# Country Tale.
All my life I have loved animals. When I was a little girl I used to bless every single creature I saw four times with the words: “Beauty, lovely, wonderful; Beauty, lovely, wonderful; Beauty, lovely, wonderful; Beauty, lovely, wonderful.” Every single creature excepting spiders, because in those days I was terribly, terribly afraid of them. If I was with another person I would say the words silently, but when I was alone the air was filled with my incantation. Ah, the peculiarities of childhood!
Years passed and the mantra went inside me. I still automatically thought it and in time it even came to include those scary spiders!
One day, when I was a grown woman, I was sitting in the living room of my friend’s country cottage when I suddenly noticed how interested her two cats were in something on top of the bookcase. They stretched up — scrabble! scrabble! — they watched –they were waiting — meow! meow! meow! … I walked over to see what the source of their fuss was and found, cowering on top of the books there, a young field rat. I lifted him down and stroked his fear away. I determined to set him free back where he came from, so first I walked out of the front door of the cottage but the cats followed me, watching their fun being taken away from them. Here was no good, they would catch him again, so I walked down the track with him and put him down at the edge of a wide field and waited for him to run away.
But the rat sat there, looking this way and that, not moving. This couldn’t be home. I picked him up again and carried him over to the neighbour’s garden and sat with him on the lawn there. But the rat wouldn’t scamper off; he stayed very near to me and let me know that this wasn’t home either.
At last I picked him up again and thought: “Where would the cats have caught him?” and then, in a flash of inspiration, I knew that he must live at the bottom of the back garden where it melds with the cornfield, separated only by a thick hedge. I carefully carried him home, shielding him from cats’ eyes that lazily glanced at me then looked another way.
I walked with my precious bundle and sat us both down where the hedge was thinnest, setting him free to explore this domain. This time he ran up and down very excitedly and vanished through the hedge, only to pop back again with an air of: “Yes, this is home!” But he still didn’t leave me. He sat on my lap, he ran over my hand then darted up my arm, nuzzled my neck and suddenly kissed me on the cheek! Then he was gone. Perhaps that’s why I always think of him as a ‘he’ — the rat who kissed and ran!
.
