RAT TOWN
The village they were approaching looked like a toy Indian encampment,
with its tiny tepees of sticks and trash.
The inhabitants were not much larger than burrow mice, were these
mountain pack-rats, so-called, who scurried about packing great armfuls
of twigs and leaves to make their homes secure. Some of the tepees were
built as high as Chinook’s head, when he stood on his hind legs, and he
could have crawled inside, had the doorways been large enough. How such
tiny fellows could build so high, he could not imagine till he saw half
a dozen rats setting one stick in place with their squirrel-like paws.
At the approach of the three bears, the sentinel mice, who had been
sitting on their roof-tops, promptly stamped a warning signal, and every
rat in Rat Town scampered, terrified, into his tent.
“Hurray!” Chinook exulted. “Watch me catch them!”
“You’ll not find it so easy as you might think,” his mother warned him.
“They have none of them lost the use of their hind legs.” And indeed,
the three bears had a lively time of it before Mother Brown Bear had
satisfied her keen mountain appetite. Still, it was a paradise for
mousers.
That same night the Ranger’s Boy was having his own experience with
Oregon pack-rats.
The Forest Ranger, in his horseback trips through the mountains, found
it convenient to have a shelter shack in the fir woods just beneath
Lookout Peak. This time the Boy had gone with his father, who had to
find out how much timber up that way was ripe for cutting, for a lumber
company wanted to buy some. For the first time that summer, they were to
spend a couple of nights at the cabin. To their surprise, they found
that a family of little pack-rats had taken possession in their absence.
The blankets were chewed and pieces torn off, presumably so that the rat
babies would have a soft bed. The flour that the Ranger had left in a
bag hung from the rafters so that the porcupines couldn’t reach it had
been spilled through a hole that the rats had chewed in one corner of
the bag, for, unlike the prickly ones, the little rats had been able to
run down the string as easily as so many circus acrobats. The lid had
been lifted off the tea jar and the tea had been sampled, though with no
great relish, for most of it had been left untouched. Even as the Boy
entered the dusky doorway, he spied three of the mouse-like gray rats,
no larger than chipmunks, tugging with their handlike paws at the lid of
the molasses can, which appeared to fit too tightly for them to manage.
The dusty paw marks up and down its sides told that they must have tried
it many times. At the Boy’s laugh, they ran, but they were bold, and
were soon back again, working away in the shadows that his candle
lantern threw.
That night the Boy, who slept in a bunk of fir boughs opposite his
father’s, was awakened by a great scuffling and scurrying over floor and
roof, and once by angry squeaks and squeals. Another time something warm
and furry, with toe nails that tickled, ran across his forehead. A third
time he was awakened by a resounding thump. It was one of his heavy
hiking boots, which he had been advised to take to bed with him—for fear
the rodents might have a relish for smoked-tanned moose hide smeared
with neat’s-foot oil. They had evidently tugged at the heavy boot until
they had hauled it over the edge of the bunk. The Boy watched them with
one eye half open to see what would happen next. With a huge sound of
scraping over the split log floor, the three little rats dragged the
boot to one corner of the cabin, and there tugged and panted in their
effort to drag it into their hole. The Boy, feeling assured that that
was something they could never do, and knowing that they could never
lift it to carry it away through the cabin window, and being in that
optimistically drowsy state where one doesn’t care much what happens
anyway, allowed himself to fall asleep again.
In the morning he found the appropriated boot filled to the top with
stores the little rats had sought to hide there. First there was his
soap, which they had nibbled all around the edges with their pointed
teeth. Next came a mixture of pine nuts, bits of the cold lunch the
Ranger had brought in his saddle-bags and thrown in the cold fireplace,
a button they had chewed from his sleeve, and a much-gnawed pencil,
while the toe of the boot was stuffed with half a dozen burrs which they
evidently treasured, and with the fragments of the greasy paper in which
they had brought their breakfast bacon. As for the bacon itself, that
was nowhere to be seen, though a greasy, paw-marked trail led up the
side of the cabin wall and into a corner of the rafters. The tin in
which they had stowed it for safekeeping had been uncovered and
thoroughly decorated with telltale footprints. The Ranger and his Boy
doubled with laughter.
“Pack-rats are a pest,” pronounced the Ranger, when he found his own
boots, still safe at the foot of his bunk but nibbled all across the
tops. “I’ll take you up to an abandoned mining camp some day, where the
pack-rats have taken possession of every cabin. With doors and windows
boarded up so that bears and bobcats can’t get in, they live there,
producing about four litters a year of perhaps four to a litter, till
there must be thousands of them. Where nothing larger than a weasel can
get at them to keep their numbers down, it’s destroyed the Balance of
Nature. Some day I’d like to find the time to clear them out, or there
will soon be such millions that they’ll come migrating around the
settlements, destroying crops and doing no end of damage.”
“How are you going to ‘clean them out,’ Dad? Going to take the Pied
Piper along?” laughed the Boy.
“All I’ll have to do, I imagine, is to destroy the old log cabins,
because as soon as the hawks and owls, bears and bobcats, foxes and
coyotes, and all the animals whose natural food they are, can get at
them, the Balance will soon be restored. As for the Pied Piper, I don’t
know if these rats care for music, but thank goodness, they aren’t the
common Norway, disease-spreading rat of our city wharves. ‘Trade rats,’
campers call these little fellows, because they have a funny way of
trading some of their trash for some of the food they salvage. There,
just look at that!” and he reached for the butter tin, which also had
been raided. It was half full of bark. “I suppose they think that kind
of trade will square it with us.”
“Well, they may relish bark for breakfast,” sighed the Boy, “but I’d as
soon have bacon and butter to go with these biscuits. Thank goodness, I
put the biscuit tin under a heavy weight last night. I thought I had
placed the bacon there, too.”
“You did,” agreed the Ranger, “but not under a heavy enough weight. See,
they lifted that hardwood stick right off! You wouldn’t think they had
the strength to, but I suppose it’s team work.”
“The brazen things!” howled the Boy, convulsed with mirth, for one rat
had just peeked over the edge of the table, filched a half biscuit from
his very plate and made off with it, and now sat with a fragment he had
broken off eating it as he sat up squirrel-wise holding the biscuit in
his paws.
“They really seem more like squirrels than rats,” thought the Boy aloud.
He was noticing that instead of the coarse hair and naked tails of the
city rat, they had soft gray fur and snowy under sides, with tails
almost as thick as a ground squirrel’s.
“They aren’t real rats,” agreed his father, “but mice, in spite of the
name. In some places they have taken to nesting in the tree tops, and in
some places they burrow. They nest in the branches overhanging swampy
places, and burrow in sandy plateaus. But up here in the higher
altitudes they either live among the rocks or build tepees of trash.”
“Dad, do they store food for winter?”
“Just like squirrels, and there is one thing they do that is rabbitlike.
I’ve seen them drum an alarm on the ground with their heels when they
have to send a warning signal a long distance.”
“They’re sure cunning rascals.”
“Altogether too ’cute for me. I wouldn’t mind an occasional half pound
of bacon, if only they wouldn’t dig up the pine seeds that I plant in my
reforesting nurseries.”
“They are vegetarians, mostly, aren’t they?”
“Yes, and down in San Luis Potosi they sell them at the market stalls to
be cooked like rabbits. Look out! Is that your pocket knife that
fellow’s dragging across your bunk?”
The Boy made a dash for his property. “Can you beat it!”
But up in Rat Town they were giving Chinook a merry chase.