On the day of my husband’s annual fund-raising gala, I was down by the river liberating rats.

There were two of them on this day, massive, stolid, blunt-snouted beasts who bore no more resemblance to common house mice than beavers, or the nutria from the bayous of my childhood. Rattus rattus they were, or, more familiarly, European black rats. I looked them up in Webster’s Unabridged when Pom first designated me their official executioner. I figured that if you’re going to drown something, the least you can do is know its proper name. That was a fatal mistake. Name something, the old folk saying goes, and you have made it your own. Rattus rattus became mine the instant I closed Webster’s, and after that I simply took the victims caught in Pom’s traps down to the river and, instead of drowning them, let them go. Who, after all, would know? Only the dogs went with me, and, being bird dogs, they were uninterested in anything without wings. The leaden-footed, trundling rats were as far from the winged denizens of God’s bestiary as it was possible to be. My hideous charges waddled to freedom unmolested.