The day was bound to come, and it didn’t take long, when my father noticed. Something had been into the Hopi blue corn, shredding the tiny husks to get at the baby ears inside. “I think it’s a rat,” he reported one morning at breakfast. “Probably that same one that was in the house. I think he’s working the field now.”
I felt so ashamed. “Maybe Ringo will get him,” I said.
“As long as he isn’t coming back in the house, why don’t we leave him be?” my mother suggested. “Think what the ravens have done to us. The coyotes get in the corn…. Think what a deer has done in one night.”
My mother likes to think of us as sharing the valley with all the animals, and so does my father—to a degree. With the exception of deer mice lately, we’d never poisoned anything, and my father didn’t even own a gun. When the aphids would get out of hand, he’d order five or ten thousand ladybugs.
“Dusty’s good at keeping the deer off,” my father replied. “I don’t worry about the deer. But it doesn’t appear that Dusty’s taking care of this rat.”
There you’re mistaken, I thought. But what I said to my dad was, “This rat is cool! He’s got a bushy tail, you know.”
My father wagged his head. “A rat is a rat is a rat. And you can bet there’s more where he came from. Mama rats, baby rats …”
“Maybe not,” I countered. “Maybe he’s a loner.”
My mother got a chuckle out of that. I forged ahead, pleading my case. “Think about all the enemies he has in life. Weasels, skunks, foxes, badgers, coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, gopher snakes, not to mention Ringo.” I was making myself sick with this list. “Owls, too,” I added.
My father stopped and stroked his smooth chin. “Tep, I’m surprised. You’ve always been the best scarecrow I’ve got. You feel pretty strongly about this rat, don’t you?”
“Maybe there’s some good that this rat does around here, and we don’t even know about it.”
My father was interested. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
I thought wildly for a line of argument that might sway him. “Some chili seeds need to pass through the gut of a bird,” I began slowly, pausing for a breath and more time to think. “You taught me that. The seed couldn’t sprout without the help of the digestive system of the bird.”
“Sure thing,” my father agreed, proud that I’d remembered.
“Well, rats must help some seeds out, too,” I continued. “Maybe in a number of ways. When a packrat moves pinyon nuts around, sometimes he’ll drop a nut and pick up something else. Maybe he’ll drop that nut in a place where it will sprout and become a pine tree. So he has a valuable place in nature.”
“Good point,” my father said. “Go on.”
“Well, what else … Packrats eat insects—I read that in Mom’s field guide. For all we know, that rat had a sweet tooth for the Luperini beetles in the gourds. We might lose some squash—corn, I guess you said it was—and a few other things, but the rat might be helping us out in ways you don’t even know about!”
My mother was beaming as she put her arm around my shoulder. “That’s my boy,” she said. “And don’t forget, that rat might help make science possible for someone like me forty thousand years from now.”
My father couldn’t help laughing. “You guys almost have me rooting for the rat!”
“Try to think of him more like a rabbit,” my mother suggested. “He’s just as adorable, maybe more so. Rabbits have caused us a lot more grief than packrats.”
My dad went out to work and my mother started mixing up some bread dough. Twice a week she bakes outside in the adobe oven my father and I built, and those days are extra special. I watched as she kneaded the bread. She’s small, but she has a lot of power in her arms. “Tell me what I was like in the incubator,” I said.
My mother looked up, a little surprised.
“No joking around,” I said. “I really want to know.”
“You fought for every breath,” she said. “It would have been so easy for you to just give up.”
“How long was I in there?”
“Months.”
I snagged a little raw dough, pretending I had to snatch it fast. “How much exactly did I weigh at first?”
“Two and a quarter pounds.”
“I really wasn’t supposed to live?”
“They told us the chances were ten to one against, maybe worse.”
I was standing there wishing she’d say more. Somehow she knew what I was most needing to hear. “You were born with incredible willpower, Tep. You’ve always had it. You’re tenacious about anything worth fighting for. You always have been.”
She set the dough to rise. In the heat of a summer morning like this, it would rise quickly. After it rose the first time, she’d punch it down, shape it into loaves, and let it rise again. I went out to get the fire going in the beehive adobe oven. I like to use a combination of scrub oak and juniper. The oak coals burn long and even, and the juniper adds a little flavor. As my fire caught, I was trying to catch fire with the idea that I could control the rat. I had to stop raiding our fields, that’s all there was to it. I repeated to myself the words my mother had said: “You were born with incredible willpower, Tep. You’ve always had it. You’re tenacious about anything worth fighting for. You always have been.”
I can do it, I told myself, if only I’d summon the willpower. No more squashes, no baby corn. None. None!
I missed my room. I’d take a little nap there. It was still morning, and the upstairs hadn’t heated up yet.
As I woke from my nap, hungry as ever, the delicious smell of fresh-baked bread filled the house. Through the register in the floor, I heard my parents talking about me. “Tep’s sleeping a lot,” my father was saying. “And he seems to have a lot on his mind.”
After a long pause, my mother said, “I think he’s just going through a phase.”
Right then and there, I decided that I had to take charge of the rat, and tonight would be the night. When I’d accomplished that, I could go back to working on the riddle of what had happened to me. Maybe I could return to Picture House. Maybe I could find that flute.
I took the old fruitcake tin in my hands, and I popped the lid. Here were treasures I couldn’t possibly let the rat have: my father’s first tepary beans and the ancient corn from Picture House that I would plant soon. For these treasures I would fight the rat with everything in me. If I could prevail, I could start to get my life back. If I lost…
I set the lid aside, and I placed the open tin on my desk.
Out of habit, the rat started down for the field that night. I turned him back by picturing the seeds in that fruitcake tin: the little plastic bag of teparies, the bag of corn.
Moments away from the showdown I had staged for myself, I climbed the side of the cabin to Ringo’s entry spot, up under the eaves above the second story. Dusty was watching from below. Once inside, I crawled down the rough-hewn log walls and jumped onto my bed. The rat nosed all around the room where the floor met the walls, and then he jumped onto the chair. Now his hands were up on the desk, and he was peering inside the tin.
I could see the seeds now, and so could the rat. In my gut, I could feel the craving. I only wanted to tear at those bags, devour the prize. But from the back of my mind I screamed in my own voice. “Not those beans! Not that corn!”
I attacked. I fought with all my willpower, but with a spring the rat was on top of the desk tearing at the seeds. No! I screamed, and I fought with everything I had. Not my father’s tepary beans. Not my Picture House corn.
Tep! I yelled. Fight him! Fight for your life, Tep!
My attack was met by a furious onslaught that shook me through and through with waves of convulsions. I got mad, I kept fighting, I counterattacked. In the end, I beat him. I thrashed him. Now it was the rat that would have to look out through that tiny window, and I could decide what I would and wouldn’t do.
I started up the walls toward the hole under the beam, knowing I shouldn’t wait any longer before getting back to Dusty. As my bad luck would have it, Ringo appeared suddenly above, making his high-pitched hunting cry like crackling static. He had me trapped and he knew it. How did this happen? I wondered. Where had Dusty been?
The ringtail rushed to the attack. We tumbled across the room, and I fought with teeth and claws as he did the same. He seemed much stronger than the first time we’d met, and I was quickly wearing out—I knew I had to get away. The chance arrived when I bit him on one of his oversize ears. As fast as I could, I scurried up the wall and through the hole next to the beam.
I’d made it outside, but now he had me by the tail. As I swung around to try to get at him, my claws lost their hold on the logs, and I was falling.
It’s a long way to the ground from the beams above the second story. I spread my limbs wide to try to slow myself down. The world was flying by and not so slowly. Still, I might have been all right if I hadn’t landed with a splash in the rain barrel we keep by the porch.