The swarm cannot cross a road without first stopping to argue about it. At the cart road below Ustrevo, the lead rats reach the rut and halt, and the halt runs backward through the body like a shudder through a wagon train, until the whole mass is standing in the verge facing different directions. The pause lasts four to eleven minutes by my watch. Then, with no signal I could find, they go, and the crossing itself takes under a minute. I paced the swarm along the mill wall, walking at its speed: forty-one paces from the first rat to the last, three across. The miller puts it at two thousand animals. I did not count them.
Three people have explained it to me, and they do not agree. Wiktor Hrabal, who keeps the mill at Ustrevo, says it is one animal wearing two thousand coats. When a barn cat took a rat from the rear, he says, the front rank wheeled before any squeal could have reached it. He props his cellar door open on its latch whenever the swarm is in the district. A shut door counts as a refusal, and the swarm answers by gnawing a new doorway through the oak, which costs more than the bran it would have eaten.
A widow in Jezdrava who keeps hens says it is a committee. She set out two dishes of scalded oats at opposite ends of her yard and watched the swarm split into two sullen halves, each convinced the other had the better dish. They rejoined at dusk without apology. She also reports that it takes the left boot from any pair left by a door and never the right. She owns nine right boots. A drover who winters his goats by the Ustrevo ford says it is neither a mind nor a committee but a set of habits. Every evening, before the light goes, the swarm sits in rows along the foot of a wall and washes, the whole body at once, two thousand faces wiped in one stroke. Nothing is being guarded or decided. It is washing. Its road is easy to follow afterward: a lane of polished, greasy dust the width of a loaf runs along every wall it uses, and it smells of tallow, because tallow ends and bran are what the swarm eats first.
Every account breaks down in the cheese loft above the Jezdrava weighhouse. The swarm there does not pause at the door, does not split, takes no boots and does not wash. It crosses the floor in a single file one rat wide, north wall to south, at a steady trot, and leaves through a hole the loft keeper has never located. He says it is the same swarm. I have no grounds to doubt him and no way to make it fit.
- Classification
- Many-bodied vermin, swarm-minded
- Habitat
- Granaries, mill cellars, wall footings
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 41 paces long, 3 across
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Farmland and millworks
- Binomial
- Murisca agminalis
- Diet
- Bran, tallow ends, scalded oats
- Temperament
- Quarrelsome, then suddenly unanimous