By: Baboo

Baboo — Sat, 06 Feb 2021 01:45:31 +0000

In my early teens, my parents had temporarily rented a farmhouse in France, some 20 kilometres across the boarder from Geneva.
The building was quite big, half of it was where we lived, it was about a century old with almost three feet thick stone walls. The first floor had a wooden, squeaky floor and the ceiling was a layer of thin hardboard or something, but nothing very solid.
The other part of the farmhouse was just an open shell and was rented out to a farmer who had also rented the land belonging to the farm. He had about twenty cows grazing in parts of the land apart from during the winter when the cows where inside. He grew corn on the the other part of the land. When the corn was ripe and harvested, he stocked the corn cobs inside the farmhouse. This attracted rats and by the speed these rats multiplied, there soon became a quite a few of them. And since they had free access to food 24/7 they never stopped growing, there was especially one which body had reached the size of of a cat’s.
They somehow managed to get inside the thick stone wall in the house we lived in. A few times, we could hear a rumble of stones and a short rat scream, then silence… and then, later came the smell of dead rotting rats, it was quite unbearable. In my bedroom, I had a spotlight pointing upwards, I could sometimes both hear the rats’ little feet like tiny drumsticks on the thin layer of ceiling, I could even see it giving way under the weight of the fat rat.
We finally got hold of The Rat Terminator. If someone has read Roald Dahl’s The Rat Catcher and the description of this character, well it must have been his one egged twin. He was frankly mysteriously scary. He told us that there were a family of between seventy and a hundred rattus norvegicus in there. The only way to get rid of them was to give the a poison that made them thirsty so that they would rush outside to drink, and only then, when they drank would the poison take effect and kill them.
After a few days, we never saw or heard another rat again.

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By: Baboo