The Legend of the White-tailed rat

(File photo: not actual image of rodent in this story)

When we first arrived in Oecusse and moved into our house, we were talking to a couple of Australians who had lived in the house before. Upon eyeing our sensible plastic tubs that we had bought to keep our dry foods in, the couple warned us about a particularly vicious native rodent that wanders these parts: The White-tailed rat.

“They’ll eat right through that plastic”, one of them warned.

I got the sense that they were know-it-alls, trying to both impress and scare us with their local “knowledge”. A bit like the stories a sixth-grader hears a few weeks before starting high school, about the eighth graders who flush the new kids’ heads down the toilet. Scaremongering. That was all it was.

Six months later...

It’s the middle of the night and I hear an empty tin can scraping across our kitchen floor. In my recent past I have become rather accustomed to the sound of rummaging mice in the middle of the night, so I’m pretty confident it is a rodent of some description. In my midnight slumber I vaguely recall a few sparse but related words: rat... white-tail... plastic...

My eyes spring open. I give Wade an urgent nudge and inform him about our visitor in the kitchen. He dutifully gets up and has a look around to see if he can see anything, but comes back to no avail.

In the morning, we come to understand the cunning nature of this beast. In order to get inside the house, it has EATEN THROUGH THE WOODEN DOOR. While on its midnight feast, it has successfully climbed on top of some very high shelving and EATEN THROUGH A PLASTIC TUPPERWARE-STYLE CONTAINER, like some rodent-shaped can opener, in order to get to the rice – not the cheap local stuff, mind you – the expensive Arborio rice imported all the way from Dili.

Some nights later, the familiar sound once again disturbs me in my sleep. Once again, Wade – the brave, the gallant – stumbles out into the dark abyss, donning his head torch as he goes. I hear nothing for a few moments, and then a sudden crash as plastic boxes, tin cans and whacking implements simultaneous collide. Then, a flabbergasted chuckle from Wade, and all goes quiet again as the energy moves into the lounge room. All is calm for yet a moment before I once again hear the sounds of struggle; this time the coffee table being pushed across a stubborn tiled floor. More whacking, more whacking and even more whacking, and then...

“OK, it’s dead.”

In the morning I am informed that my side of the bargain is to dispose of the corpse, which has been placed respectfully in a cardboard box. I am to take it over the road, far away from the house, where a dog or a pig will likely enjoy the remains for lunch.

I decide to do this without delay, to get it over and done with. I pick up the cardboard box, take it into the bushes a little way down the street, upturn the box and witness only a brief glimpse of something stiff and furry, before running quickly away with a nauseous shudder, saying, “OHMYGODIT’SSOFUCKINGBIG!”

I didn’t get time to find out whether it was in fact a white-tailed rat, but I do hope it doesn’t have friends.