Take snails: no one can deny the beauty of their polished, many-hued shells, or marvel at the clever way they pack into neat clumps in the smallest crevices of drystone walls, or penetrate the dank interior of black polythene dustbins. How do they manage, encumbered as they are with that shell, to squeeze under the tight-fitting rim of the lid? Lift any stone in the cold winter months, and you will find hibernating snails, with all the soft bits drawn safely inside beyond the range of predators. Stand quietly near a herbaceous border in the warm dusk of a summer evening, and presently your ears will become aware of the steady chomping of hundreds of sharp, serrated teeth attached to the ribbon-like tongues of feeding gastropods, destroying the soft young leaves of hostas, delphiniums and lupins, nipping off stalks, and blighting the soil with their slimy trails.
It is enough to drive a gardener to drink, though it would be unfair and misleading to blame the Romans for all these gluttonous molluscs. True Roman snails are, in fact, quite rare nowadays, and enjoy a measure of protection. Dozens, possibly hundreds, of species of snail are native to Britain, and the huge population of slugs – black, brown, yellow, and white – is entirely home-grown.
So what can we do to thin out their numbers and protect our plants? Metaldehyde pellets are satisfactorily fatal, exploding the consumer in a little patch of silvery slime, but they are highly toxic and therefore cannot be scattered where there is any chance of dogs, cats, hedgehogs, or hens eating them – which puts the whole garden out of bounds. A more labour-intensive but subtle approach is to capitalise on the molluscs’ sweet tooth, and trap them in jars of beer sunk to the rim in the flowerbeds. In they slither, and rapidly expire. What a way to go, the slugs’ equivalent of drowning in a butt of malmsey!
Catching a dozen or so a night soothes the gardener’s vengeful feelings, but it must be admitted that beer-traps make only the smallest dent in the population. It is much quicker to pick up a bucketful (wearing rubber gloves if squeamish) and fling the contents over the garden wall. The snag here is that both slugs and snails have a strong homing instinct, and marked specimens have been recorded back at base the next morning after slithering three hundred yards from the dumping ground.
What’s more, the little blighters are hermaphrodites who do not even have to mate to reproduce their slimy selves. With slugs and snails capable of carrying about a hundred eggs each, and living between three to five years, the odds are weighted against gardeners, most of whom eventually admit the sad truth that no matter how many skirmishes they may win against this particular frontier tribe, victory will never be theirs. So grit your teeth, bite the bullet – and for good measure deposit a spadeful of gravel or chippings around your most vulnerable plants. Molluscs are not fakirs, and dislike slithering over a bed of nails on the way to their nightly banquet.
Grey squirrels and carrion crows are lone-wolf raiders, whose depredations are sporadic and seasonal, while rabbits and pheasants – so eminently edible – hardly rank among the frontier tribes.
Rats are a special case. They are the enemy within the gates, a Fifth Column that has grown so conversant with our ways and so closely woven into farm life that they interpret our intentions and read our body language as cleverly as dogs. They are, in scientific terms, metacognitive – able to solve problems by learning from their own experience – and a hoary old rat knows so many tricks and strategies that he can outwit us humans any day of the week.
Rats tend to draw into farm buildings in autumn. We don’t often see them, getting just the occasional whisk of a long tail beneath a door, or hearing a scuffle on top of a beam, but I know they are ever-present, watching us from their well-established rat-runs in the rubble-filled walls of our old stone buildings, waiting to profit from a spilt handful of corn, or a few pony-cubes carelessly dropped over the stable door.
Frustrating their knavish tricks is almost a game. I know there is little chance of banishing them altogether, but at least I can make their life as difficult as possible by storing forage in rat-proof metal bins, and sweeping up left-overs. ‘Where there are men, there are rats,’ the Council Pest Officer once told me philosophically – she had been twenty years in the job and was thrice-divorced, so she had an intimate knowledge of both species.
Rats are expert at keeping out of our way, blending into their background, and covering their tracks. It takes a keen eye to detect the tail-trail flattening the dust across the floor of a shed, or smoothing a path through straw around a muckheap. Another classic giveaway is the faint sheen on the entrance to a hole that looks far too small for a rat to squeeze through, but has, nonetheless, been polished by the passage of countless sleek bodies. More concrete evidence of their presence comes with the discovery of their distinctive capsule-like droppings neatly cached in dark corners, or the holes chewed through nesting-boxes, usually at the back beneath the overhang of the roof. There is little a spy can teach a rat about living undercover, keeping a low profile and working below the radar.
Although it is difficult to like rats, I must admit a certain grudging respect for the way they make the most of their brains and unattractively humpbacked physique. They can collapse their shoulders in order to slither through narrow gaps, and their long, ever-growing incisors gnaw through chicken-wire and concrete with ease, not to mention the insulation of electrical cables. That long, corrugated tail is put to many uses, the most extraordinary of which must be in the feat – persistently reported though I have never witnessed it – of using it as a tow-rope. In a co-operative venture to steal turkey-eggs one rat will lie on its back, clasping the large shell, while the other tugs it away by the tail to a place where both can devour it.
I have, however, seen them stand on one another’s backs to reach up to a swinging corn-hopper, or else descend the strand of binder-twine from which it is suspended. Experiments with lab animals have recorded the apparent altruism of caged rats who unfastened their own prisons, then released their mates, (though this is not unique to rats, since I have seen stabled horses do just the same once they have mastered the technique of lifting and sliding a bolt.)
They are good swimmers both underwater or on the surface, and despite living in some pretty unsavoury places such as sewers and muckheaps, they are personally clean, spending much of their leisure grooming their coats and combing their whiskers as assiduously as a Frenchman. So why do we shudder at the sight of a rat and shy away from contact with an animal that is so clever, unobtrusive, thrifty, industrious, and clean?
The answer lies in two D-words: Disease and Destruction. Though long ago cleared of responsibility for the Black Death by spreading bubonic plague, even a healthy Rattus norvegicus carries notable nasties which it hands on to humans with abandon. Rat bites quickly become infected, and Weil’s Disease – the worst form of leptospirosis – can be fatal if not recognised in time, or mistaken for ’flu.
As for their destructive powers, few have described it better than Robert Browning:
Rats! They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats,
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.
Hamelin’s plague of rats may have been in the fifteenth century, but over the following six hundred years their essential nature has hardly changed. Be it large or small, the rat population remains a feared and detested Fifth Column wherever humans live and work. In fact, if a modern Pied Piper ever offered to rid our farm of them completely – perhaps by mass drowning in the Severn – his thousand-guilder fee would seem cheap at the price.
During the hours of daylight, our frontier tribes keep their distance and limit their depredations to quiet moments when no one
is around, but as night draws on, our authority diminishes, while those who can see in the dark become correspondingly bolder. Sometimes in the small hours a security beam will reveal a scurrying form crossing the gravel, or the nocturnal silence is broken by a sudden loud squealing, swiftly quelled, as some creature meets its doom. These are isolated incidents, though, and give little clue to the scale of nocturnal activity around the old buildings.
Snugly tucked up in bed, we can only imagine what is going on in the farmyard when the lights go out, but from snippets of evidence that I collect the following day, it may be something like this.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Farmyard at Night
‘SHE’S LEFT the hopper out!’
The excited squeak of a great-great-grandchild reaches Rattus Novegicus in his favourite lair in the crumpled paper sacks beneath the slats of a wooden pallet, but he doesn’t move.
He, too, has seen Mrs Twolegs cross the gravel drive and go into the house without lifting the orange plastic hopper containing poultry corn from its hook and storing it in a metal bin, as she does every evening, but he hasn’t survived as King Rat of the farmyard for over two years without learning a good deal about human body language. There had been something he didn’t trust about the woman’s movements, a faint but discernible ostentation in the way she glanced back before closing the door of the glass porch, as if inviting him and his family to take note of what she was doing – or had omitted to do.
The thick-walled stone buildings of the inner farmyard surround a hollow oblong of gravel drive, with the house, which is up a couple of steps on the southern side, commanding an excellent view of sheds, haystore, and stables. An open-fronted range has been turned into a white-barred dog-kennel, with the sheep-shed, henhouse, and muck-heap forming an outer yard beyond the stable archway. This is Rattus’s fiefdom. He knows every inch of it: every hole and run provided by bales and rubble-filled walls and, by keeping his senses honed and his wits about him, here he has flourished on stolen provender ranging from black-bag overflow to the leavings of horses and sheep, and scraps from the human table intended for chickens.
There are holes he could have crept through in the farmhouse walls, too, and channels behind the wainscotting, but these he leaves for the use of mice. Though he is now too big for the house cats to tackle, there is always Jacko, the terrier, ready to raise the roof if he so much as shows a whisker indoors, and too many of his kin have died, dehydrated and delirious, after a visit from the pest officer for Rattus to risk stealing from Mrs Twolegs’s own larder.
Half an hour passes, the light begins to fade, and all remains quiet. It is possible, he reflects, that in the matter of the hopper he is being over-cautious. From the bustle in house and yard that day he has deduced that something unusual is up. Cars have been moved from their habitual parking places and machinery tidied away. The haystore has been swept, and concrete hosed down, all of which indicates that visitors are expected. Perhaps Mrs Twolegs has too much on her mind to think of putting away the corn-hopper.
I’ll wait until it’s full dark, he thinks, folding his tattered ears flat and wrapping his tail around his feet. She may remember it and come out again, or she may have left it in place for a purpose. I am old and wise enough to guess what that purpose may be, but it’s no use trying to explain to the youngsters. They have to learn for themselves. Most of them will die before they grasp the lesson, but I can’t help that. In any case, once Ratta’s new family starts foraging round the corn-bins they’re bound to attract attention and then we’ll be in for another bout of persecution – traps, terriers, poison, our nests destroyed, no peace from morning till night – until things quieten down again.
So he sits tight as the shadows lengthen, and the half-grown rats from the deep hole under the concrete floor edge to its entrance, darting out a couple of feet and back again, gradually lessening the distance to the hopper but always within easy range of their escape route. Even when the boldest of them reaches up to the tempting target, Rattus does not stir.
Despite the scars collected in a lifetime of dodging enemies, he is a large and handsome fellow, well-whiskered, bright-eyed and glossy. In his youth an inch of tail fell victim to a trap set exceedingly fine under a covering of straw, and constant battles for supremacy have shredded both ears, but for the past six months no other rat has cared to challenge him, either for a mate or the pick of farmyard provender, and his waistline has expanded accordingly.
His intent round eyes watch the hopper swing lazily as one young rat scrambles over another’s back and clutches at its rim with small pink paws. Chittering excitedly, a third joins the pyramid and succeeds in hoisting its body into the shallow trough containing the corn. As if inspired by seeing this is achievable, its siblings follow, jumping on to the rim, grabbing a mouthful, toppling off as the hopper swings, and darting back to stash the booty in a dark corner behind the haybales.
Rattus twitches his whiskers. Looks safe enough. Time I claim my share before those youngsters clean up the lot, he thinks, stealthily inching forward.
As he does so, a white flash shot through with orange lights the yard, and is followed by a deafening explosion. Pellets rattle off the stone walls and the hopper swings wildly as the young rats scramble for safety. A few squeaks, then silence, broken only by scuffling and scraping on the dusty floor.
‘Got one of the blighters.’ Bill Twolegs’s torch strobes into the hay-store. ‘Oh, and look: here’s another.’ He picks up the pair of limp bodies by their tails and tosses them on to the muck-heap. ‘Just about half-grown. I wonder where the big fellow is? I’ve seen Jacko telling to that heap of pallets, so he may be in there.’
‘I’ll let him out,’ says Mrs Twolegs, and a moment later the sharp-featured terrier races across the gravel. Fast as he comes, though, he is too slow to prevent Rattus’s lightning slither to the rear of the pallets and into his hole, and by the time Twolegs has flung the top layer of pallets aside, Jacko has lost interest, knowing his prey is well out of reach.
‘Leave it,’ says Mrs Twolegs. ‘I asked them for eight, so they’ll be here any minute.’ She unhooks the orange hopper and places it in a metal bin just as headlights scythe through the gate and a car drives across the gravel.
Reluctantly Twolegs re-stacks the pallets and whistles to Jacko. ‘Another time, old boy,’ he says, and strolls across to greet his guests.
Rattus lets several minutes pass before venturing out again, but this time he chooses a different path. The hopper had been a distraction only; he has plenty of other areas to investigate before dawn. Keeping close to the wall in case Jacko is still about in the yard, he slides round the corner of the stable archway and pauses before entering the right-hand loosebox.
The horses have been fed at dusk, and it is a safe bet that the pony in the left-hand stable will have eaten every scrap, but the old grey mare is less efficient. She is in the habit of plunging her nose into her feed and grabbing such big mouthfuls that a few cubes often escape and lodge under the manger where she cannot reach them. Rattus is wary of her big hoofs, which have more than once come close to breaking his back when she struck out impatiently at him. By now, though, she should have given up trying to nudge the stray cubes into the open, and moved over to her haynet. In a swift, scuttling scramble he is up and over the wooden door, landing on the deep bed of clean straw before the mare even glances round.
Now to check under the manger. He burrows into the banked-up sides and strikes one of his own rat-runs which the girl-groom has overlooked when she mucked out the stable. Here he is perfectly safe and his twitching nose tells him that the prize he seeks is there for the taking. Not only a handful of cubes, but flakes of maize and a few oats are scattered in the straw right underneath the manger, well beyond the mare’s reach.
Better still, there is a stolen hen’s nest in the corner, with three eggs in it. They are too big to be carried in his mouth, but Rattus long ago perfected the art of dribbling an egg with his nose, nud
ging it from each side in turn, and now he begins to roll the nearest one towards the drain through which he usually leaves the stable. Tonight it is half blocked by a wisp of straw, but there is still room for him to push the egg through.
A few inches short of the drain, he pauses, one paw raised, as his sixth sense flashes a warning. Why hasn’t the groom swept the drain clear, as she usually does? Why does the grain lead in a tempting line towards it? Could there be a pressure plate concealed by that frail wisp, from which steel jaws will spring up and clamp his body?
Another inch, another nudge, and the egg rolls into the sloping drain under its own momentum. As it touches the straw, there is a terrifying clang that makes the mare leap back and stand trembling, legs braced backward, blasting air through her nose like a war-horse.
The egg disintegrates in a jet of sulphurous liquid. Rattus freezes, flattening himself to the floor, his heart racing. As the silence lengthens, the mare relaxes again, and heads for her water-bucket. Seeing him, she lowers her nose, snorts and stamps.
Get out, you! says her body language unequivocally.
No need to tell him twice. Rattus scrambles up the rough stone wall, runs along the top and down again to take refuge in the next-door shed where the chickens roost. Perhaps there’ll be safer pickings here.
A stir goes through the twenty-odd feathered lumps ranged on the beams as he darts in short, rapid bursts along the wall towards the nesting-boxes, freezing to immobility when the fierce, red-wattled Cock of the Walk raises his ruff and gives an angry croak, running on again after checking the way ahead is clear.
Moving gently, Rattus eases into the broody’s coop and listens intently. Her head is sunk deep into her grey-speckled feathers, her round eyes open but unfocused. She has been sitting for nearly three weeks, stirring from the nest only when the temperature rose enough to stop her clutch of eggs chilling while she hurried to feed and drink and defecate before settling back into position. Now she is listening to the tiny chip-chip of the chicks’ egg-teeth working against the shells from which they will soon break out.
A Job for All Seasons Page 19