It's a Rat's Life

It's a Rat's Life

   By Ed Staskus

   Aksel was a Norwegian rat, although it would have been a matter of rough-and-tumble if anybody told him that. He thought he was a Norman rat since his forebears had come to the New World aboard a French ship that sailed from Bayeaux long ago. It had been more than a hundred generations of his family saga since then. He had no idea about any Norwegians. He didn’t even know where Norway was.

   He  didn’t know he was living in North Rustico on Prince Edward Island, either. He had no idea he was on the North American continent, for that matter, although if he had known it wouldn’t have mattered. He knew where Rolling’s Pond was. Home is where the heart is. The pond was where he spent most of his time. During the day he slept in the basement of the Stella Maris church. He didn’t own anything, not even a fork, knife, or plate, but it was cozy. He stored some dried food there and had a bedroll of straw and a small pillow.

   Aksel was known by the nickname of Left-Handed. How he came to be called Aksel the Left-Handed was beyond him, since he was right-handed. In the event, he didn’t gripe about it. It was better than some of the nicknames he had heard in his neck of woods, like Moss Neck and Foul Fart.

   He wasn’t a farmer, foraging for food instead of sowing seeds. He looked for grub far and wide. He ate anything and everything. He thought he had probably eaten hundreds of different foods in his lifetime. He ate any discarded morsels he came across as well as all crops from all fields. He ate all the time, snacking on whatever came his way. Some people said he was a glutton. He didn’t bother disagreeing with them. He preyed on lizards, chicks, and other rodents. He caught fish on Fridays. 

   His mother let it slip one day that their kind only lived two or three years. He was aghast. There was no time to waste. His eyesight had always been bad. He needed glasses. He was colorblind, too. His other senses, smell, taste, touch, and hearing, were outstanding. He wasn’t especially agile, but he could run, jump, climb, and swim enough to keep danger at bay. He used his face whiskers to feel the world around him. He could wiggle each one of them individually, unlike cats like Snaps from Foyle’s Cove who were always messing with him. He and Snaps were going to have it out one day. The menace was always laying low for him. He had to find a way to cancel out the cat’s claws, which were razor sharp and deadly. He had the scars to prove it. 

   Except for Snaps, cats rarely bothered Aksel. He was too big for most of them, feral or otherwise. Snaps was a different order of things. He was a dangerous son-of-a-gun. The cat and the rat were a stop-and-go dance in the dark. When Aksel stopped Snaps stopped. When he started up again the cat was on his heels again, low-down and quiet.

   Islanders didn’t always give Aksel his due. Some called him a street rat, even though he was a field rat. Others with college educations called him a Hanover rat. He didn’t like it whenever he was called a dirty rat. He was fastidiously clean. He washed and groomed himself ten times a day. He was a brown rat with a white underside. He was a big boy, his body length almost a foot long with a tail slightly shorter than a foot. All he had to do was flash his teeth and wiggle his tail at passersby to make them jump.

   One day he met one of his own kind in the dumpster behind the co-op store next to Angie’s Eatery. After giving each other the secret handshake, after which both rats were sure the other one was legit, they gossiped while they ate. His new-found friend, it turned out, had come off a cruise ship in Charlottetown, gone on a self-guided tour, been late getting back, and was now stranded until the next boat rolled in.

   “Oh, hell, I can hi-jack myself onto any boat anytime I want to,” he said. “You know those round things they attach to mooring lines, what they call rat guards, and how they coat them with grease? First, I puff up my cheeks. Then I suck up the grease. I spit it out over my shoulder when I go over the rat guard.”

   Cruise ships had been docking in Charlottetown since just after the turn of the century, pulling into port to hearty welcomes. They let loose hundreds sometimes thousands of tourists all at once to stretch their legs, eat, drink, see the sights, and buy “Anne of Green Gables” dolls and effigies.

   It was after midnight when Aksel and Yeoman Purser, which was what his  friend called himself, went their separate ways. “I know I’m just a rat and a mug, to boot, but I have got to say this place here is something else, just beautiful, and everywhere I look there is food.” The hometown rat twitched his agreement.

   Aksel was more nocturnal than not, so when Bernie Doiron found somebody dead in the ground on the other side of the hill from Rolling’s Pond and every cop car, ambulance, and fire truck in the land descended on his stomping grounds, the noise that morning woke him up. He had just rolled over in his straw bed. He coughed and cleared his throat, blinking. He was curious and made his way to the top of the field where it was all happening to see what was going on.

   He had a love hate relationship with human beings. On the one hand, he preferred living near them since they were a rat’s number one fast food outlet. On the other hand, they were always trying to kill him. They checked his droppings unceasingly and tracked him by them. They were always putting out traps and bait stations. Whenever they found his nest they gassed it. He had gotten to be cautious as an accountant. He knew full well what glue boards and snap traps were about. It didn’t matter if they were baited with his favorite fish and cereals. He gave them a wide berth.

   “My mama didn’t raise no fool,” he reminded himself.

   He saw what Bernie had seen and what the cops were seeing. It was an arm that had been chopped off. He guessed the rest of the body was still in the ground. It looked like they were digging it up, although why was beyond him. He knew they weren’t going to eat the remains, so what was the point? What human beings did day in and day out baffled him more often than not. 

   Aksel quickly lost interest in the unearthing. There wasn’t going to be a free meal in it for him anytime soon unless somebody dropped some food. That was something else that puzzled him about men and women. They seemed to never want to pick up food they had dropped, especially the women. In his world no rat did that. They ate everything, no matter what, no matter where it was. 

   He ran across the open ground behind him. He could run faster than any man alive. He could run six times his body length in a single second, but he couldn’t keep it up for long. When he got to the tree line and was out of sight, he slowed down and caught his breath. When he got to Church Hill Rd., he looked both ways before crossing. There was no sense in being run over on his own doorstep by a four wheel bucket of bolts rumbling past.

Excerpted from “Ebb Tide” at http://www.redroadpei.com.

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com.