed it over the second hole. It was a cage, but half of its bottom was a trapdoor, neatly mounted on hinges. This they raised, placing the open part directly over the opening in the earth. Then they backed away, one of them holding a trip cord which
would close the trapdoor after the rats were inside.
‘All set?’ The doctor called to the man in the mask.
The mask nodded.
‘Keep back, now,’ said the doctor to Mr Fitzgibbon, who had left his tractor to watch. He walked to the truck, reached inside, and turned a switch. Mrs Frisby heard the soft throb of a pump.
Now.
She turned and watched the blackberry bramble in the woods. Would they hear the pump? Where were they? Oh, let them come out. Almost a minute passed. The men in white watched the trap. Nothing moved.
Then she saw it. Behind the bramble, half-hidden by a swirl of mist, a grey-brown shape, a rat, shaking earth from his ears. Another. Then three more. They huddled in silence, waiting. More. How many? Ten? Seven. Only seven. Where were the other three? Still they waited.
Then, as if by agreement, they stopped waiting. They ran. All seven of them, not back into the woods to safety, but out of the woods, towards the stubble of the rosebush, towards the men. At the edge of the bush, they stopped as if in confusion, ran to the left, ran to the right, then fled back into the woods again. Now they were out of sight of the men, but not of Mrs Frisby. Instantly they regrouped behind the blackberry bramble and charged out again — but this time in smaller numbers: first two, then three, then two again. She saw what they were up to. They were not in the least confused; they were making seven rats look like twenty rats, or forty, a steady stream of them. In the mist, in the hectic turning, running, turning, hiding, she could not tell whether or not she recognized any of them.
The men shouted:
‘Look at that!’
‘A pack of them!’
‘How did they get out?’
‘Get the nets!’
The doctor turned off the pump; the man with the hose pulled off his mask. As a new wave of rats danced along the edge of the clearing all three men ran to the truck and from it pulled long-handled nets.
But Mrs Frisby, up on her branch, was staring at the blackberry bush again. She saw something that all of the others, including the rats, did not see. An eighth rat had come out. He emerged running, but then he stumbled; he got up and ran again, this time more slowly, circling vaguely to the right. He did not seem to know where he was going. He reached a sparse thicket of saplings almost out of her sight, and there, abruptly, he fell over on his side and lay still.
Meanwhile all three men, holding their nets low, ran across the stubble towards the parade of rats. But as they approached the parade it vanished; the rats, their purpose accomplished, melted into the misty woods, and this time they did not reappear. Mrs Frisby watched them as they loped away swiftly in single file and disappeared from her view, back into the deep forest and up the mountainside. The rear guard was gone, bound for Thorn Valley.
But the eighth rat still lay unmoving among the saplings. And two had never come out at all.
‘They’re gone,’ said the man who had worn the mask. ‘They fooled us.’
‘What happened?’ asked Mr Fitzgibbon, standing near the truck.
‘Simple enough,’ said the doctor. ‘They had two escape holes, and they used the other one.’ He walked back to the blackberry bramble and bent down, kicking the branches aside with his foot. ‘Here it is,’ he said. ‘Quite a long tunnel. One of the longest I’ve seen.’
To the other two men he said: ‘Get the pick and the shovels.’
For half an hour they dug, laying open a narrow trench along the tunnel. From her angle of view in the tree, Mrs Frisby could see only the top of this trench, and not down into the bottom. Still she watched, saying to herself, perhaps, after all, there were only eight, maybe they decided that eight would be enough.
Then one of the shovels broke through into air; they had come to the rats’ storage room.
‘There’s two of them,’ said one of the men, and her heart sank. Who were they? She wanted to run and look, but she did not dare.
‘Careful,’ said the doctor. ‘There may still be some gas in there. Let the wind blow it out.’
‘Phew,’ said one of the men. ‘That’s not gas, that’s garbage.’
‘Open it up a little more,’ said the doctor.
One of the men wielded his shovel for another minute, and then the doctor peered in.
‘Garbage,’ he said. ‘Last night’s dinner. Garbage and two dead rats.’ Mrs Frisby thought: He sounds disappointed.
‘Only two?’ said Mr Fitzgibbon.
‘Yes. It’s easy to see what happened. In a hole this size there would have been a couple of dozen at least. But these two must have been up at the front, near the tunnel. They got a whiff of the gas, and it killed them. But before they died, they must have warned the others. So the rest ran out.’
‘Warned them?’ said Mr Fitzgibbon. ‘Could they do that?’
‘Yes,’ said the doctor. ‘They’re intelligent animals. ‘Some can do a great deal more than that.’ But he did not elaborate; instead he turned to one of the men. ‘We might as well take these two back with us.’
From the truck the man produced a white paper sack and a pair of plastic gloves. He pulled the gloves on, reached into the hole and placed the two dead rats into the sack. He did this with his back to Mrs Frisby, so that she never got even a glimpse of them.
‘All right,’ said the doctor. ‘Let’s close it up.’ They shovelled the earth back into the trench and returned to the truck.
‘You’ll let me know if they have rabies?’ said Mr Fitzgibbon.
‘Rabies?’ said the doctor. ‘Yes, of course. But I doubt it. They look perfectly healthy.’
Perfectly healthy, thought Mrs Frisby sadly, except for being dead. She looked into the woods, over towards the saplings where the other rat lay. Was he, too, now dead? To her surprise, she saw that he was moving. Or was he? In the mist it was hard to tell. But something had moved.
After the truck had left Mr Fitzgibbon stood looking at the ruin of the rosebush. He seemed vaguely puzzled and disappointed; he must be wondering, she thought, whether it had been worth it, just to exterminate two rats. He had no way of knowing, of course, that all the rest were also gone and would not return, that his grain loft was safe. In a moment he turned and walked to the house.
As soon as he was safely gone Mrs Frisby scurried down from her tree and into the woods. On the ground she could no longer see the rat or the thicket where he lay, but she knew the direction, and she ran. Around a stump, over a mound of leaves, past a cedar tree — there were the saplings, and there lay the rat, still on his side.
It was Brutus. Beside him, futilely trying to move him, stood Mr Ages.
She reached him, breathless from her run.
‘Is he dead?’
‘No. He’s unconscious, but he’s alive and breathing. I think he’ll revive if I can just get him to swallow this.’ Mr Ages indicated a small corked bottle, no bigger than a thimble, on the ground beside them.
‘What is it?’
‘An antidote for the poison. We thought this might happen, so we got it ready last night. He got just a little of the gas, made it this far, and then collapsed. Help me lift his head.’
Mr Ages had been unable to lift Brutus’s head and the bottle at the same time. Now, with Mrs Frisby’s help, he forced open Brutus’s mouth and poured in just a few drops of the smokey liquid the bottle contained. In a few seconds Brutus made a gulping noise, swallowed hard, and spoke.
‘It’s dark,’ he said. ‘I can’t see.
‘Open your eyes,’ said Mr Ages.
Brutus opened them and looked around.
‘I’m out,’ he said. ‘How did I get here?’
‘Don’t you remember?’
‘No. Wait. Yes. I was in the hole. I smelled gas, an awful, choking, sweet smell. I tried to run, but I stumbled over somebody lying on the floor, and I fell down. I must have breathed some of the gas. I couldn’t get up.’
‘And then?’
‘I heard the others running past me. I couldn’t see them. It was darker than
night. Then one of them ran into me, and stopped. He pulled me up, and I tried to run again. But I was too dizzy. I kept falling. The other one helped me up again, and I went a few steps more. He kept pulling me, and then pushing, and somehow, finally, I got to the end of the tunnel. I saw daylight, and the air smelled better. But there was nobody else there; I thought the others must have left. So I ran a little farther, and that’s all I remember.’
Mrs Frisby said: ‘What about the one who helped you?’
‘I don’t know who it was. I couldn’t see, and he didn’t speak at all. I suppose he was trying to hold his breath.
‘When we got near the end, and I could see daylight, he gave me one last shove towards it, and then he turned back.’
‘He went back?’
‘Yes. You see, there was still one rat back in there — the one I stumbled over. I think he went back to help that one.’
‘Whoever he was,’ said Mrs Frisby, ‘he never came out. He died in there.’
‘Whoever he was,’ said Mr Ages, ‘he was brave.’
Epilogue
A few days later, early in the morning, the plough came through the garden. Mrs Frisby heard the chug of the tractor and the soft scrape of the steel against the earth. She watched from just inside her front door, fearfully at first, but then with growing confidence. The owl and the rats had calculated wisely, and the nearest furrow was more than two feet from her house.
Behind the plough, in the moist and shining soil, the rudely upturned red-brown earthworms writhed in a frenzy to rebury themselves; hopping along each furrow a flock of spring robins tried to catch them before they slid from sight. And when the ploughing was done and the worms had all disappeared, either eaten or safely underground, Mr Fitzgibbon came back with the harrow, breaking down the furrows, and turned them all up again. It was a good day for the robins.
Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (Puffin Modern Classics) Page 16