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BAITING BUSH RATS
Native. Marsupial: six syllables suggesting an indigenous tenderness, though, because they dwell in limited light, unseen, they are given the names of vermin: rat, rodent, and their reputation for disease and filth. They come for shelter, entering the ceiling through cracks in the wall age or creepers have widened. The air they exhale is blue, also the hair-thin stripes of light that number the outstanding veins in their ears. Their tails- rolled, banded leather-make curious lines in a sheen of torchlit timber dust. Their nests are spiked with straw, paper, wood- splinters and hair, and could be the careful makings of any small bird. When they move along a narrow network of rafters, it seems a spray of fine gravel has been cast into the roof; or an internal, gritty rain interrupting sleep or thought. It's simple: disturb domestic order and die. So a list of death is made, narrowed to traps or cups of poison. You rarely hear the traps go off- (branches at the window, the neck bone crack of expanding joinery) -but the cries of poisoned animals claim the walls like rising damp. With brutal thirst, they turn in circles and rake each other's eyes, their pain forgotten until morning, when they are sometimes found, bobbing like unhealthy turds in water that's impossible to flush.