Ratatouille - rætə tuːi

Here in the tropics there exists a plethora of animals. Mostly insects but also reptiles, amphibians, monkeys, birds, fish, rodents, you name it. Among the more troublesome for us lately have been the rodents, specifically rats. Our house is a very simple affair, basically a wooden structure about 20’ wide by 40’ long, with a wooden floor, all cut from timbers with a chain saw. It is built on top of short posts with a corrugated tin roof. It has an open ceiling and is open at the eaves and has no shortage of other openings both in the floor and walls as the boards shrunk considerably after it was built. There are two interior walls, each seven feet high that are open above to the roof, providing visual privacy only, much like tall cubicle walls. Any kind of animal that wants to get in, can get in. Needless to say, screens won’t help. Naturally, we use mosquito nets on our beds. Since there is a ½ inch gap between each floorboard, insects that do come in, don’t stay very long before the walk right out again. Sweeping is a simple matter, since anything you push with a broom will fall right through the floor at the next gap! Ventilation is not a problem. When we have bananas in the house, fruit bats will sometimes visit in the middle of the night for a snack. They are very noisy eaters as they have a habit of noisily licking the bananas with a very loud smacking sound, like a cat lapping up water. We have never seen a snake, neither in our house nor in our yard. We live very close to the center of the village and most snakes don’t survive the trip from the edge of the village to where we live since every kid has been trained from infancy to kill any snake on sight, without question or hesitation. Chickens also like to eat them.

That brings us to the topic of this essay: Rats. Had we more snakes, and less food, we would probably not have rats. We are not overrun with them, but even a two rats that have decided that they like you is two, too many. Among other unique features of our home is an invention of my own: Interior gutters. Because we have a tin roof and the air here is extremely humid most of the time and the temperature change from mid-day to night can easily reach 40 degrees – condensation on the inside of the roof is a nightly event. If sufficient, the condensation runs down the corrugation until it reaches the wooden supports that run perpendicular to the rafters, known here as “reglas”. When it does reach this obstruction, the water drips straight down to the floor, or whatever is below it. When the water drips down and strikes the top of a mosquito net, for example, it splatters into a zillion smaller droplets and sprays over the occupant(s) of said net. In the middle of a pitch dark night, it is hard to move into a position on a very small bed where the water will not get you. After several months of moving beds and furniture around, I finally decided to mitigate this problem using tin gutters placed on top of the short walls that constitute our three room house. The gutters are positioned directly under the “reglas” such that any dripping water will fall into them and not cause problems for whatever lies below. This brings us to the subject if “dancing rats”. It began on a quite completely dark in our house at night. There are no outside lights and if the moon is not supplying light, it is really, really dark. It is also profoundly quiet most of the time. The sound of little footsteps on tin woke me in the middle of one of these very dark nights. I laid in bed and listened as the sound progressed across the house from the far end, over my head and into the kitchen. Clearly they were the steps of a substantial rodent using the interior gutters as a kind of bridge from one end of the house to the other. Mind you, they didn’t need to use the gutters because the top of the exterior wall was only seven feet high as well and the eves are open, supplying ample passage. For some reason, a particularly large rate had decided that he liked the sound of his own footsteps and was noisily walking back and forth inside the interior gutter. After some time, I heard another similar sound. Now, apparently, two rats were walking back and forth in the gutter. Laying in bed I wondered if I should get up and chase them out, thus waking the entire family, or just let it go and hope that they would leave quickly. They didn’t. The walking back and forth became more and more animated until at one point I could clearly hear them coming closer together, just over my head. At the point where I would have expected them to cross over each other there was a momentary pause and then a confusion of loud squealing and jumping around inside the gutter. Then the sound of each of them prancing off in two different directions. It was clearly getting to the point where I wished I had turned on a flashlight and chased them away, but I waited a bit longer. Before long, I hear one of them approaching the open end of the gutter that juts out over the kitchen counter (a wooden board covered with sheet plastic). After a very brief pause, the sound of a very large rat hitting the plastic, about four feet below the height of the gutter, could plainly be heard. Before long, items in the kitchen were being knocked over and I think I heard him jump from the counter to the floor. The other rat followed suit and soon both were on the floor of the kitchen, knocking things about. At the time, I could only guess what they were doing but the next morning I found my children’s toy blocks scattered around the kitchen. The obviously were playing with the blocks, knocking around the ones that would roll. I had images of these two rats dancing around in our kitchen like a couple of ballet dancers – skidding blocks here and there and periodically taking a break to play in the gutters. As far as I could tell, no food was taken at all. They simply seemed to enjoy playing at our house. This sort of thing went on over a period of a week or so. Sometimes I would wake-up, get my flashlight and walk to the kitchen and shine the light around. Sometimes I could just barely see them as they lept back up on the counter and scaled the wall as though gravity didn’t apply to them. Sometimes I could see the shadowing image of their portly bodies, about the size of a Nerf football, running along the top of the exterior or interior wall that forms the perimeter of our bedroom. Before long, I purchased a very large rat trap. I tried peanut butter but they simply licked it off the bait pan without setting off the trap. Then I rolled the peanut butter up into part of a tortilla and put that on the pan but they deftly picked it off without setting off the trap. Finally, I tied the peanut butter and tortilla sandwich to the bait pan with a wire twisty fastener. That did the trick. The next night, as I lay there listening to them jumping around and dancing on the floor, there was a loud WHACK! Moments later I could hear the sound of a large rodent shuddering in it’s death throws smacking the counter with the trap firmly attached to it’s body. After about a half-minute of this, silence. In the morning, I disposed of the dead rat, all two pounds, by throwing over the hill that forms the perimeter of our back-yard. After a couple more nights, the second, a smaller female, was done in the same manner. After that, we had no more rats!

That was over two years ago. We have been gone for a long time and various animals have been making liberal use of the house while we were in the US. The unmistakable signs of rats nests could be found in various nooks and crannies. I thought I had found them all and cleaned them out – but recently Jennifer and I noticed an odd smell in the kitchen. We couldn’t exactly determine where it was coming from, but we both noticed that if we stood between the dining table and the stove, it was most prevalent there.

For several days, we tried to find out where the smell of a dead rat could possibly be coming from. I looked under the house. I looked on the roof. I looked in the interior gutters. I looked on top of the wall. No luck. Once, passing the stove, I noticed some trash behind in on the floor. I pulled it away from the wall and cleaned up the refuse; a half eaten bar of soap, some wrappers from various food items and several large pieces of plastic bubble wrap. Nothing that would explain the smell. Then, almost in passing, I noticed the two-inch wide hole in the back that led into the combustion chamber, where the gas burns that heats the oven above. The bottom of the oven was easy to remove and what we found in the area below, where the gas actually burns, was nothing short of horrifying. Most accidents they say, happen at home. What happened in that recess below the oven was one of those unfortunate coincidences that sadly resulted in the untimely death of what appears to have been one or more rats, possibly a small family of babies, partially encased in melted bubble wrap, soap and an assortment of other half-burnt common household detritus. Keep in mind that the last time we used the oven was on Thanksgiving day (about a month previous) when we celebrated by baking a chicken purchased from our neighbors across the street. It tasted good to me. Jennifer dutifully cleaned out the oven with a spatula and abrasive cleaning products. Strangely, it still smells funny in that part of the kitchen. Perhaps the smell has soaked into the wooden floor.

A few nights ago, I heard the telltale sound of a large rodent prancing down the length of the interior gutter, jumping off the top of the wall onto the counter and knocking things over. I didn’t bother to wake Jennifer or turn on the light. I have left the baited rat trap out for three nights without any luck so far. This is a battle of wits and I intend to be more witty than my opponent! I’ll take pictures of my prey this time. Perhaps I can trap it and teach it tricks.