Dinosaur Wars

Chapter twelve - Death cargo

Aaron Black combed the wheat field with the other workers, his beating stick at the ready. Each time he did this ritual before harvest, he remembered the mouse plague from his childhood. It was in Oxfordshire, back in the old country. Good rains and a hot summer promised a bumper crop. Then came the invasion.

In his memory, it was something that happened over night. Waves of mice appeared. They flowed and rippled like a sea made of fur. And they hopped and 'splashed' when you walked toward them. There were so many that they couldn't get out of the way when you walked toward them. Mouse flesh squished under his boots, and more than once mice darted up inside his trouser legs, clawing at his thighs. At night, if you held up a lamp outside, thousands of points of light stared back at you and scurried and skittered across the ground.

They invaded houses and barns. His mother would chase them around the house, smacking down at them with a broom.

His father made water traps with buckets, emptying hundreds of mice onto a pile in the yard in the morning. The bonfire they made from these had a fetid smell, the thought of which turned his stomach even today.

Five days into the crisis, the vicar called everyone to church. Aaron was afraid his sins had something to do with the infestation, that there would be a sermon proclaiming this biblical plague was due to the evil in all their hearts.

It turned out to be a council of war. Men were organized into work parties with the aim of driving the mice en masse toward a river that bounded several of the farms. It was a desperate plan.

He joined the men - and even boys as young as ten wielded thick sticks to batter the roiling, swirling mass of mice. They used dogs, as well, to drive the tide of mice before them. Two lines of men moved forward. The mice that streamed through the first line were beaten with sticks and savaged by the dogs.

Aaron was fascinated by the canine helpers. Two of them he knew quite well. He sometimes played with Bonnie. And Ginger, with a madly wagging tail, would always lick his face. He didn't recognize them now. There was a sharp energy in their eyes, a deadly intensity, as they shot this way and that, urged on by their masters, snatching up mice and tossing them aside. Their muzzles were slimed with gore.

It was effective, though. The mice fled before the onslaught. Mile after mile, they pushed the mice horde forward.

Eventually, they came to the treeline that marked the edge of the river. The mice rolled on. Those at the front tried to stop, but the torrent coming from behind shoved them forward and the seething multitude tumbled into the water. The current flurried briefly with each new ingestion, but the mice soon succumbed. He imagined the pike and the eels gulping mice down whole in the depths of the water.

But more mice seemed to boil up from the ground. The village men and boys repeated their harrying of the mice day and night for a week. Even so, the crops were ravaged and even pigs and other farm animals had been injured by the ravenous army of mice. Several piglets and six calves died from the flesh being eaten from their legs.

Some twenty years after this event, Aaron had immigrated to America. The competition for jobs had made living in the English countryside next to impossible. Machines had taken over much of the manual labour. There was the workhouse, of course, and the filthy occupations in the city factories, but he liked the country air and the open sky above him.

He had asked Addison for work on his farm. The older Englishman had recognized the same spirit and respect for the land in Black that he himself possessed. He hired Aaron Black immediately.

Black now searched for the mice with a sort of cold malice. Anyone who professed affection for the "timorous wee beastee" didn't know of its ruinous potential.