it if the wind hadn’t chosen those few moments to lull. It didn’t sound like a branch; it sounded like a person. Like some orphan of the storm too weak or badly hurt to even knock and could only scratch. Only no one had been out there… or had there been? Could he be absolutely sure? It had been so dark. Black as the devil’s riding boots.
Drew went to the door, freed the deadbolt, and opened it. He held up the Coleman lamp. No one there. Then, as he was about to shut the door again, he looked down and saw a rat. Probably a Norway, not huge but pretty big. It was lying on the threadbare welcome mat, one of its paws—pink, strangely human, like a baby’s hand—outstretched and still scratching at the air. Its brown-black fur was littered with tiny bits of leaf, twig, and beads of blood. Its bulging black eyes were looking up at him. Its side heaved. That pink paw continued to scratch at the air, just as it had scratched at the door. A miniscule sound.
Lucy hated rodents, screeched her head off if she saw so much as a fieldmouse scuttering along the baseboard, and it did no good to tell her the wee sleekit cowerin beastie was undoubtedly a lot more terrified of her than she was of it. Drew didn’t care much for rodents himself, and understood they carried diseases—hantavirus, rat bite fever, and those were only the two most common—but he’d never had Lucy’s almost instinctive loathing of them. What he mostly felt for this one was pity. Probably it was that tiny pink paw, which continued scratching at nothing. Or maybe the pinpricks of white light from the Coleman lantern he saw in its dark eyes. It lay there panting and looking up at him with blood on its fur and in its whiskers. Broken up inside and probably dying.
Drew bent, one hand on his upper thigh, the other holding down the lantern for a better look. “You were in the equipment shed, weren’t you?”
Almost surely. Then the tree had come down, smashing through the roof, destroying Mr. Rat’s happy home. Had he been hit by a tree branch or a piece of the roof as he scuttled for safety? Maybe by a bucket of congealed paint? Had Pop’s useless old McCulloch chainsaw tumbled off the table and fallen on him? It didn’t matter. Whatever it was had squashed him and maybe broken his back. He’d had just enough gas left in his ratty little tank to crawl here.
The wind picked up again, throwing sleet into Drew’s hot face. Spicules of ice struck the globe of the lantern, hissed, melted, and ran down the glass. The rat panted. The rat on the mat needs help stat, Drew thought. Except the rat on the mat was beyond help. You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist.
Except, of course, he could help.
Drew walked to the dead socket of the fireplace, pausing once for a coughing fit, and bent over the stand containing the little collection of fireplace tools. He considered the poker, but the idea of skewering the rat with it made him wince. He took the ash shovel instead. One hard hit ought to be enough to put it out of its misery. Then he could use the shovel to sweep it off the side of the porch. If he lived through tonight, he had no wish to start tomorrow by stepping on the corpse of a dead rodent.
Here is something interesting, he thought. When I first saw it, I thought “he.” Now that I’ve decided to kill the damn thing, it’s “it.”
The rat was still on the mat. Sleet had begun crusting on its fur. That one pink paw (so human, so human) continued to paw at the air, although now it was slowing down.
“I’m going to make it better,” Drew said. He raised the shovel… held it at shoulder height for the strike… then lowered it. And why? The slowly groping paw? The beady black eyes?
A tree had crashed the rat’s home and crushed him (back to him now), he had somehow dragged himself to the cabin, God knew how much effort it had taken, and was this to be his reward? Another crushing, this one final? Drew was feeling rather crushed himself these days and, ridiculous or not (probably it was), he felt a degree of empathy.
Meanwhile, the wind was chilling him, sleet was smacking him in the