'Do not leave here, and do not be afraid,' said Mother Rat. 'I shall return soon, with more to eat.'
Four sets of black eyes stared up at her as she gnawed at the greasy heel of a tuber, the first bit of food they had seen in weeks. With a shake of her lank and oily fur, she slipped out, and was gone.
The young rodents waited only a moment before they descended upon the tuber, scarfing it down and tussling with each other for the scraps.
'I am going out,' the rat child with the white facial marking said. 'To eat the bread I can smell with my cunning nose.'
'I shall go with you, to grab the bit of sausage I spied yesterday with my keen eyes,' said his sister, whose pelt was a light brown. 'We shall eat bread and wurst, and find more food.'
The third rat watched as his litter-mates left the cramped surroundings of their cozy little recess, cast a glance at his remaining sibling, and followed the others out into the dark.
The last rat, whose fur was red and gray, curled up in the corner and began to shiver, trusting that Mother would return.
Later than she had hoped, Mother Rat returned home to find three of her cubs missing and the fourth being swallowed head-first by a thick, black snake. She lunged at the intruder and bit its face, but the snake thrashed about so violently that she was forced to flee the hole. She sniffed the air with her little nose and perked up her little ears, but neither sound nor scent of her babies reached her. So, with a shake of her lank and oily fur, she turned tail, and ran.
***
The child watched the sun rise through a crack in the beams of the wooden trap door. As soon as she heard boots marching on the courtyard's stones, she hurried back to the hole through which she had come. Replacing the bricks one by one and with great care in order to confuse anyone following her, she wiggled back through the narrow gap, taking care not to rip the pouch of stolen grain, and emerged into a familiar section of tunnel.
There was a noise behind her where no noise should have been, so she pulled herself into an alcove, to hide. After a long time, her limbs began to hurt. She was about to shift position when she heard the noise again – closer, this time. Her heart was beating so loudly in her ears that she was convinced it would betray her presence.
After an few more agonizing minutes, the noise sounded from just around the corner to her hiding space. It reminded her of someone with a bad cold muffling a sneeze.
'I must move now, or else whatever is out there will catch me,' she thought.
She leaped from her crevasse and ran through the dark, her hands feeling for the familiar guide-points, her memory guiding her home.
'I cannot lead it all the way back, for whatever it is will likely endanger my family,' she thought and darted into a section of tunnel she knew to be unstable and full of deadly sinkholes. Trusting her ears and toes, she wove her way through the ink-black pitfalls and plunging deeps of the dangerous length of tunnel, pausing at the end to listen.
Within a few minutes, she heard something scrape against a far wall; it made the strange sound that had made her want to hide.
'Here is where I make my stand,' she said to herself, settling into a fighting crouch and pulling her knife from its sheath, a brave decision for a girl of eight years.
She heard the muffled noise one last time, followed by desperate squeals and the sound of frantic scraping. Then, all was quiet for a moment, until whatever had been following her impacted, somewhere far below, with a dull and distant thud.
mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥
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