Summer of The Rat

The summer of 1963 was special for me in so many ways, that those days have remained vivid in my memory for more than 40 years. It was a time in a young boy’s life when there are always a lot of “firsts”, and the world seemed determined to provide me with all the experience I could handle.
We lived on the southern edge of town, only a block from the CP tracks and #3 Highway running through town east-west. The next street west was taken up mainly by Newman’s Honey farm and cabin rentals, but the remaining section was occupied by an old Seed-cleaning plant and elevator owned by a local man.
The plant was abandoned by this time, and had been left with a large store of grain of various kinds, much of which had been sewn into burlap sacks ready for shipping. It hadn’t taken long for the rats to find this windfall, and by that spring, I and the other boys on the block had discovered the rats.
We passed near the buildings on our way to school every day, and as the snow had melted, they had taken to sunning themselves and feeding on the grain that spilled out the doorways and holes in the walls. As the days passed, their numbers grew until we couldn’t help but start throwing rocks and hard lumps of clay at them as they clustered in such large groups. There were so many one couldn’t help but make each missile have its intended result.
Despite our successful efforts, the rats were un-intimidated in their lust for the grain, and they returned time and again to the zone of destruction, so we knew something more had to be done.
There were plenty of old hockey stick handles about in those days, as we fixed them over and over until they were broken beyond all reasonable repair. Armed with these as clubs and girded with rubber boots and leather mitts, we took them on in their own territory.
Each day after school, several of us would invade the barn-like storehouse area, and drive them outside to a number of piles of old lumber lying about. They were almost impossible to hit while they were inside, but outside was another matter.
When a sufficient number had been herded to the area we staked out, the wood was lifted and the swinging began. Rats are amazingly agile, but they were no match for a gauntlet of off-season hockey players, each determined to out-do the other in the day’s count.
With rats of all sizes scurrying everywhere, these battering matches were scenes of total bloody chaos punctuated by shouts of victory and frustration, until the rats had all found their way back into the safety of the building. After a brief pause to tally the score and dispose of the remains in an old garbage can nearby, we began the process again until we were tired or sick of the destruction.
This became a daily activity for a growing crowd of neighborhood boys, and soon the carnage had resulted in a full barrel of corpses and the smell was getting bad. It didn’t take long for someone in the group to come up with the idea of burning them, so an immediate search party was sent out to find a source of gasoline.
To this day, I have no idea what we thought would happen when you pour a two liters of gasoline onto a 200 liter drum full of dead rats, but I do know the results were not what we expected!
The explosion of flame was at first satisfying and worthy of our efforts thus far, but it wasn’t long until the gasoline was consumed and the fire died down to a smoldering heap of rotten flesh that produced a cloud of foul smoke drifting across the neighborhood. Some bits of lumber lying about seemed to be the solution, so we piled on everything that could be stuffed into the mess and stood back.
As the fire burned downward, it belched an even more horrid stench, and a crowd of other kids and onlookers began to gather to see what the heck was going on. There was no point in trying to stop the process, so we all stood around with our sticks in hand, hoping we weren’t going to get into trouble because of the stink.
By suppertime, almost everybody on our street had heard what had happened, and when my dad got home, the first thing he asked me was, “What the hell were you doing over there, don’t you know you could have burned down that whole elevator!”
When I eventually got the whole story out to them, my parents were horrified to hear what we had been doing, while at the same time rather proud that we had stood up to the foe so valiantly on our own. We were given rather strict instructions not to proceed further with our activities around the old seed-plant until something was done about it. We left the rodents to whatever the town council might decide.
As the school holidays finally turned to boredom and motivation, we picked bottles and cut grass to earn the money to buy bullets so we could go out to the town dump and practice our marksmanship with a .22 calibre rifle. We were all steeped in Gene Autrey, and only considered it good tactics to brush up on our gunnery.
Loaded with a box of 50 rounds each, Ronnie, Larry and I set out one morning before it got too hot. The road to the dump was only a block off our street, and we chatted away excitedly as we anticipated the day’s activities. Our appetites for rat extermination had only been whetted by our long hiatus, and we were eager to begin the slaughter.
Crossing the highway south to the town dump, we could see the wisp of smoke that constantly spiraled above the garbage. In those days, everything imaginable was taken to the dump, with no restrictions whatever, so things were a bit scary for the uninitiated. Rats and skunks abounded, as well as a number of other vermin we considered fair game.
It was a quiet morning with hardly a breath of wind, which is always a special moment in Saskatchewan, and the sun was growing hotter by the minute. This led us to entertain thoughts of heading over to the DogHide River later in the afternoon for a swim at the beaver dam south of the Golf course. All in all, it promised to be a fine day, and no one was surprised to hear the loud report of a rifle up ahead. It only served to build our anticipation of a good hunt, as people were already banging away.
Half-way to the dump was an old abandoned slaughterhouse, with corrals and a few buildings remaining amongst a patch of weeds that we rarely noticed on our way out shooting. Ambling along, we all tested our aim on various targets that presented themselves, from bottles to dragon flies that settled too close to our attention. Everybody seemed to be in fine form, and imaginations ran wild with fantastic shots in mind.
We were almost to the old slaughter-house when Ronnie noticed that there was a truck parked in the approach. It was a dark-blue older model GMC ½ ton, and it had no special attraction to anybody, other than the fact that it was there, and we had never seen anybody there before.
By mid July, the grass had grown up enough so we couldn’t see the road in until we got right up to it, and that was why we all had to walk into it together.
There on the road leading to the old slaughterhouse, was a dead man, with his head blown away. That he was dead was clearly demonstrated by the fact that his brains were all over the road leading to the dump, and all that remained of his head was his face with two vacant eye-holes and a jaw that seemed to smile in surprise.
We all came to an abrupt halt, and I cannot recall if it was gasps of horror or surprise, but something happened which I have wrestled with all my life. That look of total horror or shock, or whatever it was on his face just scared the living-bejeepers out of us, and we all beat it out of there like we had seen a real ghost.
I didn’t know where Ronnie and Larry were running, but I was heading home as fast as my feet could carry me, and since we lived next door to each other, there was no contest on which direction to go. Their folks were working at the time, so we went straight to my house, where my dad had just arrived home from work after the early-morning shift at the post office.
Dad was a veteran of World War II, and had seen a lot of action with the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders in most of Northern Europe during 1944 and 1945, and he didn’t ruffle easily. It took some serious convincing to get him up off the couch from his afternoon nap.
With three saucer-eyed boys clinging to the back of the front seat, we headed out to the dump with much mumbling about “you guys wouldn’t know a dead man from a piece of horse manure!” Although he was probably right, we all knew that we weren’t crazy, as the images of what we had seen were fresh and vivid.
Crossing the highway onto the road to the dump, we could see the truck still was sitting in the approach, and a terrible feeling of dread crept into us all. I knew I never wanted to see that scene again, and by the way Ronnie and Larry sat back white-faced and silent, they didn’t want to either.
Dad was wise enough to sense this, and stopped the car some distance away, ordering us to stay put. There was no argument on our part, so he walked the remaining distance to the truck on his own, while we sat holding our breath. It didn’t take him long to investigate the truth of the matter, and he immediately came back to the car, all trace of doubt now gone.
He quickly turned the car around and we drove back to the highway intersection, where he left us posted on the road in case some other people came before he got back. We all sensed the need to keep things from being disturbed, and we certainly didn’t want any other kids to head down that road to go garbage-picking or shooting, which was common then.
I don’t know exactly why, but we were all scared that something else would happen, and constantly kept our eyes on that truck, as if we expected the man to get up and drive it back down the road towards us. It was probably only about ten minutes, but it seemed much longer before dad returned with an R.C.M.P cruiser following him.
This time dad remained with us at the corner, while the policemen investigated the scene. By the time the ambulance arrived along with another police car, our fright had subsided to the point where we were almost feeling a bit proud that we had been the discoverers of this terrible incident, and already imagined ourselves telling the tale.
By the time the detachment Sergeant finally came up to question us, we had regained our composure, and answered him satisfactorily, while dad puffed on a cigarette nearby. We were just about to get back in the car to go home when we heard the policeman comment off-handedly to dad, “It was a good thing those boys never got there a few minutes earlier Jimmy, we found nine rounds in his pocket”.
I don’t remember exactly how he explained it, but somehow we all realized what had just happened, and dad was unusually affectionate and understanding about it all. Of course, my mom was horrified to hear what had happened, but she knew there was no point in dwelling on the past, and by unspoken agreement we never spoke of it again for many years.
Somehow I had lost my interest in rat hunting, and as none of the other boys seemed to want to go either, our rifles gathered dust for awhile, and we all got ready for school to start again. It seemed that our story was no fun to tell at all, and we pushed it out of our minds as well as we could over the next months.
By Halloween, the rats were running down the street in broad daylight, and dad had even resorted to shooting them with his .22 pistol right through the holes in the storm window as they played in our yard. It rattled my mother to no end when he would do so, but it was obvious that something had to be done, and finally the town council took action.
They warned the owner several times of their intention to demolish the building, and he was given ample opportunity to remove his seed-cleaning equipment, but he never did. One crisp morning in November as we were trudging off to school, we found a back-hoe already at work digging a trench all around the building, and by noon hour, the town crew was filling the trench with a tank of used motor oil from various garages around town. We were all itching to stick around and watch the proceedings, but we were assured that nothing would happen until later, so we headed off, vowing to return after school.
By then the site was a flurry of activity, and a large crowd of men with rifles and shot guns had gathered, while we younger lads hung back, armed with our clubs. The great fear was that when the building was put to the torch, the rats would break out in mass and scatter through the whole town. Everyone who had been there knew that there were thousands of rats, and we shuddered to think of the plague of invasion they would create if they all escaped.
When all was ready, the trench was ignited, and then the building itself, which went up explosively as the dry lumber and grain caught fire. As the inhabitants of this haven began to flee, they found every avenue blocked by a wall of flame that prevented all exits. Some tried to jump through the fire, but they were either immediately engulfed, or fell singed and squealing into a merciless barrage of bullets and clubs that were determined to leave no survivors.
By nightfall, the job was done, and we put away our clubs and guns, and forgot about rats for awhile. Thinking about them always makes me sad.
Doctor Bob