By Ed Staskus

   Aksel was a Norwegian rat, although there would have been warm words if anybody had tried to tell him that. He believed he was a Norman rat since his forebears had come to the New World aboard a French ship that sailed from Normandy long ago.  Norwegians sat around their fjords fishing in the moonlight. He came from a land of fighting men. It had been more than a hundred generations since his ancestors landed on Prince Edward Island. He had never met a Norwegian. He didn’t even know where Norway was.

   He didn’t know what day, week, or month it was, either. He didn’t know what century or millennium it was. He  didn’t know anything about art, culture, religion, politics, money, calendars, or legal systems. He lived in a biological reality, not a constructed reality. He believed in fleec cloth, not whole cloth. He didn’t know he was living in North Rustico on the Atlantic Canada coastline. He had no clue about the North American continent, or any other continent, for that matter, although if he had known it wouldn’t have mattered. He knew where Stella Maris and Rollings Pond were. 

   The pond was where he spent most of his evenings and nights. He slept in the basement of the Stella Maris Catholic Church during the day. He never went to mass or confession, though. It wasn’t that he was an atheist, not exactly. He simply couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of a Supreme Being who played rattle and snap with fate. He was unable to understand why the all-mighty created sinners and as soon as they sinned condemned them to Hell

   When it came to fate something was always out to get him. Human beings called it neophobia. He called hiding in dark places and moving along walls common sense. He lived and died by his survival mechanisms. He always had to do everything for himself. He didn’t own anything, not even a fork, knife, or plate, but his bedroom in the church was cozy. He stored some dried food there and had a bed of straw and a small pillow. He kept a handful of loose change he had found in the parking lot at Cape Turner under his pillow for a rainy day.

   Aksel was known by the nickname of Left Hand. How he came to be called Aksel the Left Hand was beyond him, since he was right handed. In the event, he didn’t gripe about it. It was better than some of the other rat nicknames he had heard in his neck of the woods, like Soggy Fries and Foul Fart. He liked to think of himself as a man about town, except he didn’t have a snazzy pork pie hat to wear while stepping out.

   He wasn’t a farmer, even though he lived on the Million Acre Farm, which was one of Prince Edward Island’s nicknames. He foraged for food instead of sowing seeds. He gleaned far and wide. He ate anything and everything. He had eaten countless different foods in his lifetime. Some people said he was a glutton. He didn’t disagree with them. He preyed on chicks, lizards, and other rodents. He ate any discarded morsels he came across as well as all crops from all fields. He ate all the time, snacking on whatever came his way. He caught fish on Fridays, just in case there was a God.

   Before the Europeans came there had been Mi’kmaq, but so few it hardly mattered. When Europeans arrived they reproduced like nobody’s business. There were swarms of them in no time. Rats had been around for five million years. Human beings only went back about three hundred thousand years. As soon as they planted their crops the battle was on. They called rat infestations plagues. Aksel was insulted but what could he do? When the French were in charge, whenever rats showed up for dinner they called it an “excessive misery.” But since ‘The Year of the Rodent’ in 1815, when rats and mice ate almost all the crops island-wide, it had gotten tough and tougher. it went from farm cats to mechanical traps to arsenic to warfarin. Killing him and his kind became Integrated Pest Management. What they didn’t know was there were more of them now than ever. They were moving into urban areas with plenty of shelter and plenty of year-round food. It was better than the countryside. He had seen in a scrap of a newspaper that Summerside and Charlottetown had become the rattiest cities in Atlantic Canada. The news made him tingle with gladness.

   His mother let slip one day that their kind only lived two or three years. He was aghast. There was no time to waste. His eyesight had always been bad. He needed glasses. He was colorblind, too. His other senses, smell, taste, touch, and hearing, were outstanding. He wasn’t Olympic Games agile, but he could run, jump, climb, and swim better than most, enough to keep danger at bay. He used his face whiskers to feel the world around him. He could wiggle each one of them individually, unlike cats like Spike, who was from Doyle’s Cove and was always messing with him. He and Spike were going to have it out one day. The cat was a menace. He was always laying in ambush for him. He had to find a way to cancel out the mouser’s claws, which were razor sharp and deadly. He had the scars to prove it. 

   Except for Spike, cats rarely bothered Aksel. He was too big for most of them, feral or otherwise. Spike was a different order of things. He was as big as cats come. The beast was dangerous. The cat and the rat were a stop-and-go dance in the dark. When Aksel stopped, Spike stopped. When he started up again, the cat was on his heels again, low-down and deadly quiet. There would be blood one day.

   Islanders didn’t always give Aksel his due. Some called him a street rat, even though he was a field rat. Others with college educations called him a Hanover rat. He tried to explain he was a Norman rat, but couldn’t speak the language of the learned. He didn’t like it whenever he was called a dirty rat. He was fastidiously clean. He washed and groomed himself ten times a day. He was a brown rat with a white underside. He was a big boy end to end, his body length almost a foot tip to tip with a tail slightly shorter than a foot. All he had to do was flash his teeth and wiggle his tail at passersby to make them jump and lose their sandwiches.

   One night he met one of his own kind in the dumpster behind the North Rustico Food Market. After giving each other the secret handshake, after which both rats were sure the other one was legit, they chewed the fat and gossiped about local doings. His new-found friend, it turned out, had come off a cruise ship in Charlottetown three weeks ago, gone on a self-guided tour, been late getting back, and was now stranded until another ship rolled in. He had wandered up to the north coast and was thinking of staying.

   “I’m a free agent,” he said. “I can hijack myself onto any boat anytime I want to. You know those round things they attach to mooring lines, what they call rat guards, and how they coat them with grease? They ain’t no hedge, no sir. First, I puff up my cheeks. Second, I suck up the grease. Third, I spit it out over my shoulder as I go over the rat guard.”

   Cruise ships had been docking in Charlottetown since just after the turn of the century, pulling into port to hearty welcomes. They let loose hundreds and sometimes thousands of tourists all at once to stretch their legs, eat, drink, see the sights, and buy ‘Anne of Green Gables’ dolls. They filled up the eateries on Water St. and Victoria Row. When they did the rats came out.

   It was after midnight when Aksel and Yeoman Purser, which was what his  friend called himself, went their separate ways. “I know I’m just a mug, but I have got to say this seaside place you got up here is something else, just beautiful, and everywhere you look there is food.” The hometown boy twitched a whisker in agreement.

   He had a love hate relationship with the human race. On the one hand, he preferred living near them since they were a rat’s number one food outlet. On the other hand, they were always trying to kill him. They checked his droppings unceasingly and tracked him by them. They were always putting out traps and bait stations. Whenever they found his nest they gassed it. He had gotten to be as cautious as an accountant. He knew full well what glue boards and snap traps were about. It didn’t matter if they were baited with his favorite fish and cereals. He snorted when they were baited with cheese. It gave him gas. He gave all the snares a wide berth.

   “My mama didn’t raise no fool,” he told himself, clicking his teeth and eye-boggling the sky.

   He knew there were many animal and plant species threatened with extinction, many within decades. He didn’t want to become one of them. The Sixth Mass Extinction was going on, propelled by human activity. Almost a quarter million species had disappeared in the past five hundred years. Agriculture got started ten thousand years ago and since then had taken over a third of the earth’s land mass. Habitat destruction went on and on. Climate change wasn’t helping. The squeeze was on.

   Aksel was more nocturnal than not. He slept during the day. One morning, dreaming of his favorite food, which was Cheerios, he was woken up by an RCMP police car, an ambulance, and a fire truck racing up Church Hill Rd. They descended on Doyle’s Cove. He had just rolled over in his straw bed and thought he would roll right back, but he was curious. He coughed and cleared his throat, blinking. He popped up out of bed. He made his way past Rollings Pond, up the rise, and to the top of a field from where he could see what was happening.

   When he looked down on Doyle’s Cove he could see a knot of men with shovels digging something out from where a wall of red sandstone had collapsed. Cliff failure happened all the time, intense storms and rising sea levels undercutting the rock formations. There was less and less sea ice, too, which protected the shore during winter. He saw an arm being pulled from the rubble. He guessed the rest of the body was down there somewhere. It looked like they were trying to dig it up, although why was beyond him. Whoever was down there wasn’t going to be coming back to life. He knew the would-be rescuers weren’t going to eat the remains, so what was the point? 

   Aksel lost interest in the digging. There wasn’t going to be a free meal in it for him anytime soon unless somebody dropped some crumbs from their lunch tote. That was something else that puzzled him about human beings. They seemed to never want to pick up food they had dropped, especially the women. In his world no rat did that. They ate everything, no matter what it was, no matter how small it was, and no matter where it was.

   He ran across the open ground behind him. He could run faster than any man alive. He could run six times his body length in a single second, but he couldn’t keep it up for long. When he got to the tree line he slowed down and caught his breath. He was out of sight and safe as he ever was going to be in the Jack Pines. When he got to Church Hill Rd. he looked both ways before crossing to the Stella Maris Catholic Church. There was no sense in being run over on his own doorstep by a bucket of bolts driving past his lodgings.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, out of the past, a double cross, and a fight to the finish.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication