Magazine
Rat Invasion | Yankee Classic
The rat invasion started like house guests that overstayed their welcome. Before the author realized it, the little rodents were more at home than he was! I was not alarmed by the ceiling noises at first, those skittering overhead passes in the night. I’d lie awake and imagine a harmless little critter playing up there, […]
The rat invasion started like house guests that overstayed their welcome. Before the author realized it, the little rodents were more at home than he was!
I was not alarmed by the ceiling noises at first, those skittering overhead passes in the night. I’d lie awake and imagine a harmless little critter playing up there, and I’d feel happy to share a little part of my house with him.
Two weeks later my wife Glenna found a tunnel through a loaf of bread and informed me that we had a rat. “Naa, probably just a mouse,” I said. I figured that in time the little guy would realize his mistake: he was missing a Maine summer. The Great Outdoors. Vacationland. People pay good money, travel hundreds of miles for a taste of it. I figured he’d find his way out.
I was wrong. A few nights later while I was listening to his overhead exercises, another ticka-ticka-ticka came scurrying up the wall behind my head. He’d fetched his mate, and yes, they were settling in for the winter!
Their signs intensified: a bag of flour ravaged; potatoes gnawed. Glenna began telling me about rats spreading disease, about rabies and death. Her rodent calculations indicated that these two would turn into scores by spring if I didn’t act soon.
She suggested poison. There was a box left over from an incident a few years earlier. The rat ate the poison, then crawled up above the ceiling and expired. The house grew so rank in the days that followed that we began eating our meals outdoors. “Never again,” I said.
“All right,” she said, “but you hate mousetraps.”
I sure do. They’re insidious nerve-wracking things. It’s that delicate millisecond when, still holding your breath, you very carefully, very, very slowly remove your thumb from the evil spring-loaded masher, and the trap snaps in your hand.
“Let’s see what happens,” I suggested. “Maybe the cat’ll get ’em.”
A couple of nights later, I was awakened by a loud crash from downstairs. I grabbed the Louisville Slugger from under the bed and started down the stairs. I shined the light into the kitchen. The wastebasket was down, the week’s trash distributed fanlike across the floor. I tiptoed across the living room and flipped on the kitchen light, leaping into the room in the same moment, wielding the baseball bat. No prowler. Then what had knocked over the wastebasket?
That’s when I realized the grim truth: What we had here were genuine garbage-picking, plague-carrying, finger-nibbling-in-your-sleep rats! I bent to pick up the wastebasket, and a dark gray blur shot between my legs and tore into the bathroom. I shut the door, trapping it inside. Then I plucked the sleeping cat from the couch and threw her in with it. The battle began: a hiss, a snarl, a tumble, and then a long, promising silence. I opened the door and the cat raced past me toward the front door, which she attempted to climb. I let her out and she galloped away into the darkness.
The rat signs multiplied daily. Nightly the overhead races took on a bacchanalian quality. I knew I had to act.
The next afternoon I steeled myself and baited six mousetraps with peanut butter. “The traps are too small,” Glenna insisted. “We need rattraps.” “These will do the job,” I replied, and placed them where I had found droppings — black morsels the size of kidney beans.
By evening the traps were all sprung, and the peanut butter licked clean. Except one.
The gauntlet was flung. Alright, rattraps it shall be!
Setting a rattrap is not unlike setting a mousetrap — in principle. But where the mousetrap is indeed menacing, its diabolical big brother, the rattrap is genuinely malicious.
Kneeling on the floor before the open kitchen cupboard, I smeared peanut butter on the trigger, for good measure, I added a chunk of Monterey Jack. Now I only had to place the trap in the cupboard — without disturbing it. I very softly set the forward edge of the trap down on the cupboard floor, lowering the other side as I inched the trap in. I don’t know if the trap sprang and I dropped it, or if I dropped it first and then it sprang. The rattrap exploded, two halves of the wooden base went flying, and I rolled onto my back with dangerous heart palpitations.
I lay awake most of the night, listening to the intruders picnicking in my kitchen. I began to scheme a practical method of dealing with the enemy. By morning my plan was set.
I placed a rubber barrel, half filled with water, below the ceiling vent in the kitchen. Not directly beneath the vent, but to the side. Next I cut a trash bag flat and laid it out beside the barrel, also beneath the ceiling vent but to the other side. I taped lengths of string to the sides and corners of the bag which converged into one long string and led up through the ceiling vent into my bedroom. It was like an upside-down parachute. I baited the trap with a slice of whole wheat bread then went upstairs to test it. When I pulled the string, the bag neatly folded around the bread as it simultaneously rose into the air and swung over the barrel of water. I dropped it. Plop. It worked!
After everyone went to bed that night, I was lying on my bedroom carpet, my face filling the opened floor vent, gazing down on a fresh slice of wheat bread on a dark green trash bag. I waited. I watched. I caught myself drifting dangerously to the alluring edge of slumber.
Suddenly the rat was there — huge like a big dark shoe with a whip tail. I hadn’t seen its approach — I had been dozing. Now it was just backing off the trash bag with the slice of bread in its jaws. I pulled the ripcord, but too late. The rat was already scampering away to whatever banquet was planned that evening.
I marched downstairs, got another slice of bread, placed it on the trash bag, and ran upstairs to take my position. I fell asleep and didn’t awaken until dawn. The bread was gone.
We lived with the bread-barrel-and-bag trap for days. The rats seemed to lose their appetite for whole wheat bread and for outwitting me. And I lost hours of sleep to rat fishing.
I found salvation on a table at the Windsor fair. A white cardboard box labeled RAT GLUE — GUARANTEED! I bought a bunch.
Inside the box were shallow plastic trays filled with thick yellow flypaper-type glue. I set up the trays, as instructed, along the rat walkways. During supper that evening, our cat came staggering across the kitchen floor with a tray attached to her face. It was a good omen.
I awoke early the next morning to the sound of a rat in trouble. I ran downstairs in my bathrobe and switched on the light. There it was, desperately trying to get out of the glue.
I slid a spatula under the trap and lifted my quarry, then opened the back door and headed down the driveway in the cold, driving autumn rain, hoping that no one would catch sight of me in my bathrobe…with a rat on a spatula.
Just as I got to the patch of woods about 200 feed down the road, a car approached — a neighbor who had never spoken to me in ten years. Never even waved. This time he decided to stop.
“How are you?” he asked grimly.
“Good,” I answered.
“So,” he began delicately, “everything all right at home”
“Will be,” I said. “Soon as I toss this rat into the woods”
“Here? Not next to my house, you don’t.”
“No,” I lied. “Past your house. I was taking it down to the river.” Which was a quarter mile away.
He drove off hesitantly, keenly watching in the rearview mirror as I marched with the rodent past his house. When he was out of sight, I set the trap softly in the grass, facing the rat toward his house. “Good luck,” I said, then ran for home.
When I opened the front door, Glenna was at the counter pouring the coffee. “Did anyone see you?” she asked. “It’s pouring out. I mean, you really look…eccentric.”
“Oh. Raining, is it?” I shot back, wiping my face with a towel.
She answered with a short, terrified scream. The other rat, its hind legs glued to a trap, was pulling itself, slap-slap-slap, out from behind the refrigerator.
“This one’s yours,” I said.
“No!” She shouted. Then, abruptly, with sudden calm resolve, said, “Okay. No problem.” The rat-disposal competition was underway. She picked up the spatula, deftly lifted the rat, and dropped it into the water-filled trash barrel. Then peering proudly into the barrel, she grew suddenly horrified. “Ahh,” she cried. It’s swimming.”
Sure enough, the rat was paddling around and around the barrel, floating on the buoyant plastic trap. She started stirring up a whirlpool with the spatula. “Look at him go,” I said, heading out the door, grinning like a crow.
By the time I left the house that morning, my normally sound, well-balanced wife was dancing around a rubber trash barrel furiously shaking a box of rat poison into the whirlpool, chanting, “Drink it, rat! Drink it!”
The rat was gone when I came home. The barrel, stale bread, and trash bag were also gone. Likewise the empty box of rat poison, the mousetraps, and the rattraps. In the days and weeks that followed, our cat returned to sleeping on the couch, and I stopped listening at night for those small, skittering, overhead sounds. Glenna has never told me how she got rid of her rat that morning. And I’ve never asked her.
Excerpt from “’The Year of the Rats,” Yankee Magazine, February 1986.
I was not alarmed by the ceiling noises at first, those skittering overhead passes in the night. I’d lie awake and imagine a harmless little critter playing up there, and I’d feel happy to share a little part of my house with him.
Two weeks later my wife Glenna found a tunnel through a loaf of bread and informed me that we had a rat. “Naa, probably just a mouse,” I said. I figured that in time the little guy would realize his mistake: he was missing a Maine summer. The Great Outdoors. Vacationland. People pay good money, travel hundreds of miles for a taste of it. I figured he’d find his way out.
I was wrong. A few nights later while I was listening to his overhead exercises, another ticka-ticka-ticka came scurrying up the wall behind my head. He’d fetched his mate, and yes, they were settling in for the winter!
Their signs intensified: a bag of flour ravaged; potatoes gnawed. Glenna began telling me about rats spreading disease, about rabies and death. Her rodent calculations indicated that these two would turn into scores by spring if I didn’t act soon.
She suggested poison. There was a box left over from an incident a few years earlier. The rat ate the poison, then crawled up above the ceiling and expired. The house grew so rank in the days that followed that we began eating our meals outdoors. “Never again,” I said.
“All right,” she said, “but you hate mousetraps.”
I sure do. They’re insidious nerve-wracking things. It’s that delicate millisecond when, still holding your breath, you very carefully, very, very slowly remove your thumb from the evil spring-loaded masher, and the trap snaps in your hand.
“Let’s see what happens,” I suggested. “Maybe the cat’ll get ’em.”
A couple of nights later, I was awakened by a loud crash from downstairs. I grabbed the Louisville Slugger from under the bed and started down the stairs. I shined the light into the kitchen. The wastebasket was down, the week’s trash distributed fanlike across the floor. I tiptoed across the living room and flipped on the kitchen light, leaping into the room in the same moment, wielding the baseball bat. No prowler. Then what had knocked over the wastebasket?
That’s when I realized the grim truth: What we had here were genuine garbage-picking, plague-carrying, finger-nibbling-in-your-sleep rats! I bent to pick up the wastebasket, and a dark gray blur shot between my legs and tore into the bathroom. I shut the door, trapping it inside. Then I plucked the sleeping cat from the couch and threw her in with it. The battle began: a hiss, a snarl, a tumble, and then a long, promising silence. I opened the door and the cat raced past me toward the front door, which she attempted to climb. I let her out and she galloped away into the darkness.
The rat signs multiplied daily. Nightly the overhead races took on a bacchanalian quality. I knew I had to act.
The next afternoon I steeled myself and baited six mousetraps with peanut butter. “The traps are too small,” Glenna insisted. “We need rattraps.” “These will do the job,” I replied, and placed them where I had found droppings — black morsels the size of kidney beans.
By evening the traps were all sprung, and the peanut butter licked clean. Except one.
The gauntlet was flung. Alright, rattraps it shall be!
Setting a rattrap is not unlike setting a mousetrap — in principle. But where the mousetrap is indeed menacing, its diabolical big brother, the rattrap is genuinely malicious.
Kneeling on the floor before the open kitchen cupboard, I smeared peanut butter on the trigger, for good measure, I added a chunk of Monterey Jack. Now I only had to place the trap in the cupboard — without disturbing it. I very softly set the forward edge of the trap down on the cupboard floor, lowering the other side as I inched the trap in. I don’t know if the trap sprang and I dropped it, or if I dropped it first and then it sprang. The rattrap exploded, two halves of the wooden base went flying, and I rolled onto my back with dangerous heart palpitations.
I lay awake most of the night, listening to the intruders picnicking in my kitchen. I began to scheme a practical method of dealing with the enemy. By morning my plan was set.
I placed a rubber barrel, half filled with water, below the ceiling vent in the kitchen. Not directly beneath the vent, but to the side. Next I cut a trash bag flat and laid it out beside the barrel, also beneath the ceiling vent but to the other side. I taped lengths of string to the sides and corners of the bag which converged into one long string and led up through the ceiling vent into my bedroom. It was like an upside-down parachute. I baited the trap with a slice of whole wheat bread then went upstairs to test it. When I pulled the string, the bag neatly folded around the bread as it simultaneously rose into the air and swung over the barrel of water. I dropped it. Plop. It worked!
After everyone went to bed that night, I was lying on my bedroom carpet, my face filling the opened floor vent, gazing down on a fresh slice of wheat bread on a dark green trash bag. I waited. I watched. I caught myself drifting dangerously to the alluring edge of slumber.
Suddenly the rat was there — huge like a big dark shoe with a whip tail. I hadn’t seen its approach — I had been dozing. Now it was just backing off the trash bag with the slice of bread in its jaws. I pulled the ripcord, but too late. The rat was already scampering away to whatever banquet was planned that evening.
I marched downstairs, got another slice of bread, placed it on the trash bag, and ran upstairs to take my position. I fell asleep and didn’t awaken until dawn. The bread was gone.
We lived with the bread-barrel-and-bag trap for days. The rats seemed to lose their appetite for whole wheat bread and for outwitting me. And I lost hours of sleep to rat fishing.
I found salvation on a table at the Windsor fair. A white cardboard box labeled RAT GLUE — GUARANTEED! I bought a bunch.
Inside the box were shallow plastic trays filled with thick yellow flypaper-type glue. I set up the trays, as instructed, along the rat walkways. During supper that evening, our cat came staggering across the kitchen floor with a tray attached to her face. It was a good omen.
I awoke early the next morning to the sound of a rat in trouble. I ran downstairs in my bathrobe and switched on the light. There it was, desperately trying to get out of the glue.
I slid a spatula under the trap and lifted my quarry, then opened the back door and headed down the driveway in the cold, driving autumn rain, hoping that no one would catch sight of me in my bathrobe…with a rat on a spatula.
Just as I got to the patch of woods about 200 feed down the road, a car approached — a neighbor who had never spoken to me in ten years. Never even waved. This time he decided to stop.
“How are you?” he asked grimly.
“Good,” I answered.
“So,” he began delicately, “everything all right at home”
“Will be,” I said. “Soon as I toss this rat into the woods”
“Here? Not next to my house, you don’t.”
“No,” I lied. “Past your house. I was taking it down to the river.” Which was a quarter mile away.
He drove off hesitantly, keenly watching in the rearview mirror as I marched with the rodent past his house. When he was out of sight, I set the trap softly in the grass, facing the rat toward his house. “Good luck,” I said, then ran for home.
When I opened the front door, Glenna was at the counter pouring the coffee. “Did anyone see you?” she asked. “It’s pouring out. I mean, you really look…eccentric.”
“Oh. Raining, is it?” I shot back, wiping my face with a towel.
She answered with a short, terrified scream. The other rat, its hind legs glued to a trap, was pulling itself, slap-slap-slap, out from behind the refrigerator.
“This one’s yours,” I said.
“No!” She shouted. Then, abruptly, with sudden calm resolve, said, “Okay. No problem.” The rat-disposal competition was underway. She picked up the spatula, deftly lifted the rat, and dropped it into the water-filled trash barrel. Then peering proudly into the barrel, she grew suddenly horrified. “Ahh,” she cried. It’s swimming.”
Sure enough, the rat was paddling around and around the barrel, floating on the buoyant plastic trap. She started stirring up a whirlpool with the spatula. “Look at him go,” I said, heading out the door, grinning like a crow.
By the time I left the house that morning, my normally sound, well-balanced wife was dancing around a rubber trash barrel furiously shaking a box of rat poison into the whirlpool, chanting, “Drink it, rat! Drink it!”
The rat was gone when I came home. The barrel, stale bread, and trash bag were also gone. Likewise the empty box of rat poison, the mousetraps, and the rattraps. In the days and weeks that followed, our cat returned to sleeping on the couch, and I stopped listening at night for those small, skittering, overhead sounds. Glenna has never told me how she got rid of her rat that morning. And I’ve never asked her.
Excerpt from “’The Year of the Rats,” Yankee Magazine, February 1986.