‘He went to sleep right after you left,’ Teresa said. ‘He’s waked up twice, and the second time he wasn’t delirious. He said his chest hurt and his head hurt. But, Mother, he seemed so weak — he could hardly talk. He asked where you were, and I told him. Then he went back to sleep.’
Mrs Frisby went to where Timothy lay, a small ball of damp fur curled under a bit of cloth blanket. He looked scarcely larger than he had when she and Mr Frisby had carried him to Mr Ages as an infant, and the thought of that trip made her wish Mr Frisby were alive to reassure the children and tell them not to worry. But he was not, and it was she who must say it.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Mr Ages gave me some medicine for him and says he will recover.’ She mixed the contents of one of the packets, a grey-green powder, in water, and then gently shook Timothy awake.
He smiled. ‘You’re back,’ he said in a voice as small as a whisper.
‘I’m back, and I’ve brought you some medicine. Mr Ages says it will make you all right.’ She lifted his head on her arm, and he swallowed the medicine. ‘I expect it’s bitter,’ she said.
‘It’s not so bad,’ he said. ‘It tastes like pepper.’ And he fell back to sleep immediately.
The next morning, as predicted, his fever was lower, his breathing grew easier, and his heartbeat slowed down; still, that day he slept seven hours out of each eight. The next day he stayed awake longer, and on the third day had no fever at all, just as Mr Ages had said. However, since Mr Ages had been right in all that, Mrs Frisby knew he was sure to have been right in the other things he had said: Timothy was not really strong yet. He must stay in bed, stay warm, and breathe only warm air.
During those three days she had stayed close by his side, but on the fourth she felt cheerful enough to go for a walk, and also to fetch some more of the corn from the stump so they could have it for supper.
She went out of her front door into the sunshine and was surprised to find a spring day waiting for her. The weather had turned warm while she had stayed indoors; February was over and March had come in, as they say, like a lamb. There was a smell of dampness in the air as the frosted ground thawed, a smell of things getting ready to grow. It made her feel even more cheerful than before, and she walked almost gaily across the garden.
And yet despite the fine warmth of the day — indeed, in a way, because of it — Mrs Frisby could not quite get rid of a nagging worry that kept flickering in her mind; it was the kind of worry that, if you push it out of this corner of your thoughts, pops up in that corner, and finally in the middle, where it has to be faced. It was the thought of Moving Day.
Everybody knows that the ground hog comes up from the deep hole where he has slept away the winter, looks around, and if he decides the cold weather is not over, goes back down to sleep for another six weeks. Field mice like Mrs Frisby are not so lucky. When winter is over, they must move out of the garden and back to the meadow or the pasture. For as soon as the weather allows, Farmer Fitzgibbon’s tractor comes rumbling through, pulling the sharp-bladed plough through the soil, turning over every foot of it. No animal caught in the garden that day is likely to escape alive, and all the winter homes, all the tunnels and holes and nests and cocoons, are torn up. After the plough comes the harrow, with its heavy creaking discs, and then the people with hoes and seeds.
Not all the field mice move into the garden for the winter, of course. Some find their way to barn lofts; some even creep into people’s houses and live under the eaves or in attics, taking their chances with mousetraps. But the Frisbys had always come to the garden, preferring the relative safety and freedom of the outdoors.
Moving Day therefore depends on the weather, and that is why a fine day set Mrs Frisby worrying, even as she enjoyed it. As soon as the frost was out of the ground, the plough would come, and that could happen as much as a month earlier (or later) one year than the last.
And the worry was this: If it came too soon, Timothy would not be able to move. He was supposed to stay in bed, and moving meant a long walk across the field of winter wheat, up and down the hill to the brook’s edge, where the Frisbys made their summer home. Not only that — the home itself would be damp and chilly for the first few weeks (as summer homes always are) until early spring turned to late spring and the nights grew truly warm. This was something that Mrs Frisby and the children did not ordinarily mind; Moving Day, in fact, was normally a gay time, for it marked the end of the grey weather and the frost. It was like the beginning of a summer holiday.
But this year? Now that Mrs Frisby had faced the problem, she did not see any answer except to hope that the day would not come too early. In another month (according to Mr Ages), Timothy would be strong enough. Perhaps she was only borrowing trouble. One warm day, she told herself, does not make a summer. No, nor even a spring.
She walked on through the garden and saw ahead of her a small figure she knew. It was a lady shrew, a tiny thing scarcely bigger than a peanut, but with a wit as sharp as her teeth. She lived in a simple hole in the ground a few yards away; Mrs Frisby met her often and had grown to like her, though shrews are generally unpopular, having a reputation for short tempers and extremely large appetites.
‘Good morning,’ said Mrs Frisby.
‘Ah, Mrs Frisby. Good morning indeed. Too good is what I’m thinking.’ The shrew was holding a stalk of straw, which she now thrust into the earth. It went down easily for two inches or more before it bent in her hand. ‘Look at that. The top of the frost is gone already. Another few days like this, and it will be all gone. Then we will have the tractor in here again, breaking everything up.’
‘So soon? Do you really think so?’ asked Mrs Frisby, her worry returning in a rush, stronger than before.
‘He ploughs when the frost is gone. Remember the spring of sixty-five? That year he ploughed on the eleventh day of March, and on a Sunday at that. I moved down to the woods that night and nearly froze to death in a miserable hollow log. And that day came after a week of days just like this.’
Mrs Frisby did remember it; her family, too, had shivered through those chilly nights. For the fact was, the earlier Moving Day came, the colder the nights were likely to be.
‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘I hope it doesn’t happen this year. Poor Timothy’s too sick to move.’
‘Sick is he? Take him to Mr Ages.’
‘I’ve been myself. But he was too weak to get out of bed, and still is.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. Then we must hope for another frost, or that the tractor will break down. I wish someone would drive a tractor through his house and see how he likes it.’ So muttering, the lady shrew moved off, and Mrs Frisby continued across the garden. The remark was illogical, of course, for they both knew that without Mr Fitzgibbon’s plough there would be no garden to live in at all, and there was no way he could turn the earth without also turning up their houses.
Or was there? What the shrew had said was meant to be sympathetic, but it was not helpful. It meant, Mrs Frisby realized, that she, too, could see no solution to the problem. But that did not mean that there was none. She remembered something her husband, Mr Frisby, used to say: All doors are hard to unlock until you have the key. All right. She must try to find the key. But where? Whom to ask?
And then, as if to make things worse, she heard a sound that filled her with alarm. It came from across the fence in the farmyard, a loud, sputtering roar. It was Mr Fitzgibbon starting his tractor.
Five Days
The sound of the tractor did not necessarily mean that Mr Fitzgibbon was getting ready to plough. He used it for many other things — hauling hay and firewood, for instance, and mowing, and clearing snow in the winter. Mrs Frisby reminded herself of all this as she hurried over to the corner post.
That was a very thick fence post at the corner of the garden nearest the farmhouse and the tractor shed. She had discovered long ago that it had, a few inches above the ground, a convenient knot hole with a hollow place behind it in wh
ich she could hide, when she had reason to, and watch what was going on in the yard. The cat, Dragon, also knew of its existence, so she had to look sharply when she came out.
She came up carefully behind the post, stared this way and that, and then darted around it and up into the hole. All clear.
Mr Fitzgibbon had backed the tractor out of the big, cluttered shed where he kept it. Leaving the motor idling, he climbed down from the seat and called to the house. In a moment his older son Paul came out, closing the door carefully behind him. Paul, at fifteen, was a quiet, hardworking boy, rather clumsy in his movements but strong and careful about his chores. In a few seconds he was followed by his younger brother Billy, who at twelve was noisier and had an annoying habit of skimming rocks across the grass at anything that moved. Mrs Frisby did not much care for Billy.
‘All right, boys,’ said Mr Fitzgibbon, ‘let’s haul it out and see about that linch-pin.’
‘It was just about worn through last autumn, I remember,’ Paul said. The boys disappeared into the shed, and Mr Fitzgibbon remounted the tractor; he turned it around and backed it slowly towards the shed, so that the rear end was out of Mrs Frisby’s sight.
There was some clanking and clanging inside the shed while Mr Fitzgibbon, looking over his shoulder, worked some levers on the side of the tractor.
‘All set?’
He shifted the gears and eased the tractor forward again. Hitched behind it, clear of the ground, was the plough.
Mrs Frisby’s heart sank. Surely he was not going to start now?
But as soon as he had the plough out in the sunlight, Mr Fitzgibbon turned the tractor’s engine off. It died with a splutter, and they all gathered around the plough-hitch.
‘Sure enough,’ said Mr Fitzgibbon. ‘She’s just about ready to shear. Paul, I’m glad you remembered that. If I order it today, Henderson’s will have a new one in three or four days.’
‘It took five days last time,’ Paul said.
‘Five, then. That’s just about right anyway. It’s too wet to plough now, but five days like this ought to dry the ground out. Let’s grease up while we’ve got it out. Billy, get the grease gun.’
In her hiding place Mrs Frisby breathed a sigh of relief, and then began to worry again immediately. Five days, although a respite, was too short. Three weeks, Mr Ages had said, would be the soonest Timothy could get out of bed, the soonest he could live through a chill night without getting pneumonia again. She sighed and felt like weeping. If only the summer house were as warm as the cement block house. But it was not, and even if it were, he could not make the long journey. They might try to carry him — but what was the use of that? Only to have him sick again after the first night there.
She might, she thought, go back to Mr Ages and see if he had any ideas that would help. Was there some medicine that would make Timothy get strong sooner? She doubted it; surely, if he had such medicine he would have given it to her the first time. She was thinking about this when she climbed out through the knot hole and slithered to the ground below — not ten feet from the cat.
Dragon lay stretched out in the sunlight, but he was not asleep. His head was up and his yellow eyes were open, staring in her direction. She gasped in terror and whirled around the fence post to put it between her and him. Then, without pausing, she set out on a dash across the garden as fast as she could run, expecting at any instant to hear the cat’s scream and feel his great claws on her back. She reached the shrew’s hole and considered for a fraction of a second diving into it, but it was too small.
Then she glanced back over her shoulder and saw an amazing sight. The cat had not moved at all! He was lying exactly as before, except that now one of his eyes was closed. The other, however, was still looking straight at her, so she did not pause, but raced on.
Finally, when she was a safe distance away — two-thirds across the garden and nearly home — she stopped and looked again more carefully. The cat still lay there and seemed to have gone to sleep. That was so odd — so unheard of — she could hardly believe it. Feeling quite safe, but puzzled, she looked for a vantage point from which she could see better. By rights, she should be dead, and though she had escaped by what seemed almost a miracle, she scolded herself for having been so careless. If the cat had killed her, who would take care of the children?
She saw a dead asparagus plant, stiff, tall, with branches like a small tree. She climbed it and from near the top looked back to the farmyard. Mr Fitzgibbon and his sons had finished greasing the tractor and gone on somewhere else. But the cat still lay on the grass, seemingly asleep. Why had he not chased her? Was it possible that, close as she had been, he had not seen her? She could not believe that. The only explanation she could think of was that he had just finished a very large meal and was feeling so stuffed and lazy he did not want to take the trouble to get up. But that was almost as unbelievable; certainly it had never happened before. Was it possible that he was sick?
Then, on what had already been a day of oddities and alarms, she noticed something else strange. Beyond the cat, quite far beyond, between the barn and the house, she saw what looked like a troop of dark grey figures marching in columns. Marching? Not exactly, but moving slowly and all in line.
They were rats.
There were a dozen of them, and at first she could not quite see what they were up to. Then she saw something moving between them and behind them. It looked like a thick piece of rope, a long piece, maybe twenty feet. No. It was stiffer than rope. It was electric cable, the heavy, black kind used for outdoor wiring and strung on telephone poles. The rats were hauling it laboriously through the grass, inching it along in the direction of a very large wild rosebush in the far corner of the yard. Mrs Frisby quickly guessed where they were taking it, though she could not guess why. In that rosebush, concealed and protected by dense tangles of fiercely sharp thorns, was the entrance to a rat hole. All the animals knew about it and were careful to stay away.
But what would rats want with such a long piece of wire? Mrs Frisby could not imagine. Even more curious, how did they dare to pull it across the yard in broad daylight when the cat was right there? The rats were bigger than Mrs Frisby, and could be, when necessary, dangerous fighters, but they were no match for Dragon.
She watched them for quite a long time. It was obvious that they knew exactly what they were doing, and they looked as well drilled as a group of soldiers. They had about twenty-five yards to go to reach the rosebush; as if at a signal (which, however, she was too far away to hear), they would all pull together, moving the wire about a foot. Then they would pause, rest, and heave again. It was about twenty minutes before the first rat disappeared into the bush. A little later the last bit of wire disappeared behind them like a thin black snake, and Mrs Frisby climbed down from the asparagus bush.
All that time the cat had slept on.
A Favour from Jeremy
In her worry about Moving Day, in watching the tractor, the cat, and finally the rats, Mrs Frisby had forgotten that she had set out originally to get some corn for supper. Now she remembered it, so instead of continuing to her house she turned towards the far corner of the garden and the stump at the edge of the woods beyond. She was a little tired after her dash from the cat, so she walked along slowly, feeling the warmth of the sun and the smell of the breeze.
This mild breeze, carrying the moist essence of early spring, caused a dead leaf to flutter here and there, and across the garden near the fence it moved something that sparkled in the sunlight. This caught the corner of Mrs Frisby’s eye; she glanced at it, saw that it was only a bit of tin foil (or aluminium foil) blown from somewhere, and she looked away again. Then she looked back, for at that moment a black object plummeted from the sky, and she recognized her friend Jeremy the crow.
A thought crossed Mrs Frisby’s mind. She changed direction again, and, moving more quickly, ran across the earth to where Jeremy stood. He was hopping around the shiny piece of foil, eyeing it from one direction and a
nother.
What had occurred to Mrs Frisby was that although Jeremy was not the brightest of animals she had met, and though he was young, he knew things and places she did not, and one had to begin somewhere. As she approached him, he had picked up the foil in his beak and was spreading his wings to fly off.
‘Wait, please,’ she called.
He turned, folded his wings, and then replaced the foil carefully on the ground.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘You remember me?’
‘Of course. You saved me from the cat.’ Then he added. ‘What do you think of this piece of foil?’
Mrs Frisby looked at it without much interest.
‘It’s just a piece of foil,’ she said. ‘It’s not very big.’
‘True. But it’s shiny — especially when the sun strikes it just so.’
‘Why are you so interested in shiny things?’
‘Well, really, I’m not. At least not very. But I have a friend who likes them, so when I see one I pick it up.’
‘I see. That’s very thoughtful. And would the friend be female?’
‘As a matter of fact, yes. She is. How did you know?’
‘Just a guess,’ said Mrs Frisby. ‘Do you remember saying once that if I needed help, I might ask you?’
‘I do. Any time. Just ask for Jeremy. Any of the crows can find me. And now, if you will excuse me …’ He bent over to pick up the foil again.
‘Please don’t go yet,’ said Mrs Frisby. ‘I think perhaps you can help me now.’
‘Ah,’ said Jeremy. ‘What kind of help? Are you hungry? I’ll bring you some seeds from the barn loft. I know where they’re stored.’
‘No, thank you,’ said Mrs Frisby. ‘We have enough to eat.’ And then she told him, as briefly as she could, about Timothy, his sickness, and the problem of Moving Day. Jeremy knew about Moving Day; crows do not have to move, but they keep a close watch on such activities as ploughing and planting so as to get their fair share of what’s planted, and with their sharp eyes they see the small animals leaving before the plough.
Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH Page 3
