Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (22 page)

'Look at that!'

'A pack of them!'

'How did they get out?'

'Get the nets!'

The doctor turned off the pump; the man with the hose pulled off his mask. As a new wave of rats danced along the edge of the clearing all three men ran to the truck and from it pulled long-handled nets.

But Mrs Frisby, up on her branch, was staring at the blackberry bush again. She saw something that all of the others, including the rats, did not see. An eighth rat had come out. He emerged running, but then he stumbled; he got up and ran again, this time more slowly, circling vaguely to the right. He did not seem to know where he was going. He reached a sparse thicket of saplings almost out of her sight, and there, abruptly, he fell over on his side and lay still.

Meanwhile all three men, holding their nets low, ran across the stubble towards the parade of rats. But as they approached the parade it vanished; the rats, their purpose accomplished, melted into the misty woods, and this time they did not reappear. Mrs Frisby watched them as they loped away swiftly in single file and disappeared from her view, back into the deep forest and up the mountainside. The rear guard was gone, bound for Thorn Valley.

But the eighth rat still lay unmoving among the saplings. And two had never corne out at all.

'They're gone,' said the man who had worn the mask. 'They fooled us.'

'What happened?' asked Mr Fitzgibbon, standing near the truck.

'Simple enough,' said the doctor. 'They had two escape holes, and they used the other one.' He walked back to the blackberry bramble and bent down, kicking the branches aside with his foot. 'Here it is,' he said. 'Quite a long tunnel. One of the longest I've seen.'

To the other two men he said: 'Get the pick and the shovels.'

For half an hour they dug, laying open a narrow trench along the tunnel. From her angle of view in the tree, Mrs Frisby could see only the top of this trench, and not down into the bottom. Still she watched, saying to herself, perhaps, after all, there were only eight, maybe they decided that eight would be enough.

Then one of the shovels broke through into air; they had come to the rats' storage room.

'There's two of them,' said one of the men, and her heart sank. Who were they? She wanted to run and look, but she did not dare.

'Careful,' said the doctor. 'There may still be some gas in there. Let the wind blow it out.'

'Phew,' said one of the men. 'That's not gas, that's garbage.'

'Open it up a little more,' said the doctor.

One of the men wielded his shovel for another minute, and then the doctor peered in.

'Garbage,' he said. 'Last night's dinner. Garbage and two dead rats.' Mrs Frisby thought: He sounds disappointed.

'Only two?' said Mr Fitzgibbon.

'Yes. It's easy to see what happened. In a hole this size there would have been a couple of dozen at least. But these two must have been up at the front, near the tunnel. They got a whiff of the gas, and it killed them. But before they died, they must have warned the others. So the rest ran out.'

'Warned them?' said Mr Fitzgibbon. 'Could they do that?'

'Yes,' said the doctor. 'They're intelligent animals. 'Some can do a great deal more than that.' But he did not elaborate; instead he turned to one of the men. 'We might as well take these two back with us.'

From the truck the man produced a white paper sack and a pair of plastic gloves. He pulled the gloves on, reached into the hole and placed the two dead rats into the sack. He did this with his back to Mrs Frisby, so that she never got even a glimpse of them.

'All right,' said the doctor. 'Let's close it up.' They shovelled the earth back into the trench and returned to the truck.

'You'll let me know if they have rabies?' said Mr Fitzgibbon.

'Rabies?' said the doctor. 'Yes, of course. But I doubt it. They look perfectly healthy.'

Perfectly healthy, thought Mrs Frisby sadly, except for being dead. She looked into the woods, over towards the saplings where the other rat lay. Was he, too, now dead? To her surprise, she saw that he was moving. Or was he? In the mist it was hard to tell. But something had moved.

After the truck had left, Mr Fitzgibbon stood looking at the ruin of the rosebush. He seemed vaguely puzzled and disappointed; he must be wondering, she thought, whether it had been worth it, just to exterminate two rats. He had no way of knowing, of course, that all the rest were also gone and would not return, that his grain loft was safe. In a moment he turned and walked to the house.

As soon as he was safely gone Mrs Frisby scurried down from her tree and into the woods. On the ground she could no longer see the rat or the thicket where he lay, but she knew the direction, and she ran. Around a stump, over a mound of leaves, past a cedar tree - there were the saplings, and there lay the rat, still on his side.

It was Brutus. Beside him, futilely trying to move him, stood Mr Ages.

She reached him, breathless from her run.

'Is he dead?'

'No. He's unconscious, but he's alive and breathing. I think he'll revive if I can just get him to swallow this.' Mr Ages indicated a small corked bottle, no bigger than a thimble, on the ground beside them.

'What is it?'

'An antidote for the poison. We thought this might happen, so we got it ready last night. He got just a little of the gas, made it this far, and then collapsed. Help me lift his head.'

Mr Ages had been unable to lift Brutus's head and the bottle at the same time. Now, with Mrs Frisby's help, he forced open Brutus's mouth and poured in just a few drops of the smokey liquid the bottle contained. In a few seconds Brutus made a gulping noise, swallowed hard, and spoke.

'It's dark,' he said. 'I can't see.

'Open your eyes,' said Mr Ages.

Brutus opened them and looked around.

'I'm out,' he said. 'How did I get here?'

'Don't you remember?'

'No. Wait. Yes. I was in the hole. I smelled gas, an awful, choking, sweet smell. I tried to run, but I stumbled over somebody lying on the floor, and I fell down. I must have breathed some of the gas. I couldn't get up.'

'And then?'

'I heard the others running past me. I couldn't see them. It was darker than night. Then one of them ran into me, and stopped. He pulled me up, and I tried to run again. But I was too dizzy. I kept falling. The other one helped me up again, and I went a few steps more. He kept pulling me, and then pushing, and somehow, finally, I got to the end of the tunnel. I saw daylight, and the air smelled better. But there was nobody else there; I thought the others must have left. So I ran a little farther, and that's all I remember.'

Mrs Frisby said: 'What about the one who helped you?'

'I don't know who it was. I couldn't see, and he didn't speak at all. I suppose he was trying to hold his breath.

'When we got near the end, and I could see daylight, he gave me one last shove towards it, and then he turned back.'

'He went back?'

'Yes. You see, there was still one rat back in there - the one I stumbled over. I think he went back to help that one.'

'Whoever he was,' said Mrs Frisby, 'he never came out. He died in there.'

'Whoever he was,' said Mr Ages, 'he was brave.'

A few days later, early in the morning, the plough came through the garden. Mrs Frisby heard the chug of the tractor and the soft scrape of the steel against the earth. She watched from just inside her front door, fearfully at first, but then with growing confidence. The owl and the rats had calculated wisely, and the nearest furrow was more than two feet from her house.

Behind the plough, in the moist and shining soil, the rudely upturned red-brown earthworms writhed in a frenzy to rebury themselves; hopping along each furrow a flock of spring robins tried to catch them before they slid from sight. And when the ploughing was done and the worms had all disappeared, either eaten or safely underground, Mr Fitzgibbon came back with the harrow, breaking down the furrows, and turned them all up again. It was a good day for the robins.

After the harrow, for the next two days came the Fitzgibbons themselves, all four of them with hoes and bags of seeds, planting lettuce, beans, spinach, potatoes, corn and asparagus. Mrs Frisby and her family kept out of sight. Thoughtfully, Brutus and Arthur had dug their doorway behind a tuft of grass, so that not even Billy noticed it.

Brutus and Arthur. Mrs Frisby did not suppose she would ever see either of them again, nor Nicodemus, nor any of the others. Brutus, after swallowing Mr Ages' medicine and resting for half an hour, had gone on his way into the forest to join the colony in Thorn Valley. There was no talk of their coming back, unless their attempt to grow their own food should fail - and she did not believe that would happen; they were too smart. And even if they did fail, they would probably not come back to Mr Fitzgibbon's farm.

She thought that it would be pleasant to visit them and see their new home, their small lake and their crops growing. But she had no idea where the valley was, and it would be, in any case, too long a journey for her and the children. So she could only wonder about them: Were they, at that moment, like the Fitzgibbons, planting seeds behind their own plough? Some (like Isabella's mother) might grumble about the hardness of the new life they had chosen. Yet the story of what had happened to Jenner and his friends (if it
was
Jenner and his friends), to say nothing of the destruction of their own home, would surely help to convince them that Nicodemus's ideas were right.

The Fitzgibbons finished their planting, and for a week or two all was quiet. But it would not stay that way. The crops would appear, the asparagus was ready to sprout, and for the rest of the spring and summer the garden would be too busy a place for mice to live in comfortably.

So on a day in May as warm as summer, early in the morning, Mrs Frisby and her children laid a patchwork of sticks, grass and leaves over the top of the entrance to their cement block house, and then carefully scraped earth over it so that it would not show. With luck, they would not have to dig a new one in the autumn.

They walked to their summer house, taking half a day to do it, strolling slowly and enjoying the fine weather, stopping on the way to eat some new spring leaves of field cress, some young greens and a crisp, spicy mushroom that had sprouted by the edge of the woods. For their main course, a little farther on, there was a whole field of winter wheat, its kernels newly ripe and soft.

As they approached the brook, towards the big tree in the hollow of whose roots they would make their summer home, the children ran ahead, shouting and laughing. Timothy ran with them, and Mrs Frisby was glad to see that he showed no trace of his sickness. It was an exciting time for them. In the garden they were always alone with themselves, but along the bank of the brook in summer lived five other mice families, all with children. Within a few minutes of arrival, her four had gone with a group of the others down to the water to see the tadpoles swim.

Mrs Frisby set about the job of tidying up the house, which had acquired a carpet of dead leaves during the winter, and then bringing in a pile of soft green moss to serve as bedding for them all. The house was a roomy chamber with a pleasant, earthy smell. Its floor was hard-packed earth, and its wooden roof was an arched intertwining of roots, above which rose the tree itself, an oak.

On her way to get the moss she saw one of her neighbours, a lady named Janice who, like herself, had four children. Janice ran over to talk to her.

'You're so late getting here,' she said. 'We all thought something must have happened to you.'

'No,' said Mrs Frisby, 'we're all fine.'

'But don't you live in the garden?'Janice persisted. 'I should have thought you'd be afraid of the ploughing.'

'As a matter of fact,' Mrs Frisby explained,'they didn't plough the particular spot in the garden where we live. It's behind a boulder.'

'You were lucky.'

'That's true.' More than that Mrs Frisby did not tell; she had agreed to keep a secret, and she would do as she had said.

Still, she thought after quite a long deliberation, it was probably all right to tell her children, first making
them
promise to keep it secret. They were, after all, the children of Jonathan Frisby. For all she knew, and for all Nicodemus knew, they were likely to turn out to be quite different from other mice, and they had a right to know the reason.

The following evening, therefore, when they had finished an early supper, she gathered them around her.

'Children, I have a story to tell you. A long one.'

'Oh, good!' cried Cynthia. 'What kind of a story?'

'A true one. About your father, and about the rats.'

'How can it be about Father
and
the rats?' Teresa asked.

'Because he was a friend of theirs.'

'He was?' said Martin incredulously. 'I never knew that.'

'It was mostly before you were born.'

To everyone's surprise, Timothy said, 'I thought he might be. I think Mr Ages was, too.'