A few days later, early in the morning, the plough came through the garden. Mrs Frisby heard the chug of the tractor and the soft scrape of the steel against the earth. She watched from just inside her front door, fearfully at first, but then with growing confidence. The owl and the rats had calculated wisely, and the nearest furrow was more than two feet from her house.
Behind the plough, in the moist and shining soil, the rudely upturned red-brown earthworms writhed in a frenzy to rebury themselves; hopping along each furrow a flock of spring robins tried to catch them before they slid from sight. And when the ploughing was done and the worms had all disappeared, either eaten or safely underground, Mr Fitzgibbon came back with the harrow, breaking down the furrows, and turned them all up again. It was a good day for the robins.
After the harrow, for the next two days came the Fitzgibbons themselves, all four of them with hoes and bags of seeds, planting lettuce, beans, spinach, potatoes, corn and asparagus. Mrs Frisby and her family kept out of sight. Thoughtfully, Brutus and Arthur had dug their doorway behind a tuft of grass, so that not even Billy noticed it.
Brutus and Arthur. Mrs Frisby did not suppose she would ever see either of them again, nor Nicodemus, nor any of the others. Brutus, after swallowing Mr Ages’ medicine and resting for half an hour, had gone on his way into the forest to join the colony in Thorn Valley. There was no talk of their coming back, unless their attempt to grow their own food should fail — and she did not believe that would happen; they were too smart. And even if they did fail, they would probably not come back to Mr Fitzgibbon’s farm.
She thought that it would be pleasant to visit them and see their new home, their small lake and their crops growing. But she had no idea where the valley was, and it would be, in any case, too long a journey for her and the children. So she could only wonder about them: Were they, at that moment, like the Fitzgibbons, planting seeds behind their own plough? Some (like Isabella’s mother) might grumble about the hardness of the new life they had chosen. Yet the story of what had happened to Jenner and his friends (if it was Jenner and his friends), to say nothing of the destruction of their own home, would surely help to convince them that Nicodemus’s ideas were right.
The Fitzgibbons finished their planting, and for a week or two all was quiet. But it would not stay that way. The crops would appear, the asparagus was ready to sprout, and for the rest of the spring and summer the garden would be too busy a place for mice to live in comfortably.
So on a day in May as warm as summer, early in the morning, Mrs Frisby and her children laid a patchwork of sticks, grass and leaves over the top of the entrance to their cement block house, and then carefully scraped earth over it so that it would not show. With luck, they would not have to dig a new one in the autumn.
They walked to their summer house, taking half a day to do it, strolling slowly and enjoying the fine weather, stopping on the way to eat some new spring leaves of field cress, some young greens and a crisp, spicy mushroom that had sprouted by the edge of the woods. For their main course, a little farther on, there was a whole field of winter wheat, its kernels newly ripe and soft.
As they approached the brook, towards the big tree in the hollow of whose roots they would make their summer home, the children ran ahead, shouting and laughing. Timothy ran with them, and Mrs Frisby was glad to see that he showed no trace of his sickness. It was an exciting time for them. In the garden they were always alone with themselves, but along the bank of the brook in summer lived five other mice families, all with children. Within a few minutes of arrival, her four had gone with a group of the others down to the water to see the tadpoles swim.
Mrs Frisby set about the job of tidying up the house, which had acquired a carpet of dead leaves during the winter, and then bringing in a pile of soft green moss to serve as bedding for them all. The house was a roomy chamber with a pleasant, earthy smell. Its floor was hard-packed earth, and its wooden roof was an arched intertwining of roots, above which rose the tree itself, an oak.
On her way to get the moss she saw one of her neighbours, a lady named Janice who, like herself, had four children. Janice ran over to talk to her.
‘You’re so late getting here,’ she said. ‘We all thought something must have happened to you.’
‘No,’ said Mrs Frisby, ‘we’re all fine.’
‘But don’t you live in the garden?’ Janice persisted. ‘I should have thought you’d be afraid of the ploughing.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ Mrs Frisby explained, ‘they didn’t plough the particular spot in the garden where we live. It’s behind a boulder.’
‘You were lucky.’
‘That’s true.’ More than that Mrs Frisby did not tell; she had agreed to keep a secret, and she would do as she had said.
Still, she thought after quite a long deliberation, it was probably all right to tell her children, first making them promise to keep it secret. They were, after all, the children of Jonathan Frisby. For all she knew, and for all Nicodemus knew, they were likely to turn out to be quite different from other mice, and they had a right to know the reason.
The following evening, therefore, when they had finished an early supper, she gathered them around her.
‘Children, I have a story to tell you. A long one.’
‘Oh, good!’ cried Cynthia. ‘What kind of a story?’
‘A true one. About your father, and about the rats.’
‘How can it be about Father and the rats?’ Teresa asked.
‘Because he was a friend of theirs.’
‘He was?’ said Martin incredulously. ‘I never knew that.’
‘It was mostly before you were born.’
To everyone’s surprise, Timothy said, ‘I thought he might be. I think Mr Ages was, too.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘I didn’t know it. I just thought it. A couple of times I saw Mr Ages leaving their rosebush. And I knew that Father used to visit him a lot. But I never saw him near the rosebush.’
Probably, Mrs Frisby thought, because he would have been careful always to leave through the blackberry bramble, just so we would not see him.
They sat down outside the entrance to the house, and beginning at the beginning, with her first visit to the rats, she told them all that she had seen and done, and all that Nicodemus had told her. It took a long time to tell it, and as she talked the sun sank low, turning the sky red and lighting the tops of the mountains, beyond which, somewhere, the rats of Nimh were living.
The children’s eyes grew round when she told them about the escape from Nimh, and even rounder when she described her own capture and escape from the birdcage. But in the end the eyes of Teresa and Cynthia were filled with tears, and Martin and Timothy looked sad.
Teresa said: ‘But Mother, that’s terrible. It must have been Justin. He saved Brutus and then went back. And he was so nice.’
Mrs Frisby said: ‘It may have been Justin. We can’t be sure. It could have been one of the others.’
Martin said: ‘I’m going to find out. I’m going to go to the Thorn Valley, somehow, someday.’
‘But it’s too far. And you don’t know where it is.’
‘No. But I’ll bet Jeremy knows. Remember, he told you the rats had a clearing back in the hills. That must be in Thorn Valley.’ He thought about this for a minute. Then he added: ‘He might even fly me there on his back, the way he did you.’
‘But we don’t know where Jeremy is, either. We don’t see the crows down here,’ Mrs Frisby reminded him.
‘No, but in the autumn, when we go back to the garden — I could find him then. If I got something shiny and put it out in the sun, he’d come to get it.’ Martin was growing excited at his idea. ‘Oh, Mother, may I?’
‘I don’t know. I doubt that the rats will want visitors from the outside.’
‘They wouldn’t mind. After all, you helped them, and so did Father. And I wouldn’t do any harm.’
‘It’s not something we have to decide tonight,’ said Mrs Frisby. ‘I’ll think about it. And now it’s late. It’s time for bed.’
The sun had set. They went into the house and lay down on the soft moss Mrs Frisby had placed on the floor of their room under the roots. Outside, the brook swam quietly through the woods, and up above them the warm wind blew through the newly opened leaves of the big oak tree. They went to sleep.