Pack Rats

(I was cleaning off some 3 1/2 computer disk, since we still have an old working computer that has that drive in it. I came across this story on one of them)

Told by Grandpa Powell (Max):

This happened in Bluff. We would asked mother what a pack rats was, because she would keep talking to us about pack rats in the house, and in the winter time they would take over in the house. We asked her what they were and she said they were big black rats, they were rats and big, but she didn’t say how big they were.
Either ourselves or mother and dad would go up to my granddad’s place and spend a little while in the evening and talk. One evening they went up there and left Gordon and I there at the house alone. We kept hearing the pots and pans beneath the stairway rattling, apparently was from the heat from the little wooden stove. (We would have to stoke up the fire in it to keep the place warm, and to heat up the water so we could take bathes and stuff, and it had a reservoir, that is a water reservoir). We decided maybe we would play some cards, but the noise kept coming from underneath the stairway, and in our minds it was the pack rats moving around in there, which was probably was, we didn’t know how big they were and we weren’t about to open the door and let them in. we kept getting scared so we put a chair on the table and started to look for enough stuff to put us to the ceiling in the 10 foot house. We were both holding on to what ever put us up that high. When mom and dad come back and came through the door it scared us so bad that we were both speechless and we didn’t dare cry because we were afraid the pack rats would get loose any time and come into the house.
Mother told us that pack rats would get into the house buy using there teeth to borrow holes in the wood. And we weren’t about to let them chew on us, but we were so high and dry. When they got home dad looked up and saw us clear up there on top of the “thing”, and both had tears in our eyes and we were scared to death, both of us about the color as the ceiling just as white as white could be. He about whirled on mama and just about whipped her, because he asked us what with us kids and we said it was the pack rats, they were over there in the closet, we were dead serious. He got us down to the table and then on to the floor, he then walked over to show us that there weren’t any pack rats in the closet. He opened the door and Gordon and I knocked mama down trying to get back on the table so that the pack rats if they got into the kitchen they wouldn’t get a hold of us.

Grandma: Their houses in Bluff didn’t have ceilings in them so they would take cloth and stretch it across, and that was what the ceiling was. They would see these mice and things run across on the this cloth, so Grandma would tell them that they were pack rats and if they weren’t good the pack rats would pack them off. This she used as a leverage with them all the time.

Grandpa: But she made us do what she wanted us to do and we did it because we didn’t want the pack rats to come and get us.