Twelve [antikvár]

Prologue - A Russian Folk TaleSome people place this story in the town of Atkarsk, others in Volgsk, but in most versions it's Uryupin and so that is M^here we will keep it. All versions agree that the events occurred sometime in the early years of the reign of the great Tsar Pyetr and all agree that the town in question was infested by a plague of rats.Rats always came to Uryupin in the summer, taking grain and bringing disease, but the people of the town, like those of any town, had learned to survive the summer months, comfortable in the knowledge that the cold of winter would kill off most of the verminous creatures - not completely wipe them out perhaps, but at least reduce their numbers so that the next summer would be no worse than the last.But although the winters had of late been as cold as one might expect in Uryupin, they had had scant effect on the size of the rat population. The number emerging in spring seemed little fewer than there had been the previous autumn, and the number each autumn was three times what it had been in spring. By the third summer the rats were everywhere and the people of the town came up with a desperate solution. They would abandon Uryupin; leave it for the rats to feed in until there was nothing left11