By moonrise all was quiet. In the hutch the two little mice lay fast asleep, one under each of Roland’s huge lop ears which covered them like the most luxurious velvety white blankets.
Magnus had returned to the potting shed, and the noise of eating had resumed. When the man entered it the following morning carrying his little bucket, he stopped in the doorway and his mouth fell open. On the shelf was the brown paper bag that had contained quite a quantity of rabbit food. It was empty. Then he noticed the trap. He picked it up and saw upon the rusty metal of the spring arm the bright marks of Magnus’s mighty teeth.
‘Rats!’ he said out loud. ‘Must be. A plague of them, I should think,’ and he hurried back across the lawn to telephone the ratcatcher.
NINE
Jim the Rat
The ratcatcher was a well-known figure in the cottages and farms of the village and of the neighbourhood. He was one of those people who seem always to have been around. He dealt also with mice of course, and moles, and anything else that he considered to be vermin, but his chief interest was revealed in his name.
Nobody, not even the smallest children, called him Mr Johnson. To everyone, he was Jim to his face. But behind his back, he was always known as Jim the Rat.
If you remember what the most famous of all ratcatchers looked like, Jim the Rat was the exact opposite. The Pied Piper of Hamelin was ‘tall and thin, with sharp blue eyes, each like a pin, and light loose hair’. Jim the Rat was short and fat, his eyes were the colour of the bottom of a duck pond and he was bald.
When he arrived later that morning in a noisy old van, Magnus was asleep inside an old gumboot in which he had passed the night. (The potting shed contained a number of old gumboots, all right-footed. The cottager always seemed to get holes in his left boots but he kept the old rights, hoping his luck would change.)
At the sound of human voices Magnus awoke. He debated whether to shout ‘Nasty!’ or ‘Bite you!’ but something told him to remain silent.
‘I should say there was at least a couple of pounds of rabbit food left yesterday,’ the cottager was saying as the two men came into the shed. ‘And it’s all gone this morning, Jim, every scrap of it. Take an army of rats to eat that lot so quick – place must be running with them.’
Jim the Rat took a large red white-spotted handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose, very carefully.
The Pied Piper’s nose, one feels sure, was long and thin and pointed. Jim the Rat’s was short and squashy, with big nostrils pointing straight ahead, like a pig’s. He lowered it now to the shelf and sniffed, deeply.
‘No rats here,’ he said.
‘How can you tell?’
‘Can’t smell ’em.’
‘What can you smell then?’
‘Mice.’
‘You can tell the difference then?’
‘Tell ’em all apart – rat, mouse, vole, shrew. Tell the different sorts of mice apart – house-mouse, field-mouse, harvest-mouse. Good nose I’ve got.’
‘Well, what in the world’s been eating my rabbit mixture then?’
‘House-mouse.’
‘Oh, come on, Jim! Polish off two pounds of the stuff in twenty-four hours? And have a look at this trap. See these toothmarks?’
Jim the Rat picked up the trap and put it to his nose. ‘House-mouse,’ he said again. He looked at the empty brown paper bag, noticing how it was torn open. He looked under the shelf, at a litter of old seed boxes and sacks and four right-footed gumboots, one lying on its side. His piggy nostrils flared.
‘Puzzle,’ said Jim the Rat. ‘You’ll have to get some more food for the old rabbit then?’ he said.
‘That’s right. Going down the shop shortly.’
‘Well, put it somewhere else. Not in here. Put it in a tin, a good strong tin. And another thing. Don’t come in here at all for a few days, all right? Anything you need from this shed, take it out now, can you manage that?’
‘What are you up to then, Jim? Going to poison ’em?’
‘No, but keep the cat away. Shut the door.’
‘That reminds me,’ said the cottager. ‘That blasted dog next door, took the end of our Tibby’s tail off. It’s lying there on the other side of the fence.’
Jim the Rat’s duck-pond eyes narrowed, and he looked again at the toothmarks on the trap. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well, I expect you’ll be wanting to get off down the shop. Don’t bother waiting about for me, I’ll be a while yet. You just keep this door shut and I’ll look in tomorrow, all right?’
Jim the Rat waited until the cottager had mounted his bicycle and pedalled away down the lane, and then he fetched a trap from his van. No ordinary trap was this, but the strongest catch’em-alive contraption which he owned. It was the size of a large apple-box and made of metal and heavy-gauge criss-crossed wire. He used it along the river banks, to catch coypu and mink that had gone wild. He put it on the potting shed shelf. To bait it he normally used a piece of meat, for mink, and for coypu some root vegetable such as carrot or beetroot.
‘Something special for you though, I think, my friend,’ said Jim the Rat, and he took from his pocket what was to have been his mid-morning snack, a Mars Bar. He unwrapped it, placed it carefully within and set the trap. He went out quietly and shut the door.
‘I wonder,’ said Jim the Rat out loud, as he drove his noisy old van away down the lane, ‘I wonder,’ and his piggy eyes gleamed.
All his rat-catching life he had been fascinated by a legend, a legend not perhaps as well known as that of the Loch Ness Monster or the Abominable Snowman, but to him, because of his profession, more interesting. It was the legend of the King Rat.
Jim the Rat had read everything he could lay his hands on about this creature of folk lore, stories from many different lands and of many different times. All of them told of one thing in common. In any gathering of rats, especially a large gathering such as might occur in war or plague, or in sewers, or in deserted places whence humans had fled before some catastrophe, there would always be one mighty leader, the King Rat. A giant he was, a huge brute before whom cats would quail and dogs run yelping. Some of the tales told of humans attacked by an army of squeaking, chattering rats, the King at their head. Often this was at night, where a foolhardy man might perhaps have been exploring a cellar, in a ruined town. By the light he carried, a flaring torch maybe, he would suddenly see, even before a sound was heard, a thousand glistening eyes in the darkness and before them a single pair far larger than the rest. If he lived to tell the tale, that is.
And just as many people believe in the Loch Ness Monster or the Great Sea Serpent or Bigfoot, so Jim Johnson believed in the existence of King Rats. He had no proof, it is true. He had killed some big old rats in his time, but they were just big old rats. But he was always on the lookout for something unusual as he went about his business. And this morning he had found it!
It was not just the amount of food that had gone, not just the toothmarks on the trap. His sharp eyes had seen muddy footmarks on the paper sacks underneath the potting-shed shelf. They were very large footmarks, bigger than the average rat’s, as big perhaps as that sole survivor of the Piper’s music, he who, ‘stout as Julius Caesar’, had swum the river to carry the news home.
There was no King Rat in that potting shed but there was something very big, something which his good nose told him of, unmistakably.
‘I wonder,’ said Jim the Rat softly. ‘Could it be a King Mouse?’
Magnus, meantime, had drifted back to sleep. He had listened to the men’s voices, and to various noises ending in the shutting of the door. It passed through his mind, a mind made more than usually slow by the amount of food he had eaten, that he was now a prisoner, but he was warm and comfortable in the old gumboot and he could always bite his way out of the shed when he wanted to.
He woke again when his ears told him of noise and his nose of a particularly delicious smell. He climbed out of the boot and up on to the shelf, and his eyes showed him a scene of revel
ry.
Half a dozen mice (the cottager had not set the trap that had held Marcus Aurelius for no reason) were nibbling eagerly at the dark brown object from which the lovely smell came. They were squeaking with excitement and joy, and at first they did not notice Magnus. Then one suddenly said, ‘Look out, boys! Rat coming!’ and they all stopped eating and stared.
‘Not rat,’ said Magnus in a rather hurt voice.
‘What are you then?’ said another.
Magnus hesitated, a little shy with these shrill strangers, and a third one said cheekily, ‘Lost your tongue then?’
Magnus felt himself growing angry. ‘Me mouse,’ he said gruffly.
At that they all fell about, squeaking with helpless mirth. ‘Me mouse, me mouse, me mouse!’ they screamed, until, tiring of the joke, they turned their backs on him and fell to nibbling again.
Magnus saw red. One end of the metal contraption in which the mice were feasting was open, he could see, and in through this he dashed with a thundering cry of ‘Bite you!’, so loud as to drown the click of the trap door closing behind him as his weight set it off.
He found himself alone, for the others had vanished through the wire mesh, and in front of him the sweet-smelling object, hardly marked by the tiny teeth that had so far attacked it. Eagerly, effortlessly, Magnus Powermouse picked up the Mars Bar. Holding it in his forepaws, he opened wide his mouth and bit off a large lump.
‘Nice!’ said Magnus, and took another great bite. ‘Nice!’ he said again. By midday the Mars Bar was finished.
‘More!’ said Magnus mechanically.
He looked around for the other mice but there was no sign of them. He looked for the door through which he had entered but there was no sign of it. He butted at each side of the metal box but each side was unyielding. He tried the heavy wires with his teeth but all to no avail. And as he rested a moment, panting with fury and frustration, Madeleine’s words came clearly to his mind from those far-off lessons in the pigsty. ‘Beware thou the trap!’ – he could remember the exact pitch and tone of them now, spoken in that voice he loved so well, that voice that he would never hear again!
At that instant, the day’s strong wind, blowing across the garden from the north, brought upon it the scent of his beloved mother.
He threw back his head.
‘MUMM-YYY!’ cried Magnus Powermouse.
TEN
The Seventh Buck
The day’s strong wind, blowing across the garden from the north, completely drowned Magnus’s cries for help. Madeleine for once was not actually thinking about her son, so busy was she fussing around her injured husband.
At the suggestion of ‘that nice Mr Roland’, she had made him up a comfortable bed of hay in the inner sleeping compartment of the hutch, hidden from passers-by. She busied herself carrying him the choicest pieces from the rabbit’s food bowl (Marcus Aurelius particularly fancied the flaked maize).
Roland watched her comings and goings with affection. A lonely old bachelor, he had learned to put up with solitude, and only now did he realize how much he had missed the company of others. He found himself very much drawn to this family of mice, Madeleine with her shrewd country sense, sharp tongue and soft heart, the educated, long-winded Marcus Aurelius, and that extraordinary boy of theirs.
Madeleine paused in her work and made a sort of little bob in front of him.
‘Oh, I don’t know what you must think of me, Mr Roland,’ she said, ‘treating this house of yours as though it was me own, and us eating all your food and I don’t know what!’
‘My dear lady,’ said Roland in his deep tones, ‘I am delighted to have you both. There can be no question of your leaving until your husband is fully restored. As for food, there is plenty. Mind you, it would be a different matter if we were catering for that son of yours! I wonder how he’s getting on?’
‘Oh, he’ll be all right, he can look after hisself,’ said Madeleine, even as the north wind muffled Magnus’s frantic yells.
By nightfall the wind had dropped and the yells had stopped. Because there was nothing else to do, Magnus sat in the trap and waited. He had shouted till his throat was sore, he had bitten at the wire till his mouth was bleeding. He had even asked the potting shed mice for help but they of course could not open the catch that held the trap shut and he could not reach it. At last his rage changed to a sort of resignation, and he settled down to wait and see what morning would bring.
Morning brought Jim the Rat, very early. At the first peep of light, long before anyone was stirring, he slipped through the garden gate and along the edge of the lawn to the potting shed. He had left his van half a mile away. If the trap were empty, he could slip away again unnoticed.
But he did not think it would be empty.
Ordinary mice loved tiny bits of chocolate, he knew – he often used them as bait. So how would this one resist a king-sized Mars Bar? And about one thing Jim the Rat was certain. If he should be the first person – ever – to catch a King Mouse, he wanted no one to know of it. He opened the door.
At the sight of the man Magnus fluffed himself up until he looked even bigger and with one loud shout of ‘Nasty! Bite you!’ reared threateningly upon his hind legs as a hand came towards him. But the hand held a piece of cheese, which it thrust between the wire mesh and into the gaping mouth. With his other hand Jim the Rat grabbed a heavy sack and threw it over the cage; he picked it up and was gone, closing the shed door quietly behind him.
The morning was still, and in the rabbit hutch Magnus’s shout had been plainly heard.
‘Oh, crumbs!’ cried Madeleine. ‘What’s he up to now?’ and she ran to the wire and peered out. Marcus Aurelius limped and Roland lolloped after her.
‘I see a human,’ said Marcus Aurelius. ‘A human, moreover, of a physical type which might reasonably be described as corpulent.’
‘A fat man,’ said Roland softly in Madeleine’s ear.
‘He is moving,’ said Marcus Aurelius, ‘with the utmost prudence –’
‘Carefully,’ whispered Roland.
‘– and carrying an object –’
‘Thing.’
‘– the contents of which are indiscernible.’
‘We don’t know what’s in it.’
‘I can see all that,’ snapped Madeleine. ‘What I wants to know is, is our Magnus in it?’
‘I hardly think so,’ said Roland comfortingly. ‘I can hear nothing.’
At that moment the reason for Magnus’s silence ceased to exist, as he swallowed the last of the cheese, and the early morning air was rent by one great cry.
‘More!!’ yelled Magnus Powermouse from the darkness of the trap.
Then the garden gate clicked, and the footsteps of Jim the Rat died away down the lane.
In the hutch there was a long silence. Roland glanced sideways at the faces of his little friends, faces that suddenly looked pinched and old as they stared blankly out.
All his commonsense (of which he had a great deal) told him that this was the end of Magnus Powermouse. All his kindliness (of which he had a great deal) told him to give no hint of this. He decided to pretend to an ability (of which he had none) to foresee the future. He cleared his throat impressively.
‘Now listen to me, you two,’ he said in his deepest, most authoritative tones. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’
‘With all due respect, Mr Roland,’ said Marcus Aurelius heavily, ‘I find that statement difficult to believe. We must be prepared to face facts. Magnus has been kidnapped.’
‘But what for, Markie?’ said Madeleine in a shaking voice. ‘What d’you suppose that human wanted him for?’
‘To eat, I dare say,’ said Marcus gloomily. ‘He likes his food, from the look of him.’ Madeleine gave a little squeak of horror.
‘Now, now!’ said Roland sharply. ‘That’s quite enough of that sort of talk. Humans do not eat mice. They kill them, to be sure, but if that fat man had wished to kill your son, he could presumably easily hav
e done so. He has not done so. Magnus is alive and well, as we heard. And so he will continue to be. You mark my words. I know.’
‘Know?’ cried Madeleine with a return to something like her usual snappiness. ‘How can you know?’
‘I have the gift.’
‘The gift?’
‘Of looking into the future.’
A gleam came into Marcus Aurelius’s dull eyes. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘The gift of divination! How extremely interesting! The ancient Greeks and Romans, you know, made –’
‘Oh, bide quiet, Markie!’ interrupted Madeleine. ‘We don’t want to know about your old ancient folk. Tell us more, Mr Roland, how come you can see into the future then?’
‘Because I,’ said Roland, ‘am the seventh buck of a seventh buck.’
‘Crumbs!’ whispered Madeleine.
‘And I hereby solemnly tell you, Madeleine and Marcus Aurelius, that one day, some day, I cannot tell exactly when, you will see that noble giant of a son of yours again. I can see it all in my mind’s eye – the triumphal reunion of Magnus Powermouse with his pretty little mother and his wise father.’ And his lying old uncle, he thought to himself. Here I am, rabbiting on about second sight when really I haven’t a clue. But it was worth it, for the look on their faces. Let’s just hope I’m right.
ELEVEN
Fit for a King
Jim Johnson lived alone. That is to say, he had no wife or family or any other human being to share his home. Yet it was full to overflowing – with animals.
For though the killing of vermin was his job, which he did cold-bloodedly and efficiently, Jim the Rat kept pets of all shapes and sizes. Some were useful to him, like the three cats that made sure he did not have to practise his trade on his own patch. Some earned their keep in other ways, like the two goats that provided his milk and the hens and ducks that laid his eggs. And some were creatures that had somehow landed up with him: guinea-pigs that children had grown tired of, a tame jackdaw, a number of singing birds – canaries, linnets and bullfinches – and an ancient donkey that lived in the little orchard and made terrible groaning, creaking noises to show how happy it was.
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