‘Not quite yet,’ said Mr Ages.
‘No,’ said Nicodemus. ‘That was in late summer. When we first got out, we began searching for a place to live permanently, or at least a place where we could stay as long as we wanted. We had a pretty clear idea of what we were looking for. We had had plenty of time to talk about it, on the long winter evenings in the library between reading books.’
The reading we did! We knew very little about the world, you see, and we were curious. We learned about astronomy, about electricity, biology and mathematics, about music and art. I even read quite a few books on poetry and got to like it pretty well.
But what I liked best was history. I read about the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans, and the Dark Ages, when the old civilizations fell apart and the only people who could read and write were the monks. They lived apart in monasteries. They led the simplest kind of lives, and studied and wrote; they grew their own food, built their own houses and furniture. They even made their own tools and their own paper. Reading about that, I began getting some ideas of how we might live.
Most of the books were about people; we tried to find some about rats, but there wasn’t much.
We did find a few things. There were two sets of encyclopaedias that had sections on rats. From them we learned that we were about the most hated animals on earth, except maybe snakes and germs.
That seemed strange to us, and unjust. Especially when we learned that some of our close cousins — squirrels, for instance, and rabbits — were well liked. But people think we spread diseases, and I suppose possibly we do, though never intentionally, and surely we never spread as many diseases as people themselves do.
Still, it seemed to us that the main reason we were hated must be that we always lived by stealing. From the earliest times, rats lived around the edges of human cities and farms, stowed away on men’s ships, gnawed holes in their floors and stole their food. Sometimes we were accused of biting human children; I didn’t believe that, nor did any of us — unless it was some kind of abnormal rat, bred in the worst of city slums. And that, of course, can happen to people, too.
Had we, then, no use at all in the world? One encyclopaedia had a sentence of praise for us: ‘The common rat is highly valued as an experimental animal in medical research due to his toughness, intelligence, versatility and biological similarity to man.’ We knew quite a bit about that already.
But there was one book, written by a famous scientist, that had a chapter about rats. Millions of years ago, he said, rats seemed to be ahead of all the other animals, seemed to be making a civilization of their own. They were well organized and built quite complicated villages in the fields. Their descendants today are the rats known as prairie dogs.
But somehow it didn’t work out. The scientist thought maybe it was because the rats’ lives were too easy; while the other animals (especially the monkeys) were living in the woods and getting tougher and smarter, the prairie dogs grew soft and lazy and made no more progress. Eventually the monkeys came out of the woods, walking on their hind legs, and took over the prairies and almost everything else. It was then that the rats were driven to become scavengers and thieves, living on the fringes of a world run by men.
Still it was interesting to us that for a while, at least, the rats had been ahead. We wondered. If they had stayed ahead, if they had gone on and developed a real civilization — what would it have been like? Would rats, too, have shed their tails and learned to walk erect? Would they have made tools? Probably, though we thought not so soon and not so many; a rat has a natural set of tools that monkeys lack: sharp pointed teeth that never stop growing. Consider what the beavers can build with no tools but their rodent teeth.
Surely rats would have developed reading and writing, judging by the way we took to it. But what about machines? What about cars and aeroplanes? Maybe not aeroplanes. After all, monkeys, living in trees, must have felt a need to fly, must have envied the birds around them. Rats may not have that instinct.
In the same way, a rat civilization would probably never have built skyscrapers, since rats prefer to live underground. But think of the endless subways-below-subways-below-subways they would have had.
We thought and talked quite a bit about all this, and we realized that a rat civilization, if one ever did grow up, would not necessarily turn out to be anything at all like human civilization. The fact was, after eight months in the Boniface Estate, none of us was sorry to move out of it. It had given us shelter, free food, and an education, but we were never really comfortable there. Everything in it was designed for animals who looked, moved and thought differently from the way we did. Also, it was above ground, and that never felt quite natural to us.
So, when we left, we decided that our new home should be underground, preferably, if we could find it, in a cave. But where? We thought hard, and studied maps and atlases — there were plenty of those in the study. Finally, we reached some conclusions: To find a cave, we would have to go where there were mountains — there aren’t many caves in flatlands. And for food, it would have to be near a town or better, near a farm.
So we wanted to find a farm, preferably a big one, with a big barn and silos full of grain, near the mountains. We studied the maps some more, and it was Jenner, I think, who spotted this area as a good place to look. On the map, a big part of it was covered with the contour lines that show mountains, and across these were written the words, ‘Thorn Mountains National Forest’. Beneath that, in smaller letters, it said, ‘Protected Wilderness Preserve’. Bordering this, where the mountains turned to foothills, the map showed rolling country with quite a few roads but hardly any towns, which, we thought, ought to mean farmland.
We were right, as of course you know now. It took us two months of steady travelling to get to the Thorn Mountains National Forest, but we found it; we’re under the edge of it right now. And there are plenty of caves, most of them never visited by people — because people aren’t allowed to drive into a wilderness preserve. There aren’t any roads in the forest, but only a few jeep trails used by rangers, and aeroplanes are not permitted to fly over it.
We looked at a lot of caves, some big, some small, some dry, but mostly damp. Before we chose this cave and this farm, however, we found the Toy Tinker.
It began as a sad sort of thing. We found an old man lying in the woods one morning, near one of the jeep trails not so far from here, and he was dead. We don’t know what he died of; we guessed it must have been a heart attack. He was dressed in a black suit, old-fashioned in style but neat, not ragged. His hair was white, and his face looked gentle.
‘I wonder who he was, and where he was going,’ Justin said.
‘Whoever he was,’ Jenner said, ‘he wasn’t supposed to be in here at all.’
‘We ought to bury him,’ I said.
So we did, not by digging a grave, but by covering him with a high mound of leaves and stones and twigs and earth. It was in gathering material for this mound that Justin made the second discovery. He was back in the bushes, out of our sight.
‘Look here,’ he called. ‘I’ve found a truck.’
It was a very ancient truck, with a small round hood, but it had been lovingly polished and was wonderfully shiny. The body, which was square and large, had been rebuilt and painted red and gold. It had little windows and white curtains, and between them, lettered in gold, were signs:
THE TOY TINKER
Toys
Repairs
Hobby Kits
Model Sets
Electrical Toys
All Work Guaranteed
Obviously the truck had belonged to the old man. He was a pedlar and a mender of toys, the red and gold wagon was his shop and his home, and he had driven into the woods to camp for the night. It was against the law, of course, so he had concealed the truck behind some bushes, off the trail, under a big beech tree. We could see where he had made a campfire, carefully surrounding it with stones and clearing away the brush so he would not
set the woods afire. Beyond the beech tree a narrow brook flowed. It was a peaceful spot.
We could see what had probably caused the old man’s death: one wheel of the truck had sunk into the soft earth and was stuck. A shovel lay near it — he had been trying to dig it out. The work had been too hard for him, and he had started to go for help when he collapsed.
This much we could figure out just by looking. Then somebody said:
‘Whose truck is it now?’
‘It belongs to his heirs,’ I said.
‘Whoever they are,’ said Jenner. ‘He may not even have any. He seems to have been alone.’
‘Anyway,’ said someone else, ‘how would they ever find it?’
‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘We don’t know who he was, and if we did, we have no way of notifying anyone. So I suppose, if we want it, the truck is ours.’
‘Why don’t we see what’s in it?’
Thorn Valley
‘It might almost be easier to tell what wasn’t in it,’ Nicodemus continued. ‘That truck was as roomy as a small bus, and the old man hadn’t wasted a square foot of it. Not that it was cluttered; on the contrary, everything was neatly in place on its shelf, or hook, or in its cabinet.’
It took us a while to understand what a treasure we had found. The truck contained, as you might expect, a big stock of toys. It also contained the old man’s simple living quarters: a bed, a lamp, a work table, a folding chair, a bucket for carrying water, a plate, pots, pans, and so on. There was a tiny refrigerator with food in it, and some tinned stuff — peas, beans, peaches, things like that.
Most of the toys — we thought at first — we had no particular use for. There were toy cars and trucks, windmills and merry-go-rounds, aeroplanes, boats and a lot of others, mostly run on batteries. It was entertaining to look at them, and some of them we even tried out; for a while the floor looked like Christmas morning.
We tired of that and explored further into the truck. Up near the front we found several large cardboard boxes, and when we opened them we found that they were full of electric motors of assorted sizes — replacement engines for broken or worn-out toys. There were dozens of them, ranging from very small, no bigger than a spool of thread, up to some so heavy we could hardly move them.
Then, next to these, we found the real treasure: the old man’s tools. They were neatly arranged in shining rows inside a steel cabinet as big as a trunk. There were screwdrivers, saws, hammers, clamps, vices, wrenches, pliers. There were welding tools, soldering irons, and electric drills. And the beauty of it was, since they were designed for working on toys, they were nearly all miniature, easily small enough for us to handle. Yet they were themselves not toys; they were made of the finest tempered steel, like the tools of a watchmaker or a dentist.
It was Arthur who said it first:
‘Do you realize what we’ve got here? We could open our own machine shop. With these tools and all these motors, we could make anything we wanted.’
‘We could,’ said Jenner, ‘except you’ve forgotten one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We have no electricity. The old man couldn’t have run these tools off batteries. The small toy motors, yes, but not the real ones, not the power tools. He had to plug into house current to use those. See, there’s his extension cord on the wall.’
There was a long coil of heavy black cable hanging from a hook on the wall. It had a plug on one end and a socket on the other.
Now another rat spoke up, a rat named Sullivan. He was a great friend of Arthur’s, and like him, had a particular interest in engines and electricity.
‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘we could plug into a house current, too.’
‘How?’ I said. ‘Who’d let us?’
‘Do you remember that cave we looked at the other day? The one we decided was too close to the farmhouse?’
That was the beginning of it. The end you have seen yourself. He was speaking of the cave you saw today.
We all trooped back to it and examined it more carefully. It was too close, or at least closer than we had planned to live to a human habitation. But then we saw the huge rosebush near the tractor shed, where, with quite a lot of digging, we could put a concealed entrance. But most important, we noticed that there was an electric light in the tractor shed.
Mr Fitzgibbon had an underground power cable leading out from his house to the shed. We dug a tunnel to it, tapped it, and we had all the electricity we needed. Near it ran a water pipe. We tapped that, too, and we had running water. Then, a few at a time, we moved the tools and the motors from the Toy Tinker’s truck to the cave. We got nearly all of them before the truck disappeared. We went back one day and it was gone — only the hole remained, where its tyre had been sunk. The forest rangers must have found it and hauled it away. But they never discovered or disturbed the mound where the old man lay buried.
So we built ourselves the life you see around you. Our colony thrived and grew to one hundred and fifteen. We taught our children to read and write. We had plenty to eat, running water, electricity, a fan to draw in fresh air, a lift, a refrigerator. Deep underground, our home stayed warm in winter and cool in summer. It was a comfortable, almost luxurious existence.
And yet all was not well. After the first burst of energy, the moving in of the machines, the digging of tunnels and rooms — after that was done, a feeling of discontent settled upon us like some creeping disease.
We were reluctant to admit it at first. We tried to ignore the feeling or to fight it off by building more things — bigger rooms, fancier furniture, carpeted hallways, things we did not really need. I was reminded of a story I had read at the Boniface Estate when I was looking for things written about rats. It was about a woman in a small town who bought a vacuum cleaner. Her name was Mrs Jones, and up until then she, like all of her neighbours, had kept her house spotlessly clean by using a broom and a mop. But the vacuum cleaner did it faster and better, and soon Mrs Jones was the envy of all the other housewives in town — so they bought vacuum cleaners, too.
The vacuum cleaner business was so brisk, in fact, that the company that made them opened a branch factory in the town. The factory used a lot of electricity, of course, and so did the women with their vacuum cleaners, so the local electric power company had to put up a big new plant to keep them all running. In its furnaces the power plant burned coal, and out of its chimneys black smoke poured day and night, blanketing the town with soot and making all the floors dirtier than ever. Still, by working twice as hard and twice as long, the women of the town were able to keep their floors almost as clean as they had been before Mrs Jones ever bought a vacuum cleaner in the first place.
The story was part of a book of essays, and the reason I had read it so eagerly was that it was called ‘The Rat Race’ — which, I learned, means a race where, no matter how fast you run, you don’t get anywhere. But there was nothing in the book about rats, and I felt bad about the title because, I thought, it wasn’t a rat race at all, it was a People Race, and no sensible rats would ever do anything so foolish.
And yet here we were, rats getting caught up in something a lot like the People Race, and for no good reason. And the worst thing was that even with our make-work projects, we didn’t really have enough to do. Our life was too easy. I thought of what the scientist had written about our prairie dog ancestors, and I was worried.
So were many of the others. We called a meeting — indeed, a whole series of meetings, extending over more than a year. We talked and argued and considered, and we remembered our evenings in the library at the Boniface Estate when we had wondered what a rat civilization would be like. Oddly enough, Jenner, my old and best friend, took little part in these discussions; he remained rather glumly silent and seemed disinterested. But most of the others felt as I did, and slowly some things became clear; we saw our problems and figured out, as well as we could, what to do about them.
First, we realized that finding the Toy Tinker’s truck, w
hich had seemed like such an enormous stroke of luck, had in fact led us into the very trap we should have avoided. As a result we were now stealing more than ever before: not only food, but electricity and water. Even the air we breathed was drawn in by a stolen fan, run by stolen current.
It was this, of course, that made our life so easy that it seemed pointless. We did not have enough work to do because a thief’s life is always based on somebody else’s work.
Second, there was always the fear, in the back of our minds, that we might get caught. Or perhaps not caught — we took precautions against that — so much as found out. Mr Fitzgibbon was surely aware that some of his crops were being removed. And as our group grew larger, we would have to take more and more.
Already, he had begun lining some of his grain bins with sheet metal. That didn’t bother us particularly, because we knew how to get the doors open. But suppose he should take to locking them? We could cut through the locks, of course, or even through the sheet metal walls; we have the tools for that. But it would be a dead giveaway. What would Mr Fitzgibbon think about rats who could cut through metal?
All these things we worried about and talked about and puzzled over. But we could not find any easy answer — because there was none.
There was, however, a hard answer.
I began taking long walks into the forest. I had an idea in the back of my head. Sometimes I went alone, sometimes with some of the others.
On one particular day I went with Jenner. I had not yet told him about my idea, nor did I on the morning we set out, but merely proposed a direction. We took along enough food for lunch. I remember that it was autumn, a bright, cool day; the leaves made a rustling sound when the wind blew, and some were turning yellow.
In my walks I had been exploring the jeep trails, trying to find out where they went and where they didn’t go, trying to find the wildest parts of the forest, places where not even the rangers ever went.
Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH Page 12
