The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder by Patricia Highsmith Page A

the rats, and they were in such number no cat would have ventured to attack them in their lair, which had no escape route for a cat but the way the cat would have come.
    Here the rat nursed his wounds for two days, unassisted by parents who did not even recognize him as offspring, or by relatives either. At least he could nibble on old veal bones, moldy bits of potato, things that rats had brought in to chew in peace. He could see out of only one eye, but already this was making him more alert, quicker in darting after a crumb of food, quicker in retreating in case he was challenged. This period of semi-repose and recuperation was broken by a torrent of hose water early one morning.
    The wooden door was kicked open and the blast of water sent baby rats flying up in the air, smashed a few against the wall, killing them by the impact or drowning them, while adult rats scrambled up the steps past the hose-holder to be met by clubs crashing on their heads and backs, huge rubber-booted feet stamping the life out of them.
    The crippled rat remained below, swimming a bit finally. Men came down the steps with big nets on sticks, scooping up corpses. They dumped poison into the water which now covered the stone floor. The poison stank and hurt the rat’s lungs. There was a back exit, a hole in a corner just big enough for him to get through, and he used it. A couple of other rats had used it also, but the rat did not see them.
    It was time to move on. The cellar would never be the same again. The rat was feeling better, more self-assured and more mature. He walked and crept, sparing his two sore stumps. Before noon, he discovered an alley at the back of a restaurant. Not all the garbage had fallen into the bins. Pieces of bread, a long steakbone with meat on it lay on the cobblestones. It was a banquet! Maybe the best meal of his life. After eating, he slept in a dry drainpipe, too small for a cat to enter. Best to keep out of sight in daylight. Life was safer at night.
    The days passed. The rat’s stumps grew less painful. Even his eye had ceased to hurt. He regained strength and even put on a little weight. His gray, slightly brownish coat became thick and sleek. His ruined eye was a half-closed, grayish splotch, a bit jagged because of the knife’s thrust, but it was no longer running either with blood or lymph. He discovered that by charging a cat, he could make the cat retreat a bit, and the rat sensed that it was because he presented an unusual appearance, limping on two short legs, one eye gone. The cats too had their tricks, puffing their fur up to make themselves look bigger, making throaty noises. But only once had an old ginger tomcat, mangy and with one ear gone, tried to close his teeth on the back of the rat’s neck. The rat had at once attacked a front leg of the cat, bitten as hard as he could, and the cat had never got a grip. When the rat had turned loose, the cat had been glad enough to run away and leap to a windowsill. That had been in a dark garden somewhere.
    The days came and went and grew ever colder and wetter, days of sleep in a patch of sun if possible, more often not, because a hole somewhere was safer, nights of prowling and feeding. And day and night the dodging of cats and the upraised stick in the hands of a human being. Once a man had attacked him with a dustbin, slammed it down on the stones, catching the rat’s tail but not cutting any of it off, only giving him pain such as he had not known since the stab in his eye.
    The rat knew when a gondola was approaching. “Ho! Aye!” the gondoliers would shout, or variations of this, usually when they were about to turn a corner. Gondolas were no threat. Sometimes the gondolier jabbed at him with an oar, more out of playfulness than to kill him. Not a chance had the gondolier! Just one stab that always missed, and the gondolier had glided past in his boat.
    One night, smelling sausage from a tied-up gondola in a narrow canal, the rat ventured on