“Corn? Or barley is it?”“It’s oats. Soaked in deadly pye-zn. You take just one of them grains in your mouth and you’d be a gonner in five minutes!”
“Honest?”
“Yep. Never out of me sight, this tin.”
He caressed it with his hands and gave it a little shake so that the oat grains rustled softly inside.
“But not today. Your rats don’t get this today. They wouldn’t have it anyway. That they wouldn’t. There’s where you got to know rats. Rats is suspicious. Terrible suspicious, rats is. So today they gets some nice clean tasty oats as’ll do em no harm in the world. Fatten em, that’s all it’ll do. And tomorrow they gets the same again. And it’ll taste so good there’ll be all the rats in the districk comin along after a couple of days.”
“Rather clever.”
“You got to be clever on this job. You got to be cleverer’n a rat and that’s sayin somethin.”
“You’ve almost got to be a rat yourself,” I said. It slipped out in error, before I had time to stop myself, and I couldn’t really help it because I was looking at the man at the time. But the effect upon him was surprising.
“There!” he cried. “Now you got it! Now you really said somethin! A good ratter’s got to be more like a rat than anythin else in the world! Cleverer even than a rat, and that’s not an easy thing to be, let me tell you!”
-- Roald Dahl, The Ratcatcher.