The Book of the Dun Cow (4 page)

Nobody had to tell thirty Hens where to sleep that night. Not one of them was going back into the Coop, once Nezer's name had been named and his guilt proven. But somebody might have told Chauntecleer where to crow compline, for the close of the day. He usually did that from the top beam of the Coop. However, the top beam of the Coop was now a long bunch of Chickens from one end to the other, sitting ghostly, patient and pillow still. No crowing there, unless one wanted to knock a Chicken off.

So Chauntecleer grumbled his way to a stump and crowed the close of the day from that. Then he went to see how Mundo Cani Dog was doing.

Mundo Cani had put his nose to use.

Immediately after crowing the crow of grief that morning, Chauntecleer had strutted round the Coop until he had found a hole through the wall. He was bitter with himself that he had never noticed it before; but now he could be certain that it was Nezer's own door into Chauntecleer's Coop because enormous Rat droppings were discovered immediately inside. And he marveled at the size of the Rat's entrance: Nezer had done himself proud.

Having found the door, Chauntecleer wanted to do something about it. He wanted Nezer to stay under the Coop until nighttime, so he wondered what might be large enough to plug the tunnel.

At that precise moment a storm of sniffles, followed by a rushing, mighty wind, sailed around the Coop. Mundo Cani had just blown his—nose. And for the rest of the day the Dog lay belly flat upon the ground, his knees poking high above his back, his nose stuffed into the Rat's doorway. Chauntecleer took a particular pleasure in that arrangement.

“Me, mutt. It's me,” he whispered now, because the night was mortally dark. “Have you heard anything?”

The Dog said something. But if his nose was under the Coop, so was his mouth; and who can understand a voice from underneath a chicken coop? After he said his something, Mundo Cani coughed; and his eyes rolled around like twin moons in his head, beseeching the Rooster with tears. Chauntecleer was tickled.

“Or have you
felt
anything?” he whispered.

What the Dog had next to say he said very fast, crossing his eyes. And then he coughed again, and his wide eyes nearly popped out. Chauntecleer was delighted.

“Surely,” he whispered, “you haven't
smelled
anything?”

Mundo Cani said one word. It was a very short word and, by the sound of it, a sad word. But then he didn't have the time to say a second word, because his eyes filled up with water; his ears flew up from his head; and he sneezed.

All of the Chickens did a little dance on top of the Coop, and the Dog was blasted out of the hole, backward.

“You pump! You paragraph!” Chauntecleer hissed. “What are we going to do with noises like that? What
won't
Nezer know after such a speech?”

Mundo Cani hung his head and let a river run onto the ground. “This nose smelled one or two bad smells,” he said, “but that is as it should be. It deserves punishment now and again—may it stick under your Coop forever for sneezing.”

“All right, all right. Is the Rat still there?” Chauntecleer wanted to know. He was in cold earnest now, and the games were over.

“Pump is maybe better than Lummox. But Paragraph—this poor head does not know what such a name might mean. Yet if the Doctor—”

“The Rat!” Chauntecleer hissed directly into Mundo Cani's ear. “The Rat! Is Nezer still under the Coop?”

“There was no sound all the day long. Nor any noise at all,” the Dog said. “This nose felt nothing move. It could feel anything—nits, tics, grubs—were they to move even a little bit; but it felt nothing move under your Coop, Doctor. So then it did a poor job?” The question was a mournful one. “Maybe since the
morning
he isn't there.”

“If you haven't heard anything, then Nezer's there. It's the silence,” Chauntecleer said quietly, “that announces him. One last egg was eaten before noontime. Ebenezer Rat is in there, Mundo Cani Dog.” Chauntecleer was quiet for a moment. Then he said: “Watch, now; and wait.” And he left.

It was Nezer Rat's eternal silence and his dark secrecy which made any plan to feather him so difficult. Who had ever seen Nezer, except as he was leaving? Who had ever heard Nezer? Why, the long Rat could slide past thirty sleeping Hens and a dreaming Rooster, and no one would ever know that he had been among them—except that Beryl or Jacinth or Chalcedony would wake in the morning with one less egg beneath her.

It was Nezer's deep privacy which Chauntecleer had to overcome with his plan. Somehow he had to get Nezer out from under the floor and up into the Coop; there the Rat would be on the Rooster's ground, and the Rooster might be able to do something then. Chauntecleer decided against luring the Rat out, decided for driving him out. But who would go under the Coop? Who could hurt a Rat? No, the question might better be: Who could
sting
a Rat?—for therein lay an answer.

The Rooster went a little distance from the Coop and stopped before a small mound of soft dirt. There was a perfectly round hole in the perfect middle of this mound. Chauntecleer set his eye to this hole and looked in.

“Tick-tock!” he whispered.

“Not now!” said someone down in the hole.

“Tick-tock, rouse it and come up here,” the Rooster said.

“I'm busy sleeping.” The voice hardly sounded like a voice. It sounded like tiny twigs snapping. “My children are all busy sleeping, and the door is closed. Good night. Hush and good night!”

“Sleep in the morning, Tick-tock; but get up here now. This is urgent.”

“Mornings, you enormity, are for working. Nights are for sleeping, and you crew the nighttime in some little while ago. Therefore we are fast asleep. Punctual! Let urgent happen when it's scheduled. Good night.” Tiny twigs snapping were beginning to sound more like large branches cracking.

“I crew the nighttime in?” Chauntecleer knew very well that he had.

“You are an excellent clock, friend Chauntecleer. Good night!” Crack! “Good night!”
Crack!

Chauntecleer lifted his eye from the hole and spoke to himself: “I crew the nighttime in. Well, then, I will crow the morning in.”

He bent over again so that his tail feathers looped high over his back. He stuck his jet-black beak straight down into the perfectly round hole of Tick-tock the Black Ant. And then he crowed a minor morning crow. Nobody heard it, except for a few hundred Black Ants, who began immediately to march out of the hole in three perfect lines. In the middle of the night, the Black Ants went to work.

Tick-tock stood atop his hole, crossing his arms, shaking his head helplessly, and watching his laborers labor at a damn-fool hour.

“Good morning and what is it?” he snapped to the Rooster. “Urgent had better be urgent.”

“Believe it,” Chauntecleer said. “I wouldn't be here unless it was.”

Chauntecleer the Rooster was growing weary of irritations. It crossed his mind for the second time in a day that it would be good to have just one person for simple friendship and for talk. In this single, chilly moment—as he got ready to give instructions to a busy-brittle and punctual Ant—the Rooster felt lonely.

It started to rain. Not a heavy rain. Not a storm. Just a miserable drizzle which pattered all over the roof of the Coop and which blew a cold mist through the windows.

Chauntecleer crouched in a dark corner, waiting, and was heartsick.

“Ebenezer Rat,” he cursed quietly to himself. All thirty of his Hens were getting wet on the top beam of the Coop. But they would not, nor could they, come into the Coop for shelter. They had to wait in their chilly place, and Chauntecleer had to wait in his; and the difference was that he was alone.

He held two strong, long, white feathers in his left claw. He could barely see them through the heavy darkness; but he felt them several times over and knew them to be exactly what he wanted: They were sharp and barbed, bright and steely in their strength.

Left and right Chauntecleer tipped his head for a sound; but if there was one below, the sounds above covered it up. Black Ants are mighty quiet. He didn't expect to hear Tick-tock or his reserves. And Nezer was smooth silence itself: He surely didn't expect to hear the Rat creeping through his gloomy depths. But when the two came together, then there should be some sound for the warning. That was what Chauntecleer listened for.

Yet silence and the rain continued. Once the Hens clucked against the itchy rain and shuffled for a better perch above him; but then the hush settled down again.

Suddenly beneath the floor there was a scurrying. No voice. Not even a small cry. But the scurrying was desperate, like wind in a bottle, like someone holding his breath—a dry scratching sound which shot under the floor from one end of the Coop to the other. A body bumped the wall. Chauntecleer was inclined to jump, but he waited, shivering. The sound moved in a circle for a moment, then straightened out and aimed for Nezer's door through the wall.

A short, astonished bark came from that place. Then a truly painful yelping rang out. The Coop began to shake. Mundo Cani was caught, hurt, and trying to break free all at once.

“Oh, Ebenezer! Oh, Rat!” the Rooster swore, but he waited. He fought an urge, and he waited.

In that moment his battle instincts were annoyed: Nezer had created an excellent cover for himself in Mundo Cani's yelping. Chauntecleer lost all sense of the sound underneath the floor, and that gave the advantage to the Rat. How could Chauntecleer know, in this oily blackness, when Nezer was passing through his hole in the floorboards? How would he know the moment for attack?

Chauntecleer pulled a feather from his breast. He would lay it over the hole and then, perhaps, see its shadow white move at the Rat's entrance. With the feather in his beak he touched along the floor toward the hole, the beak brushing wood. Suddenly he knew precisely where the hole was. He didn't see it. He hadn't felt it. But immediately beside his ear he
heard
it: The Rat's breathing nose was there. Then a whole Rat and a silent mouth.

Ebenezer flew at Chauntecleer's throat and tore feathers away.

The Rooster went up on his claws, beating his wings together in front of him. Shock turned into ferocity. The Rat hunched, ready again for a spring. Chauntecleer's feathers shook out and stood away from his body, so that he seemed an enormous shadow. He hopped, head high, and hissed a taut threat to the Rat.

But night was Ebenezer's element. He slipped through the air like a lizard and seized the Rooster at the back of his neck.

So violent a convulsion shook the Rooster's body that the Rat fell away, and immediately Chauntecleer turned and leaped—beak, beating wings, and claws all forward at the Rat. The right claw came down on Ebenezer's back like a beam and clutched, gripped. But the Rat twisted himself rubberwise and buried his snout in Chauntecleer's stomach. There he began to gnaw. The Rooster did not let go. And while Nezer jerked and chewed at his flesh, he took one of the white arrow feathers into his beak and dug down at the Rat.

Mundo Cani had fallen quiet, though nobody knew just when he had. None but the rain made a noise. Silently a Rooster and a Rat were fighting. The Rat would kill if he could; the Rooster wanted only to finish the plan which he had.

Chauntecleer pulled his head away from the Rat's shoulder. His beak was empty and the feather gone. Ebenezer was an eating worm within his stomach; yet faithfully the Rooster held him. He took the second white feather into his beak, found a place in Ebenezer's other shoulder, and pushed. With sudden, almighty thrusts he pushed the barb of the feather deep into the Rat's hide.

It is a horror to fight an enemy altogether silent, whose one cry is the rip of his teeth through skin. Chauntecleer—beak empty for the second time—shattered the silence with a wild crow of victory, spun the Rat through the air behind him, and heard his body thump against the wall.

Then the fighters lay down. But it was Ebenezer Rat who had lost.

Forty-eight Black Ants, who had been biting the Rat's tail, duly hopped off, formed a perfect line, and marched out of the Coop. But the two magnificent feathers which were hooked into Ebenezer's black hide would stay there until his own last day.

“Now, Ebenezer! Now, Rat, find you a hole,” breathed the hoarse Chauntecleer from where he lay. “Find a hole, black Rat, which will let you pass through it like a secret. It will have to be a cave. And learn all over again how to sneak, now that you have two wonderful feathers to tell all the world of your coming. The Chicken eater chickened! Ha!” Chauntecleer barked. “Go with God, Ebenezer Rat; and forever leave my eggs alone.”

Thirty shivering Hens plopped down from the top beam of the Coop and slipped inside, trusting without a doubt the crow they had heard. They tiptoed around the Rat, for they could see him now, and lined up on their roosts. Someone might have said something about what had taken place here; but as it happened, no one said a thing. They settled down close to one another and looked at one whom they had never seen before.

So this is Ebenezer Rat.

And while this gallery watched, Nezer got up and stumbled underneath his ungainly, lolling feathers. Stumbled away and out of the Coop by the door, since his holes were now impossible to him.

That was a nice sight, and everybody thought that it was time to dry out and to have a rest.

No, not everybody.

Someone was weeping hopelessly in the rain outside the Coop door. This was the kind of weeping which would soon become a wailing, and after that a howling. “Barood!” that someone wept, wailed, very nearly howled: “Barooooood!”

So Chauntecleer waited to do one more thing before he climbed to his perch, figuring that if he was to get some sleep, he had better say something now:

“If you come inside this Coop,” he croaked, irritated for the last time that day, “you'll shut up. Understand, luggage? Some nights I can tolerate being awakened by your dreary trumpet. Some nights. Not tonight.”