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.
A few times I tried asking for information. I asked two squirrels, for instance, if they knew what lay on the other side of a mountain that rose before me. But they were silly, fearful creatures; and after looking at me in surprise, they both scurried up an oak tree and scolded senselessly in loud voices, shaking their tails, until I left. I asked some chipmunks, and they were more polite. They couldn’t answer my question (never having been farther than a hundred yards from where they were born!), but advised me to ask the birds — more specifically, one bird, a very old owl who was famous throughout the forest. They even told me how to find the enormous tree in which he lived.
That was the beginning of my acquaintance with the owl. He knew every tree, every trail, every stone in the forest. He was (as you know) not naturally friendly towards rats, or mice either, but when I told him about our life at Nimh, and our escape, he grew interested. Though he did not say so, I think he had already been watching some of our activities from the air in the evenings. Anyway, he was curious and listened carefully when I told him about our problems and my ideas for solving them. I have talked to him many times since.
It was he who told me about Thorn Valley.
The valley lies deep in the forest, beyond the big tree. The jeep trails do not cross it, nor even go close to it, for the mountains around it are forbidding, too steep and rocky even for jeeps, and are covered with thorny thickets. The owl told me that in all the years he had been flying, he had never seen a human being near it.
Yet the bottom of the valley is level and broad and nearly a mile along; steep cliffs wall it in all around. There are three ponds or small lakes in it, and apparently these are fed by springs, for they never dry up. On clear days, the owl said, he sometimes saw small fish swimming in them. I thought: Could rats weave fish nets or make fish hooks?
It was this valley I was looking for the day I set out with Jenner. I had careful directions from the owl; yet it took us half a day, moving briskly, to reach the base of the mountains. Then up, up, very steeply, for more than an hour — not really difficult for us, since rats are better climbers than men; also, we are shorter, so we had little trouble with the spiney underbrush. From the top of the high ridge at last we looked down, and the valley lay before us.
It was beautiful and still, a wild and lonely place. Through the green and yellow treetops below us I could see the water of one of the ponds sparkling in the sun. I got the idea that my eyes — our eyes — were the first ever to see it. Yet that was not true, for as we descended into the valley, a deer suddenly appeared in the trees ahead and went bounding off down the slope. There were wild animals there, and I wondered if they even suspected that outside these walls of mountains there were cities and roads and people.
Most of the valley floor was in forest, great spreading oak and maple trees, but near one of the ponds I saw what I had hoped to find — a large natural clearing, a glade where only coarse grass and wild flowers grew, and some clumps of raspberry bushes. This clearing was on the far side of the valley; beyond it the mountain wall rose again, a steep slope with big outcroppings of stone — granite ledges that thrust six or ten feet out of the earth.
‘We could live here,’ I said to Jenner.
‘I suppose we could,’ he said. ‘It’s a beautiful place. But it’s a long way from the barn. Think how far we’d have to carry food. And no electricity.’
‘We could grow our own food,’ I said. I started to add, but didn’t: And maybe, someday, make our own electricity, if we decided we wanted to.
‘We don’t know how. Anyway, where would we grow it?’
‘Right here. It would be easy to clear away these weeds and bushes. And if we dug into that mountainside, under those rock ledges, we’d have all the cave space we wanted, dry and warm, with a good roof. There could be room enough for a thousand of us.’
‘There aren’t a thousand of us.’
‘There might be, someday.’
‘But why? Why move? We’ve got a better place to live right now. We’ve got all the food we want. We’ve got electricity, and lights, and running water. I can’t understand why everybody talks about changing things.’
‘Because everything we have is stolen.’
‘That’s silly. Is it stealing when farmers take milk from cows, or eggs from chickens? They’re just smarter than the cows and chickens, that’s all. Well, people are our cows. If we’re smart enough, why shouldn’t we get food from them?’
‘It’s not the same. Farmers feed the cows and chickens and take care of them. We don’t do anything for what we take. Besides, if we keep it up, we’re sure to be found out.’
‘What then? What if we are? People have been trying to exterminate rats for centuries, but they haven’t succeeded. And we’re smarter than the others. What are they going to do? Dynamite us? Let them try it. We’ll find out where they keep the dynamite and use it on them.’
‘Then we’d really be found out. Don’t you see, Jenner, if we ever did anything like that, they’d figure out who we are and what we know? Then only two things could happen. Either they’d hunt us all down and kill us, or they’d capture us and put us in a sideshow, or maybe take us back to Nimh. And this time we’d never get away.’
‘I don’t believe any of that,’ Jenner said. ‘You’ve got this idea stuck in your head. We’ve got to start from nothing and work hard and build a rat civilization. I say, why start from nothing if you can start with everything? We’ve already got a civilization.’
‘No. We haven’t. We’re just living on the edge of somebody else’s, like fleas on a dog’s back. If the dog drowns, the fleas drown, too.’
*
That was the beginning of an argument that never had a satisfactory ending. Jenner would not yield to my point of view, nor I to his. It wasn’t that he was lazy and didn’t want to work. He was just more cynical than the rest of us; stealing did not bother him. And he was a pessimist. He never believed that we could really make it on our own. Maybe he was right. But I, and most of the others, felt that we must at least try. If we fail — well, then I suppose we must come back here, or find some other farm. Or eventually forget all we learned and go back to stealing garbage.
So we began working out the Plan. It has been a long time coming. Three years ago this spring we started watching Mr Fitzgibbon to learn what he did, and how he did it, to bring food out of the earth. We collected books and magazines on farming. We discovered early that in order to stop stealing we would, for a while, have to steal more than ever. We’ve laid up a two-year food supply, so that even if we don’t succeed in growing a good crop the first year, we won’t go hungry. We’ve got two-thirds of it moved to Thorn Valley already, and we’ve dug a dry cave to store it in, under one of the big rocks. We’ve got seeds; we have our ploughs; we’ve cleared and cultivated part of the land near the pond; and in a few days we’ll begin our first planting. We’ve even dug some irrigation ditches, in case there’s a drought.
We have a schedule worked out, sort of a countdown, and by early June we will be out of this cave, and out of Mr Fitzgibbon’s barn, I hope forever.
Captured
‘Speaking of schedul
es and countdowns’ — Mr Ages spoke suddenly — ‘we’ve got one for this evening. It’s getting late.’
The clock on Nicodemus’s desk said five o’clock.
‘Mrs Fitzgibbon feeds Dragon at six p.m.’ He spoke gently, but his voice had a chilling sound to Mrs Frisby. They all looked at her.
‘I’m ready,’ she said quietly, ‘but there are still a few minutes, and one question you have not yet answered. Why did Jonathan never tell me anything about Nimh, or any of the rest?’
Mr Ages said: ‘I’ll try to explain. When Nicodemus and the others moved into the cave near the rosebush, they invited Jonathan and me to stay with them — after all, we had been with them for many months by that time — and at first we did. But after a few weeks we decided to move out. We were, you realize, different. We both felt strange, associating always and only with rats, even though they were our close and good friends. As for me, I wanted more solitude and less society; Jonathan, on the other hand, was younger than I and felt lonely.
‘So we moved, at first together, to the basement of the old farmhouse where I still live. Then Jonathan met you, at a stream near the woods somewhere, I think he said …’
‘Yes,’ Mrs Frisby said, ‘I remember.’
‘From then on he worried. He didn’t want to be secretive, but he didn’t know how to tell you one thing. I’m sure Nicodemus has explained to you that the injections we got at Nimh had two effects. One of them was that none of us seemed to be growing any older at all — the children, yes, but not the adults. Apparently the injections had given us all a much longer lifespan than even Dr Schultz had anticipated.
‘You can see why this would have been a dreadful thing for Jonathan to have to tell you. You never had the injections. That meant that while he stayed young, you would grow older, and older, and finally die. He loved you, and he could hardly stand that thought. Yet if it was distressing to him — he thought — how much more painful it would be to you! That is what he could not bring himself to tell you.
‘He would have told you eventually; I know he intended to. Indeed, you would have found it out yourself, you would have seen it happening. But it was hard; he kept putting it off, then, finally, it was too late.’
‘Poor Jonathan,’ said Mrs Frisby. ‘He should have told me. I wouldn’t have minded. But will my children …’
‘Also have longer lives ?’ said Nicodemus. ‘We don’t know yet. We think so, but our own children are not yet old enough to be certain. We do know they have inherited the ability to learn. They master reading almost without effort.’
He stood up, took out his reading glass, and looked at the clock. But Mrs Frisby interrupted again.
‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘What happened to Jenner?’
Nicodemus said: ‘He left. He was against the Plan from the start. In our discussions, he tried to persuade others to oppose it, too. Only a few joined him; though there are some others who are still doubtful about it, they’re going to stay with us and try it.
‘The arguments stayed reasonably friendly, but the last straw, for Jenner, was when we decided to destroy the machines.’
‘Destroy them!’
‘For two reasons. One, so that if anyone ever finds the cave, there won’t be any evidence of what we’ve been doing — nothing but broken bits of metal, debris that will look like ordinary junk. We’ll pull out our electric cable, our lights and our water pipes. We’ll close up all the tunnels leading in.
‘The other reason is more important. When we move to Thorn Valley, we’re going to have some hard times. We know that, and we’re braced for it. If this cave is still open, with the machines and lights, the carpets and running water still here, there will be a terrible temptation to give up and move back to the soft life. We want to remove that temptation.
‘But when Jenner heard the decision — it was made at a meeting — he grew really angry. He denounced us all as idiots and dreamers. He stamped out of the meeting, and a few days later he left the group forever, taking six of his followers with him. We don’t know where they went, but we think they will try to find a place where they can set up a new life like this one.
‘I wish them luck, but they’ll have trouble. There won’t be any Toy Tinker this time. They’ll have to steal their machines — everything. That worries us a bit, because if they get caught, who knows what might happen? But there’s nothing we can do about it. We’re going ahead with the Plan; and once we get to Thorn Valley, I think we can stop worrying.’
Justin stood up. ‘It’s time to go.’ He picked up the paper with the sleeping draught in it.
Mrs Frisby, Justin and Mr Ages walked together up the long corridor to the rosebush.
‘Remember, when you come up through the hole in the kitchen floor,’ Mr Ages said, ‘you’ll be under a cabinet. It’s low, but there’s room to move. Go a few steps forward, and you’ll be able to see out into the room.
‘Mrs Fitzgibbon will be there, getting dinner for her family. They eat at about six. When she’s got their dinner ready, she’ll feed Dragon. He won’t be in the kitchen, but he’ll be waiting just outside the kitchen door on the porch. She doesn’t let him in while she’s cooking because he makes such a pest of himself, rubbing against her ankles and getting between her feet.
‘If you look to your right, you’ll see his bowl. It’s blue, and it has the word Kitty written over and over again around the side. She’ll pick it up, fill it with catfood, and put it down again in the same place.
‘Then watch closely. She’ll walk over to the door to let him in, and that’s your chance. Her back will be towards you. She’s got to walk about twenty feet — it’s a big kitchen. The bowl will be about two feet away from you. Be sure the paper packet is open — then dash out, dump the powder into the food, and dash back. You don’t want to be in sight when Dragon comes in. I can tell you that from experience.’
‘Is that how you got hurt?’
‘I got there a few seconds late. I decided there was still time. I was wrong.’
At the arch in the rosebush Mr Ages left them. With his cast, he would not be able to climb through the hole to the kitchen; there was no point in his going further.
Mrs Frisby and Justin moved out of the rosebush and looked around them. It was still light, though the sun was low on the horizon. Straight ahead of them, perhaps two hundred feet away, stood the big white farmhouse. Dragon was already on the porch, sitting just outside the door, looking at it expectantly. To their right was the tractor shed, and beyond that was the barnyard fence and the barn itself, casting a long shadow. Behind them rose the woods and the mountains; to the left Mrs Frisby could see the big stone in the middle of the garden, near which her children waited. As soon as her task was done, she thought, she must hurry to them and get ready for the move.
‘We go under the right side of the house,’ Justin said quietly. ‘Follow me.’ They made their way around the edge of the yard, staying in the shadows, keeping an eye on Dragon. Justin still wore his satchel and had put the powder package in it.
There was a basement under the main part of the Fitzgibbons’ house, but the big kitchen had been added later and stood on a foundation of concrete blocks, with only a crawl space beneath. As they approached this grey foundation, Mrs Frisby saw that near the middle of it, a few inches off the ground, there was a square patch of darker grey. It was a hole, left for ventilation, and there was a screen over it. When they reached it, Justin caught hold of the screen and pulled the corner. It swung open.
‘We loosened it a bit,’ he explained, holding it open for her. Mrs Frisby crept through.
‘Careful,’ he said. ‘It’s dark. There’s a drop of about a foot. Just jump. We put some straw at the bottom, so it’s soft.’
Holding her breath, Mrs Frisby jumped blindly into the blackness, and felt the cushion of straw under her feet. In a moment Justin landed beside her. They were under the Fitzgibbons’ kitchen.
‘Now,’ he said softly, ‘look to your left
. See the patch of light? That’s the hole. The light comes from the kitchen. We’ve piled earth up under it, so it’s easy to reach. Come on.’
Mrs Frisby followed him; as they got near the bright hole she could see around her a little. They were walking across bare earth, dry and cool to the touch; overhead there were heavy wooden beams holding up the floor, and above those the floorboards themselves. Under the hole rose a small round hill of earth. They walked up this, and then Justin whispered:
‘This is as far as I can go. There’s not room for me to get through. I’ll wait here. Come back down as soon as you’ve finished. Here’s the powder.’ He handed her the paper packet. ‘Remember to tear it open before you go out to Dragon’s bowl. Hurry, now. I can hear Mrs Fitzgibbon moving around. She’s getting the dinner. Be careful, and good luck.’
Mrs Frisby first pushed the packet up through the hole. Then, as quietly as she could, grasping both sides, she pulled herself up and into the kitchen.
It was light there. But Mr Ages had not been joking when he said the ceiling was low. There was less than an inch between the floor and the bottom of the cabinet, so that she could not walk properly but had to flatten herself out and crawl. She did, a few steps, and discovered that she was trembling. ‘Stay calm,’ she told herself. ‘Don’t get panicky, or you’ll do something foolish and spoil everything.’
Thus admonished, she crept forward again until she was near the edge of the cabinet. She stopped. From there she could see out into the kitchen fairly well. Straight across from her stood a big white gas stove, and in front of it, putting the lid on a pot, was Mrs Fitzgibbon. Because the edge of the cabinet was so low, Mrs Frisby could not see her head, but only up to her shoulders.
‘There,’ Mrs Fitzgibbon said, as if to herself. ‘The stew is done, the bread’s in the oven, the table is set.’
Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (Puffin Modern Classics) Page 13
