Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 1. Whole No. 785, January 2007

“Me, I like my pine a bit saltier,” added the porcupine as an afterthought.

Before his call-up to Christmas duty, the colonel had served in a toy box in rural Ontario amid walnut trees with shells so thick his jaws ached at the memory. Nighttime meant much gnawing from the direction of the outhouse. Porcupines, they told him, favored outhouse wood salty with urine.

“Tell you what a circus owner does in wartime,” said the porcupine. “First he restocks his supplies. Like those spangles you’re sitting on. Boy, do we go through spangles. I paid a little visit to the local spanglesmith back there in What-do-you-call-it where I first saw you gentlemen.

“Second, a circus owner searches out new acts for when the world comes to its senses again.” He laughed. “You two, for example, could be circus stars. You, Colonel, could be a rock eater, Billy the G., the Human Goat. And your friend there could be the Celluloid Man, a.k.a. the Human Shirt Collar.” For the rest of the journey Mr. Porcupine regaled them with stories of the circus life.

At St. Golliwoq they bid goodbye to the circus owner. As the caravan rolled away, Von Ratte said, “Funny how every time we got to a military checkpoint our friend Mr. Porcupine dropped his voice. What was that all about?”

“To make me put my head outside the wagon to catch what he was saying,” said the colonel. Seeing a nutcracker officer, the Toy Military Police invariably waved the caravan through. The colonel scratched his jaw, wondering if the creature had sabotaged his motorcycle for just that purpose.

The colonel and Von Ratte worked their way along the front-line trench north of Bloques, which was crowded with battle-scarred Toyland units catching what sleep they could with Zero Hour little more than four hours away.

At last they reached a long observation sap jutting out into no-thing’s-land. At the end of it an officer was waiting for them. He saluted, helped Von Ratte into a black rat dragoon greatcoat, and handed him his sword and kepi. The nutcracker’s spy companion buried his face in the coat’s broad lapels. Then he and the colonel slid over the sandbags and crawled out on knees and elbows onto the battlefield following the breach in the barbed wire Von Ratte had made on his way over.

The low moon lit their way across a morbid landscape of bloated, rotting rodents dead from the toxic cork shrapnel from the popguns, and the broken and well-chewed remains of wooden soldiers. When at last they stopped to rest in a shell crater, Von Ratte gestured around at the carnage. “I still say, why’s this our fight?” When no answer came he continued, “You know what I mean. You and I were designed. But the mice, the rats, and the children, yes, the children too, are animals spawned willy-nilly in dark corners.”

“You’ll have to try your regimental padre on that one,” said De Filbert. But he felt it did Von Ratte credit that he’d framed the question. No rodent would have, not even a church-mouse. Then he added, “Perhaps it’s a small price to pay for immortality. Toys who fall in the Battle for Christmas don’t die, you know. They live on in the dim of grownup memories.” Maybe he ventured a step too far when he added, “Like ‘Rosebud.’”

“ ‘Rosebud,’ my ass,” said Von Ratte bitterly and crawled off toward the rodent lines.

When they were within hailing distance, Von Ratte called out “Camembert,” the rodent password. Then they slid over the lip of the trench. As agreed, the colonel now raised his arms and became Von Ratte’s prisoner, captured on night reconnoiter. A few mouse foot soldiers came in their pink and gray uniforms to sniff De Filbert and make threatening squeaks. But they let Von Ratte march him back behind the lines to the prisoner pens.

The last of the mouse light infantry and rat dragoons crowded the roads now, heading into Sector Four and Sector Six. The colonel watched an anti-zeppelin artillery unit swing past complete with a makeshift searchlight made of a flashlight mounted on a roller skate. A brigade of rat lancers with bright pennants followed after them.

Rat cavalry were formidable and ingenious fighting units. A rat rode another rat until the mount tired. Then the mount became the rider and any rat guilty of leaning on the whip got a taste of his own medicine. This rat read on the Golden Rule gave them a primitive democracy. Where mice were all squeak, nibble, and mob, rats were disciplined and resourceful.

The colonel studied them as they passed. He marveled at the constantly churning noses, how each cupped ear moved independently this way and that to catch every sound and silence, the black unblinking eyes and sharp yellow teeth.

Oh, he’d heard all the atrocity stories, how rats killed pets and bit babies and ate all the cheese and soup and pickled sprats. He made a sour face. The pickled sprats part, now that was hard to swallow.

And here came a double column of leather-jacketed rat artillerymen transporting fragile glass mortar shells to their batteries the same way they looted eggs in peacetime. One rat lay on his back and cradled the precious cargo in his four legs while another threw the egg carrier’s tail over his shoulder and dragged it away. De Filbert looked hard and deep into the glass shells. What was it this time, more Greek fire, Dutch Elm, or some other concoction from hell?

Von Ratte and his prisoner marched deeper into Sector Five until they reached the quiet, rutty road the sawdust wagons had taken. Here the colonel lowered his arms, by now as numb as wooden dowels, and rubbed them vigorously. The moon peeped down on them just over the treetops as though standing on curious tiptoe. Von Ratte studied his map by its light.

Suddenly an approaching drum of rat feet sent them ducking into the hedgerow just as a dragoon patrol rushed by. After that they kept to the countryside behind the hedgerow where the going was slower but safer. This caution cost them time. Dawn was only three hours away when they got to the place where the sawdust wagons had turned off the road. When they reached the small stand of trees they crouched down. Ahead of them stood Von Ratte’s immense tent, its perimeter surrounded by barbed wire.

The colonel judged the place large enough for a biological-weapons facility. But how to get inside to find out for sure? Rat dragoons patrolled inside the compound and out. As he pondered, he heard a familiar hum. Working its way up the slope behind them came the circus caravan. A white sheet with a red cross now covered the Porcupine Brothers emblazonment. The driver wore a white medical duster over his spiny coat and had a Red Cross badge stuck in his hatband.

This explained everything. Mr. Porcupine was a spy. He would cross the front line disguised as a rodent doctor, part of the wounded exchange program, bound for the military hospital at St. Golliwoq. Once inside Toyland territory he’d throw off his disguise and travel about with a sharp eye out for troop movements and artillery batteries, calling himself a circus owner looking for new acts.

As the back of the caravan passed, the colonel clambered on, pulling Von Ratte up after him. When the caravan emerged from the trees, some rat dragoons came galloping up and, shouting for the gate to be opened, they escorted it inside.

The caravan trundled deeper into the compound and then came to a stop. De Filbert cut two peepholes in the canvas with his saber and they saw they were next to a long wooden trough which stood inside another barbed wire enclosure of considerable size. A line of bowlegged wrangler rats in ten-gallon hats and with barbed wire braided into their tails were passing buckets filled with a steamy slurry of sawdust gruel from hand to hand. As the colonel watched, a wrangler dumped the last of it and then banged on the trough with the empty bucket.