Chapter 22 Doctor Dolittle's Zoo by Hugh Lofting
THE STABLE MOUSE
My book entitled Tales of The Rat and Mouse Club was by now beginning to look pretty thick and bulky. Of course rewritten, or rather printed, the way it would be in the bound volume itself, it would not take up as much space as it did in my rough copy. Nevertheless I could see by the end of the fourth story (that of the Prison Rat) that only about one more could be included in the book. I told this to the white mouse.
“Well,” said he, “of course I see that you can't make the book too thick, otherwise it would be too heavy for the mouse readers to handle—and the rats have most of the volumes in the club library as it is. But there will be a terrible lot of disappointment. There are no less than nine members still hoping that their stories will be included—And I thought myself that you'd be able to get in another two anyway.”
“Who are the members whose stories are still to be heard?” asked the Doctor.
“Oh, heavens, there's hundreds!—hoping,” said the white mouse. “But there are nine whom I had sort of half promised they would stand a chance. Out of that nine we will now have to pick one—and of course there will be hard feelings. Let me see: there's the Railway Rat. His is a story of travel. Then—another voyager—the Ship's Rat, our old friend of the Canary Islands, Doctor. And there's the Ice-box Mouse and the Theater Mouse. I don't know much about them—newcomers to the club. Then there's the Zoo Rat, the chap who is always boasting of his acquaintance with the lion—and Cheapside says he does really go in and out of his den. Next?—Let me think.... Oh, the Tea-house Mouse. He is a sort of a tittering nincompoop. A regular gossip, giggles all the time. It is easy to see how and why he chose tea-houses to live in. I don't suppose his story is much. Scandal, most likely. I'll be glad to cross him off the list. The Church Mouse, too, we can count him out. His story will be a sort of a lecture, full of quotations and advice to young mice. And I'm so tired of hearing how poor he is. That leaves the Hansom Cab Mouse—his yarn will be good, I suspect.... And the Hospital Mouse. I tell you what I'll do: I'll get them all to give me a rough outline of their stories and I'll pick the one which I think is the best and relate it at the club to-morrow night, eh?”
“All right,” said the Doctor. “And you can tell the others that maybe there will be a second volume of The Tales of the Rat and Mouse Club—later—which they can all be in.”
To our surprise, when the Doctor and I took our places in the Assembly Room of the Rat and Mouse Club the following evening, we found that none of the members whom the President had spoken of last night had been selected to tell the fifth story for the book. Instead a mouse whom neither of us had seen or heard of before got up and was introduced as the Stable Mouse.
“Her story was sort of different, I thought,” the white mouse whispered in my ear. “We want variety in the book. And those others were all jealous of one another anyway. So I decided I'd take a new member altogether.”
The Stable Mouse was a quiet, ladylike little individual—rather shy. And at the beginning she had to be asked several times to speak louder, because some of the members at the back of the hall (a few of the old-age pensioners who lived in the club) could not hear her.
“This story is mostly about my first husband, Corky,” she began, “a good-natured mouse, but the most frivolous-minded mate that anybody was ever asked to live with. It was largely on Corky's account that I became a stable mouse—thinking it was a safer place for him, one where he would be less likely to get into mischief and hot water. Stables are generally very good places for mice to live. There are always oats, which after all form the most nourishing and digestible food that can be found anywhere. And it is pleasant in the evenings when the horses come home from their work to sit up in the rafters and listen to them gossip about the day's doings.
“But even in a stable that husband of mine could find plenty of occasions to get himself into trouble and to keep me worried to death. One day he found a large watering hose in a corner of the stable. And he thought it would be great fun to get into it and run up and down inside, as though it were a tunnel—sort of switchback idea. He was a regular child—I see that now: he never really grew up. Well, while he was playing this game, sliding and whooping round the loops of the hose, one of the stable-boys came and turned the water on to wash the stable floor. And of course with the terrific force of the water my husband was shot out of the hose like a bullet from a gun. His switchback gave him a much bigger ride than he expected. As it happened, the stable-boy had the hose pointed out into the yard when the water first rushed forth. And I suddenly saw Corky, gasping and half-drowned, flying over the pig-house roof. He landed in the pigs' trough on the other side—and very nearly got eaten by a large hog who mistook him for a floating turnip before he scrambled out to safety.
“Often I used to think that that light-headed husband of mine used to deliberately get himself into hot water—just for sheer devilment. And no amount of hard lessons seemed to teach him any sense. How it was that he wasn't killed in the first year of his life I don't know.
“Would you believe it? Time after time he used to get into the horses' nose-bags to steal their oats while they were actually eating! I told him often that one of these days he would get chewed up. What usually happened was that his moving around in the bags would tickle the horses' noses until they sneezed and blew him out on to the floor like a piece of chaff.
“One day this happened when the farmer who owned the place was standing in the stable with his wife. But this time the horse sneezed so hard that Corky was shot right up, nearly to the rafters. And when he came down he landed on the farmer's hat. The farmer thought it was just a drop of water leaking from the roof—it was raining at the time—and didn't take any notice. But presently while his wife was talking to him she suddenly saw Corky's nose peering over the brim of her husband's hat—wondering how he was going to get down to solid ground. Being, like most women, terrified of mice, she just lost her head, screamed and struck at Corky with her umbrella. She didn't hit him but she nearly brained her husband—who of course thought that she had suddenly gone crazy. And in the general excitement that followed Corky, as usual, got away.
“But one day he had a very narrow escape; and if I hadn't been there to come to his assistance it would have surely been the end of his adventurous career. Now there was an old jackdaw who used to hang around that stable yard. Corky took a dislike to him from the start. And I am bound to say that he certainly was a churlish, grouchy curmudgeon of a bird. He used to watch from the stable roof, and if the farmer's wife threw out any nice tit-bits of food he would be down on them before we ever got a chance to start out for them. If we did get there first he would drive us off savagely with that great scissors-like bill of his. It didn't matter how much food there was, he wouldn't let us get any. The largest rats were scared of him, for he was worse than a game-cock to fight with. Even the cat wouldn't face him. She would try to pounce on him when his back was turned but she would never face a duel with that terrible bill.
“The result was that Mr. Jackdaw—Lucifer we called him—got to be pretty much the boss of the roost round that stable yard. He knew it, too. And everybody hated him.
“Well, one day Corky came to me just brimming over with news and excitement.
“'What do you think?' says he. 'You know that new stable lad, the cross-eyed one with red hair?—Well, he's making a trap to catch Lucifer. I saw him myself.'
“'Oh,' I said, 'don't get excited over that. He'll never catch him. That bird knows every kind of trap that was ever invented.'
“Nevertheless Corky was very hopeful. And he used to spend hours and days watching that red-headed lad trying to bag Mr. Jackdaw. First the boy used a sieve and a string, baiting the arrangement with raw meat. But Lucifer gave that clumsy contrivance one glance and never even looked at it again. Next the lad rigged up various sorts of nets into which he hoped the bird would fly or could be driven. Corky kept running to me with reports, two or three times a day, to keep me posted on how things were going. Then horse-hair nooses were tried—and paper bags with raisins and treacle inside.
“But as I had told Corky, Lucifer was a wily bird and he seemed to know just as much about traps as the boy did. What was more, he soon got on to the fact that Corky was watching the proceedings with great interest. Because one morning he chased him away from some soup-meat on the garbage heap, saying,
“'Hoping to see me get trapped, eh? You little imp! Get out of that before I nip the tail off you!'
“'You may get caught yet, you big black bully,' Corky threw back at him as he ran for a hole. 'And I hope you do!'
“'Oh, hah, hah!' croaked the jackdaw as he set to on the meat. 'That red-haired bumpkin couldn't catch me if he tried for a lifetime.'
“But the red-haired bumpkin was a persevering lad and not so stupid as he looked. He had made up his mind that he was going to have that jackdaw in a cage for a pet. And after a good many failures, instead of giving up, he set to work observing the quarry and his habits and trying to find just why it was that he hadn't caught him. And among other things he noticed that the jackdaw had one favorite drinking-place, a little pool under a tap in a corner of the stable yard. Also he noticed that the bird never flew down to settle where anything new had been set up or anything old taken away.
“In other words, the stable lad had stumbled upon the truth that birds, like mice, are afraid of anything unfamiliar. That's their great protection. They've a keen sense of observation; and whenever a yard or a corner of a garden has anything new or changed about it, they are at once suspicious and on their guard.
“So, having learned this, the bumpkin went about his job differently. He saw that whatever was changed, whatever he put out to catch the jackdaw, must be changed or put out gradually. He began by laying a twig down near the watering-place—just one. Lucifer when he came eyed it suspiciously. But finally he decided it was innocent, walked around it and took his drink. The next morning the boy had two twigs there. Lucifer behaved in the same way. Three mornings later there were four or five twigs there. And so on, until a regular little bank of twigs surrounded the tiny pool beneath the tap; and the jackdaw couldn't get at the water without stepping on them.
“But at this point Mr. Lucifer became very wary. He walked all around the twigs several times and finally flew away. He had gone to find another drinking-place.
“Corky came to me in despair.
“'You are right,' he said dolefully. 'That bird is related to the devil, I do believe. I'm afraid he'll never be caught.'
“But suddenly the weather came to the assistance of our red-headed trapper. It was late November; and one morning we woke up to find the ground and everything covered with a white mantle of snow and every puddle, pool and stream topped with ice. Mr. Jackdaw came into the stable yard looking for breakfast—as usual. There wasn't any. Everything was covered, cold and silent. He looked in at the stable door. There he saw us, nibbling oats on the top of the bin. He would have come in, only he was afraid.
“'You vermin,' he sneered from the door, 'are well off, guzzling in shelter, dry and warm, while honest folk can starve outdoors, with every blade of grass buried in the snow. A pest on the weather!'
“'We would throw you some oats,' said I, 'if you hadn't always been such a mean, selfish grouch to us, driving us from every tit-bit even when there was enough for all. Yes, you're right: it is bad weather—for folks who've gone through life making no friends.'”