Tim Fox

It was the last day of three weeks of the best month of my life.  I have never  been so fat.  August.  Wonderful or so it seemed.

It is never hard to find enough to eat in the summer and the weather last year had been great.  One day in May a bunch of two color rats arrived in the 10-acre field next to the 24/7 Spring where everyday  I’d come for my afternoon drink of cool Spring Water. 

Since the farmer installed houses for the animals my original idea was to stay clear of them as I am smart as a fox and as such I understand that while the farm animals are easy to catch that it is best not to do so  because if you do the farmer will shoot you.  There were a few times in the past when I was tempted to steal a chicken or at least some eggs during the winter when food is hard to find.  I ate a few rats over the summer but that all changed when the field exploded into wall-to-wall Dumbos (two month or so after arrival the 50 adults had become 300-500 rats and by fall there must have been a 1000 rats in the field).

When I say the animals were “two color rats” I mean that they had a white patch around their neck and shoulder.  Later I noticed they had bigger ears than a regular rat.  They were in every way I can imagine unlike wild rats but they were rats.  The hired man had made a palace of that particular house.  The “living room” consisted of a half buried “Property of Harvard University” rat cage.  It was a top of the line cage and so nearly brand new that from a distance it shone like a mirror.  Up close it was a chrome steel mesh cage modified to be the social space the living room for rat meetings.  Inside the rats were safe.  No way I could break into the place. Set in the rock but lined with flat stone the mesh let the sun in and retained the heat.  It was warm and to small animals like rats warm is good.  The entrance was an empty bean can cemented into the stone – a small rabbit might have been able to get in but no way I could. It was set into the Fence Line immediately South and East of the Spring and given the care and craft of the hired man it looked like it had always been there.  Moreso than the other houses.  It alone amongst the new rat houses would be filled by the mid afternoon with maybe a hundred two color rats.

So I stopped hunting. I’d go over to the rat house around noon and sun bath away the afternoon.  I’d wait as late as night fall, sometime towards the end of the day, the guests would decide it was time to go home and so it was that the payout for sunbathing the afternoon was an easy meal for myself, my pups and my love, Sandy.  Suddenly the fat two color rats would come out of the cage - late afternoon - I presume to go home to the other cages. There were so many rats leaving that they didn’t notice me.  I  understand more now but a lot of this still does not make sense to me, what I am sure of is that it was the only cage the rats gathered in… 

Those rats were not wild.  They were almost as tame to me as were my own pups (to me) to whom I fed the rats. I’d eat and swallow a few rats quickly for myself then I’d kill a few more for my love and my pups, and that was a day’s work and it was done in minutes.  If you are wondering how this could happen it was because there were more rats than there were anyone eating them.  I had discovered them but I alone could not keep pace.  There is so much same old same food in the summer.

Hencetherefore I’d been careful to not let my good fortune cause me to forget how to hunt the wild.  There were days I’d hunt normally but it was so easy to go up to the cage, sleep the afternoon in the sun, that more and more, that is what I did and what I did up to and including a very bad  last day of a summer of free rats. 

When I went over that day there was something different - I could smell  snake in the cage.  It didn’t make a lot of sense as the rats were behaving about the same today as any other day.  Not the way I’d expect them to  behave if there was a rat snake in the cage. I see the flaws in my thinking now but I did not at the time.  Back then. 

Finally I could not control my curiosity.  I went over to look in the cage (for the snake I could smell) and now I am blind in one eye.  There is more to the story and I will tell you more tomorrow.  I am okay I guess with the eye patch but I don’t think you can imagine how it hurt.  Losing my eye in the wild.

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