They are super-intelligent rats, escaped from a laboratory, able to read and write and to use machines and electrical appliances. The rats have always kept to themselves, but she soon finds out that these are no ordinary rats. Frisbee turns to a neighboring colony of rats for help. Thanks in part to a favor she does for a young crow named Jeremy, and in part to the memory of her late husband who had connections she didn’t even dream of, and again in part to the advice of an owl, Mrs. Frisby is desperate to figure out a solution to her dilemma: for as it stands, they can either move, and Timothy will die or they can stay put, and all die together.

He has to stay in bed, and he can’t survive even a breath of cold or damp air, the likes of which he is sure to run into if they move to their summer house now. Her younger son, Timothy, a frail but very intelligent and kind little mouse, comes down with pneumonia and while he is recovering (thanks to medicines made by an old white mouse named Mr. As the story opens, the time for moving out of their winter house approaches (when the frost breaks up, the farmer will plow his field, so their home will be destroyed). Frisby, a widowed field mouse who, with her two sons and two daughters, lives under a tree in a meadow in the summer, and inside a cinder block in a farmer’s field in the winter.

It (the book, not the movie) won the Newbery Medal in 1972. This book was the basis for the MGM/UA animated movie The Secret of NIMH.

Rt margaret and the rats of nimh