The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

The crowd was silent. They'd been silent since Hamnpork had been propelled out of the pit. Around the top of the wall which, yes, was far too high for a rat to jump, Darktan saw faces. They were mostly red. The mouths were mostly open. The silence was the silence of red faces drawing breath ready to start shouting at any moment.

Around Darktan the surviving rats were scrambling aimlessly for a foothold on the wall. Fools, he thought. Four or five of you together could make any dog wish you'd never been born. But you scrabble and panic and you get picked off one at a time…

The slightly-stunned Jacko blinked and stared down at Darktan, a growl rising in his throat.

“Right, you kkrrkk,” said Darktan, loud enough for the watchers to hear. “Now I'm going to show you how a rat can live.”

He attacked.

Jacko was not a bad dog, according to the way of dogs. He was a terrier and liked killing rats in any case, and killing lots of rats in the pit meant that he got well fed and called a good boy and wasn't kicked very often. Some rats did fight back and that wasn't much of a problem, because they were smaller than Jacko and he had a lot more teeth. Jacko wasn't that smart, but he was a lot smarter than a rat and, in any case, his nose and mouth did most of the thinking.

And he was surprised, therefore, when his jaws snapped shut on this new rat and it wasn't there.

Darktan didn't run like a rat should. He ducked like a fighter. He nipped Jacko under the chin and vanished. Jacko spun around. The rat still wasn't there. Jacko had spent his show business career biting rats that tried to run away. Rats that stayed really close were unfair!

There was a roar from the watchers. Someone shouted, “Ten dollars on the rat!” and someone else punched him in the ear. Another man started to climb into the pit. Someone smashed a beer bottle on that man's head.

Dancing back and forth under the spinning, yapping Jacko, Darktan waited for his moment…

… and saw it, and lunged, and bit hard.

Jacko's eyes crossed. A piece of Jacko that was very private and of interest only to Jacko and any lady dogs he might happen to meet was suddenly a little ball of pain.

He yelped. He snapped at the air. And then, in the uproar, he tried to climb out of the pit. His claws scraped desperately as he reared up against the greasy, smooth planking.

Darktan jumped onto his tail, ran up his back, scampered to the tip of Jacko's nose, and leapt over the wall.

He landed among legs. Men tried to stamp on him, but that meant other men would have to give them room. By the time they'd elbowed one another out of the way and stamped heavily on one another's boots, Darktan was gone.

But there were other dogs. They were half-mad with excitement in any case, and now they pulled away from ropes and chains and set off after a running rat. They knew about chasing rats.

Darktan knew about running. He sped across the floor like a comet, with a tail of snarling, barking dogs, headed for the shadows, spied a hole in the planking and dived through into the nice, safe, darkness—

Click went the trap.

CHAPTER 9

Farmer Fred opened his door and saw all the animals of Furry Bottom waiting for him. ‘We can't find Mr. Bunnsy or Ratty Rupert!’ they cried.

—From “Mr. Bunnsy Has an Adventure”

“At last!” said Malicia, shaking the ropes off. “Somehow I thought rats would gnaw quicker.”

“They used a knife,” said Keith. “And you could say thank you, couldn't you?”

“Yes, yes, tell them I'm very grateful,” said Malicia, pushing herself upright.

“Tell them yourself!”

“I'm sorry, I find it so embarrassing to… talk to rats.”

“I suppose that's understandable,” said Keith. “If you've been brought up to hate them because they—”

“Oh, it's not that,” said Malicia, walking over to the door and looking at the keyhole. “It's just that it's so… childish. So… tinkly-winkly. So… Mr. Bunnsy.”

“Mr. Bunnsy?” squeaked Peaches, and it really was a squeak, a word that came out as a sort of little shriek.

“What about Mr. Bunnsy?” said Keith.

Malicia reached into her pocket and pulled out her packet of bent hair pins. “Oh, some books some silly woman wrote,” she said, poking at the lock. “Stupid stuff for ickle kids. There's a rat and a rabbit and a snake and a hen and an owl and they all go around wearing clothes and talking to humans and everyone's so nice and cosy it makes you absolutely sick. D'you know my father kept them all from when he was a kid? ‘Mr. Bunnsy Has an Adventure’, ‘Mr. Bunnsy's Busy Day’, ‘Ratty Rupert Sees It Through’… he read them all to me when I was small and there's not an interesting murder in any of them.”

“I think you'd better stop,” said Keith. He didn't dare look down at the rats.