Nimby

When they think about it, round the fire together, nobody can really say they remember exactly when Nimby moved in to the garden.

He lives in the compost heap, just quietly. 

Can you see him — coming out of his front door?

No? Most people can’t. Nimby likes it that way. He has discovered that not everybody likes rats, and besides, he is a private kind of person.

If I showed you Nimby going in to his house, could you see him then?

Yes? You saw his tail?

Good. Now go back to the first picture and look for his ears, and his bright eyes and shiny whiskers. 

That’s Nimby the black rat.

What do you think of the idea of living in a compost heap? Cold and wet and smelly? Ah, if you thought that, you’d be so wrong.

There are several reasons Nimby chose to make his home in the compost heap — after all, he could have lived somewhere else; under the wood shed maybe, or he might have made a little hole under the oak hedge.

But the compost heap is always nice and warm — that’s partly how compost makes itself; as all the vegetable scraps and lawn clippings rot down, they give out a lot of heat, which kills germs, and keeps Nimby’s home cosy.

He has a tunnel going up into the middle of the heap, so all the wetness has drained down into the earth, and the part where Nimby lives is not soggy. Especially because, there in the middle of the heap he has made himself a little chamber, big enough to curl up comfortably and go to sleep in peace.

To make sure it’s clean and pleasant and not wet, Nimby goes into the house to fetch the perfect materials to wallpaper his bedroom — onion skins. He lines his nest with those.

He can reach them. Rats can jump!

There are other interesting things on the shelf where the onions live — oats and nuts, for example, that Nimby would really like. But the plastic boxes are hard to chew into. He can do it, but not easily. He makes a note of the nuts in the back of his mind. Those bags are not hard to bite through. He might come back. But the onion skins are what he was after today.

Meanwhile, the people in the house come every day and toss food into the top of the heap. All Nimby has to do is run up the other section of his tunnel, and he can sort through the bell-pepper seeds and the bread crusts, the apple cores and the marrow seeds. There’s usually something nice. Perfect.

Just over the garden wall is that chicken run in the next door garden. Nimby has a tunnel into that as well, and under cover of darkness, when the chickens are shut in, he raids the hen coop for grains of wheat and barley.

Sometimes at dusk, the owners of the compost heap also put out a plate of left-over cat food for George Fox. 

Nimby knows it wasn’t George who polished off the cat scraps today — George licks the plate entirely clean — it was probably the seagulls or the crows. They’ve left some gravy on the plate. Nimby is quite partial to gravy.

So Nimby lives his best freegan life in the privacy and seclusion of his compost heap in the garden, and when he feels like it he joins the other animals to chat around the fire, and sing — Kum Ba Ya, and We Shall Overcome; that sort of thing.

This is the very best place in the whole world for a black rat to settle in. Nimby thinks it is just right, and he hopes it will stay just like this in every detail and never, ever change — because he wouldn’t want it any other way.