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By Root 2137 0

the bacteria) that spread the disease. Plague kills rats just as energetically as it kills us. Indeed, it kills many other things, too. One of the signs of a plague outbreak is lots of dead dogs, cats, cows, and other animals scattered about. Fleas much prefer the blood of furry creatures to the blood of humans, and generally turn to us only when nothing better is available. For that reason, modern epidemiologists in places where plague is still common—notably parts of Africa and Asia—generally avoid culling rats and other rodents too enthusiastically during outbreaks. In a very real sense there is no more welcome time for rats to be around than when plague is rampant. Anyway, more than seventy other creatures besides rats—including rabbits, voles, marmots, squirrels, and mice—have been implicated in the spread of plague. Moreover, possibly the very worst plague outbreak in history doesn’t seem to have involved rats at all, at least not in England. Long before the notorious Black Death of the fourteenth century, an even more ferocious plague devastated Europe in the seventh century. In some places almost everyone died. The Venerable Bede, in his history of England written in the following century, says that when the pestilence reached his monastery at Jarrow, it killed everyone except the abbot and one boy—a mortality rate considerably over 90 percent. Whatever was the source of its spread, it wasn’t rats, it seems. No rat bones from the seventh century have been found anywhere in Britain—and people have looked hard. One excavation in Southampton collected fifty thousand animal bones from in and around a cluster of dwellings; none came from a rat.

It has been suggested that some outbreaks attributed to plague may not have been plague at all, but ergotism, a fungal disease of grain. Plague didn’t come at all to many cold, dry northern places—Iceland escaped entirely, as did much of Norway, Sweden, and Finland—even though those places had rats. At the same time, plague was associated with miserably wet years almost everywhere it appeared—the very circumstances that would tend to produce ergotism. The one problem with the theory is that the symptoms of ergotism are not much like those of plague. It may be that the word pestilence was used loosely or vaguely and simply misinterpreted by later historians.

Even just a generation or two ago, rat numbers in urban areas may have been considerably higher than now. The New Yorker reported in 1944 that a team of exterminators working in a well-known (but carefully unidentified) hotel in Manhattan caught 236 rats in the basement and subbasement in three nights. At about the same time, rats all but took over the aforementioned Gansevoort poultry market. They invaded in such numbers that secretaries sometimes found rats leaping out of their desk when the drawers were opened. Exterminators were called in and caught four thousand rats in a matter of days, but they couldn’t make the market ratproof. In the end it was shut down.

It is commonly written that there is one rat for every human being in a typical city, but studies have shown that to be an exaggeration. The actual figure is more like one rat for every three dozen people. Unfortunately, that still adds up to a lot of rats—a quarter of a million in New York City, for instance.

II

The real life in your house is at a much smaller scale. Down at the realm of the very tiny, your house teems with life: it is a veritable rain forest for crawling, clambering things. Armies of tiny creatures patrol the boundless jungles of your carpet fibers, paraglide amid floating motes of dust, crawl across the bedsheets at night to graze on the vast, delicious, gently heaving mountain of slumbering flesh that is you. These creatures exist in numbers you cannot comfortably imagine. Your bed alone, if it is averagely clean, averagely old, averagely dimensioned, and turned averagely often (which is to say almost never) is likely to be home to some two million tiny bed mites, too small to be seen with the naked eye but unquestionably there. It has been