Victory by Susan Cooper

Author:Susan Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books

Here’s adieu, sweet lovely Nancy,

Ten thousand times adieu.

I’m a-going round the ocean,

To seek for something new.

Come change your ring with me, dear girl,

Come change your ring with me,

For it might be a token of true love

While I am on the sea . . .

One day after supper when I was on the edge of the crowd listening to Jonathan singing in the fo’c’sle, Tommy the cook’s assistant came looking for me. He pulled at my sleeve to draw me to a quieter corner, beside the black iron carronade that fired the biggest cannonballs of all the ship’s guns. His shiny face was less cheerful than usual.

“Sam,” he said, “we need you help.”

I blinked at him. “Me?”

“You remember catchin’ the rats?” Tommy said.

I grinned. The rats had been my only small triumph in my days as cook’s boy, aside from the chickens—well, in fact because of the chickens. Rats are a major pest on board ship, second to nothing but the maggots and weevils in ship’s bread. When food supplies are loaded into the ship’s hold before a voyage, there are always a few rats inside the bags of vegetables or fruit who have nibbled their way in from the warehouse or some farmer’s barn. And once they are on board, they live down there in the hold with the stores and they eat, and breed. When I was working in the galley, somehow a few of them made their way up to my chicken coops, and began stealing eggs and even chicks. The cook had a cat called Pricker, but she was fat and spoiled and paid the rats no attention. So I had rigged snares, the same kind I had always used on the farm to catch rabbits, and one after another I had caught seven big rats. The cook had been so impressed that he didn’t yell at me for a whole week, and the chickens were left in peace again.

I said to Tommy, “I remember.”

“Well, they back,” Tommy said. “And they big trouble. They ate a whole pan of slush two days back, and Mr. Carroll got so mad at me—”

Now I was close, I could see that one of his eyes was puffy and half shut. I was furious.

“He hit you!”

Tommy looked down. “Well, he was mad. And there wasn’t no rat to hit.” He looked up at me again, through the good eye. “Sam—come set you traps, huh?”

So after supper next day I slipped down to the galley, after cleaning away the spoons and platters and helping stow the mess table. Tommy had found me some wire and I had a spool of yarn from my uncle, and the cook willingly gave me a hunk of cheese—elderly cheese, stinking now as it molded in the Mediterranean heat. But the stink was fine for catching rats. I set snares all over the galley, and next day we found them all full of dead rats—except for one snare with a horrid bloody foot in it, where the desperate rat had gnawed through its own leg to get away.

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