Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH: Chapter 21–Epilogue

There were welding tools, soldering irons, and electric drills.

The jeep trails do not cross it, nor even go close to it, for the mountains around it are forbidding, too steep and rocky even for jeeps, and are covered with thorny thickets.

This clearing was on the far side of the valley, beyond it the mountain wall rose again, a steep slope with big outcroppings of stone—granite ledges that thrust six or ten feet out of the earth.

It wasn’t that he was lazy and didn’t want to work. He was just more cynical than the rest of us; stealing did not bother him.

He found the rats all grouped around the motor. It had been left plugged in, though it was turned off. They must have been gnawing at the insulation for some reason—at least that’s what he thinks.

“And do you know? They’re going to. I was joking, of course, but the man in charge of the group didn’t take it as a joke at all. He wanted to know where the farm was, how far away, how many acres, what I raised, how many rats I thought there were. He acted really interested. It seems they wanted to examine the dead rats at Henderson’s, but they couldn’t. He’d already sent them to the town dump, and they were incinerated.”

But on the other side of the stone there was an impasse.

Under Arthur’s direction the ladder-like structures became a scaffolding—four small towers standing one near each corner of the block.

From these bars they now hung pulleys wound with strong, thin cord, and at the ends of the cords they fastened hooks, which they slipped into the oval-shaped holes in the block and pulled taut.

Two rats to a roller, they slipped four of these under the cinder block so that they lay athwart the hole, like bars across a window.

When it moved off the hindmost of the rollers, as it did every few inches, the two rats in the rear would quickly pick that one up and replace it under the front of the block.

The bush fought back, then yielded angrily, snapping and crackling before the inexorable thrust of steel.

He reached a sparse thicket of saplings almost out of her sight, and there, abruptly, he fell over on his side and lay still.

One of the men wielded his shovel for another minute, and then the doctor peered in.

Behind the plow, 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.