Over the preceding six months, the family began complaining of a rodent invasion. Initially, they thought their particular plague was mice. But what I smelled wasnӴ a mouse. I, who was whelped under farmhouse stairs, who prowled the chicken house as a puppy and stuck my nose in every hole around their feed, recognized the odor of a rat. The entire neighborhood, block upon block, seemed suddenly overrun by rats. But they stayed out of sight and underground. They could be heard but not seen, and they impudently left their fecal calling cards on every carpet and countertop of the homes they raided.

My owners, city dwellers with whom I had lived for only a year following my rescue from a shelter, decided that I would best serve the family by menacing the rodents in their apparent hidey-hole, the basement. My very presence was supposed to be a sufficient deterrent to their activities. With me guarding the basement stairs each night, I would spoil any designs they had on a comfortable permanent residency.

On the first night of my vigil, I was fed and brought downstairs by the husband. He patted my head and repeatedly told me, ԇood Boy. You keep the critters from coming upstairs tonight. Okay, Woody? Thereӳ a good boy.ԠHe administered a soft treat from his pocket, clipped on a chain he had already attached to a drainage pipe, and turned to leave. I watched him ascend the open stairs to the warmth of the kitchen above, and the light went off. I stood alone in a darkness I could not yet see in.

Initially, it was very still. The smell of humans had not abated, and this kept my adversaries away. As my vision eventually expanded and sharpened, I saw roaches begin scuttling out from between cinder blocks and along the makeshift baseboards. Roaches have instincts instead of ears and are always the first to emerge. Therefore, they are the unwitting scouts for the mammals, an oblivious first-line detachment. As soon as the light was off, out they came, tapping their feelers against the cement like little blind men.

Sounds came from upstairs. Laughter, the clatter of dishes, the jangle of silverware. It was dinnertime in the human world. After a few moments of inhaling the scent of pork roast and potatoes boiled in their jackets, I heard the slapping drip of fluid on concrete and realized, with shame, that I was salivating.

It was not complacency that I felt down there, even though this was my home, my province. I recognized the trouble I was in. On one hand, my slavering was triggered by the odors that had begun to permeate every nearby cranny of the basement, and on the other hand, it was a nervous response, one I would not have had upstairs, where the aromas were stronger still. The potent and complicated undercurrent to that heady smell of food was the smell of them. They stank in a way that made me anxious, in a way that made my teeth clack together with involuntary anticipation. I wanted them to come out. Yet, at the same time, I wanted to run upstairs and escape. I wanted my plaid bed, my tooth-ravaged toys. I moved toward the stairs, but was seized by the chain.