Young Fredle

  “If they don’t forage, will they eat me instead?”

  “They’ll think about it. They’ll want to. But all a raccoon needs to start him off at night is enough food to get him going. The chicken will do that. We’ll have fresh ramps for after, if we want. Hop back on, young Fredle. We know your name,” he said as Fredle made his careful way up the long snout and between the dark eyes. “So unless we haven’t had anything to eat for a while, I’d say you’re safe enough. For the time being. If the weather holds.”

  Fredle gripped an ear and thought about all this. He reminded himself of the appearance and the taste of the food Rilf had shown him, ramps, and the watercress the captain had pulled out of the stream. You never knew when you might need to know something. Rilf gathered up a mouthful of the long stalks and then he and Fredle were off again, heading through grainy darkness toward the burrow.

  Rilf was proved correct. Three raccoons were waiting in the clearing when he came loping back. “We saved you the backbone, Cap’n.”

  Rilf lowered his head and let Fredle scramble off to retreat to the shelter of the wall. Then he emptied his mouth of its burden. “Ramps,” he announced. “Dig in, boys. Or save them for tomorrow night. Whatever.”

  “I could use another mouthful,” said Rec, but the others shouted him down: “Paws off! You’re always trying to eat more. Give it a rest, Rec.”

  “What about the mouse, Cap’n?” asked Rad. “You want to kill him before we go? We don’t want him running off on us.”

  Rilf waited too long for Fredle’s comfort, as if he was thinking this over, but at last he said, “Fredle won’t run off. He knows he can’t find his way. Don’t you, young Fredle?”

  “Yes,” Fredle answered, because it was true. He’d tried to run away, and failed.

  “You don’t believe that inedible stuff, do you, Cap’n?” asked Rec.

  “What do you think?” Rilf answered.

  “But what’ll he eat? Because we don’t want him starved and skinny. There’s little enough meat on a mouse when he’s fat,” Rimble pointed out.

  “He’ll eat whatever we bring him.” Rilf turned to Fredle. “Anything you want from the compost?”

  This was not what Fredle had expected and it took him a few seconds to think of … “Apple peels?”

  “Apple peels! Didja hear that?” And they were off again, laughing at him. “Woo-Hah, listen to that mouse, he wants us to bring apple peels back for him.”

  “I have to say, he’s almost too much fun to eat,” Rimble remarked.

  “What’s so funny?” demanded Fredle. “What’s so funny about being hungry and wanting something good to eat?”

  “What’s so funny, young Fredle, is that if you climb over this stone wall you will find yourself in the middle of a whole field of apple trees. With apples lying scattered on the ground around them. A little rotten, maybe, after the winter cold, but apples all the same, enough to feed seven times seven herds of mice.”

  “What are they doing there?” asked Fredle. “Didn’t Mister and Missus want them?”

  “Nobody harvests these apples,” Rilf told him. “It’s as if nobody knows they’re there. Deer eat them, and we do, too, if there’s nothing better on offer. But raccoons are carnivores, basically. That means we eat meat, in case you don’t know. Which includes mouse,” he added.

  “Includes Fredle the inedible, Woo-Hah,” laughed Rec. “Can we get going? There’s no garbage can for us tonight, I’m thinking, but what do you say to a good sniff around that chicken pen?”

  “Who said you could give orders?” growled Rad. “You’re not my captain.”

  “Can’t we just go?” demanded Rimble.

  “Happy foraging, Fredle,” Rilf called back as the four raccoons lolloped off, leaving him alone in the night.

  For a long time Fredle sat in the clearing in front of the wide-mouthed raccoon burrow. The air darkened around him. The black, shadowy branches of trees swayed in the wind, high around him. From where he sat, he could look up and see thin clouds that had stretched themselves across the sky. Through them he caught glimpses of stars, and then one of the smaller moons appeared, curved like an apple peel, and bright white. Hungry as he was, Fredle sat for a long time, looking up. As always, the stars comforted him. He should do something about being hungry, he knew, but he didn’t move, looking at the stars and this moon, thinking about everything he had learned that day, remembering the stream—what was it he’d forgotten about streams?—and what Rilf had told him, about setting off in the right direction the first time, the direction of morning light, downhill. The clouds drifted off, leaving the stars and moon bright in the sky. Still, Fredle didn’t move.

  After a long while, however, he started to get curious about those apples, over the wall. He scrambled awkwardly up over first one large stone, then another, then a third—jumping over the deep cracks where the stones did not fit together—until he stood on top.

  From there he could see a dark expanse of star-strewn sky, beneath which he made out the shapes of many trees, standing in rows like the flowers at the front of the house. What would make those trees grow in rows? he wondered. The humans, probably. Only humans made such straight lines out of things, in flower beds, in the walls of a house, and even out in the wild, apparently, far from their homes.

  These trees were smaller versions of the tall trees near the house, where squirrels lived. These trees had slender trunks and their branches didn’t spread out so high above the ground. Pieces of white clouds were caught in their branches and there was a faint perfume in the air, like that of the flowers—although not exactly like it. Also in the air, now that Fredle paid attention to what he was smelling, he caught the scent of apples.

  Careful not to go so fast that he lost footing, Fredle clambered down the other side of the stone wall. Back on the ground, the apple smell was stronger and the grass sparse, so he ran quickly to the nearest tree.

  It stood among thin stalks of grass and a scattering of round, brown apples. Why were some apples dark gray, like the peels on the compost heap, while these were brown? Fredle wondered as he bit into one. This brown apple was softer, too, not at all crisp. It was as if this brown apple had soaked in water as it lay in the grass. But it tasted apple-y good, it filled his stomach, and when he finished eating it, he decided to take the core back with him, to his own tiny burrow in the wall. He had seen how Rilf carried ramps. With an apple core in his teeth, Fredle found that going over the stone wall was more difficult, but he managed it, tumbling back onto the ground at almost the exact same spot from which he had first started his climb. Why, he asked himself as he drifted off to sleep, would humans keep their apple trees so far from the house, when the garden and the barn and the chickens and cats and dogs were kept so close?

  The raccoons woke him when they returned, noisily recounting their adventures of the evening to one another, boasting about taking a swat at an owl—“Thought I was some easy prey of a weasel but I showed him different!”—and facing down a rat—“They think they’re the only ones with any rights to the grain bins. Woo-Hah. They think they’ve got the only sharp teeth on the farm.”

  “We brought a couple of corncobs,” Rimble told Fredle.

  “He’s got a whole field of apples,” Rec objected.

  “We share,” Rilf told them. “That’s how the Rowdy Boys do it. There’s enough for all of us, and besides, if ordinary mouse is tasty, a fat, corn-fed mouse will be even tastier.”

  “Right you are, Cap’n,” they said.

  “Actually, thank you, but I’m not hungry,” Fredle told them. They made him nervous. The idea of eating with them made him even more nervous.

  “Woo-Hah,” they laughed.

  “If you’d ever had corn,” Rec advised him, entirely serious, “you wouldn’t miss the chance to have it again.”

  The raccoons weren’t ready to sleep. It wasn’t light yet and they were still excited by the night’s adventures.

  “Those dogs never even
suspected we were there.”

  “I’d have brought you an egg,” Rilf told Fredle, “but they don’t transport well, too fragile. I’d have ended up with a mouthful of shell.”

  “Ick-ko,” agreed Rimble.

  “You are such a coonlet,” Rec said.

  Rimble snapped at the big raccoon, teeth flashing. “I’ll show you coonlet and I’ll take off some of your fat while I’m at it.”

  The two snarled at one another until Rad interrupted to report, “Things are looking promising in the garden, Cap’n. She’s planted lettuce, and the peas and peppers are already sprouted.”

  “Rain tomorrow,” predicted Rilf. When the other raccoons groaned at the news, “Don’t be so soft,” he told them. “How do you feel about rain, young Fredle?”

  “Young Inedible,” said Rec.

  “Young Incredible,” added Rimble.

  “Woo-Hah,” they laughed.

  “I don’t mind rain. It means good drinking,” Fredle said.

  “Who wants to have to live off rainwater? Not us.” The Rowdy Boys all agreed on this point. “We’ve got the stream and we’ve got the lake, too. When do we move to the lake, Cap’n? It’s warm enough, isn’t it? Winter’s well gone. Which do you think tastes better,” they asked one another, “fresh fish or fresh mouse?”

  “When do we go up to the summer burrow, Cap’n?” they asked again, and more eagerly.

  Once again, Fredle was distracted by something he couldn’t remember about that stream. The forgotten thing chittered like a chicken at the edge of his mind.

  “The girls will be wanting to see us, and show off their coonlets.”

  Rilf looked at Fredle and then at the Rowdy Boys. He looked up into the air and then back at Fredle. He was watching Fredle when he answered, “We’ll be there in time for the full moon.”

  “Not long, then,” Rec observed, and he, too, looked at Fredle.

  “I’m almost sorry,” said Rad, staring as well at the mouse in their midst.

  Fredle guessed he knew what they were thinking of. “Me too,” he agreed.

  “Woo-Hah,” they all laughed.

  He didn’t join in.

  13

  The Moon’s Story

  Fredle thought very carefully about the situation; he didn’t want to make mistakes because of being frightened, or hungry, or just plain impatient. The first thing he needed to know, if it was something that could be known, was: How long did he have before a full moon appeared in the night sky? As far as Fredle had seen, the different moons appeared at random out of the darkness and sometimes there was no moon at all. But maybe raccoons knew something he didn’t about moons. Maybe raccoons had lived in the wild long enough to understand what was going on in the sky as well as mice understood what was going on in the kitchen. Fredle needed to find out what the raccoons knew, without making Rilf suspicious.

  He couldn’t spend too many hours thinking about all of this, either, because who knew when some full moon would take it into its head to pop up in the sky, and that would be the end of him.

  That evening, when the raccoons woke up and were having a snack of stale chocolate cake, they offered some to Fredle. He recognized the smell. “Mice can’t eat chocolate,” he told them.

  “Poor you,” said Rec, but didn’t sound sorry at the prospect of increasing his own share even by one-quarter of the small amount a mouse would eat.

  “It’s really good, Fredle,” said Rimble, who didn’t have many chances to be the raccoon picking on someone. “It’s sweet. Smell it. It can’t hurt you just to smell it, can it?”

  Fredle turned his back on them and looked up at the sky, where only one star shone, low in the purple darkness of evening. He studied it for a long time, as the raccoons slurped and swallowed behind him, before asking, carelessly, without even turning around, “Is that one of the moons up there? Over the apple trees?”

  “What do you mean, one of the moons?” asked Rad.

  “Did you hear what he said?” Rimble asked. “That mouse can’t tell the moon from a moonbit.”

  “Woo-Hah, stupid mouse,” laughed Rec.

  “Unless—Do you think he’s making fun of us?” asked Rimble. “Because if he is—What do you think, Rec, do we let the mouse get away with that?”

  “He could be,” said Rec, menacingly. “I think he might need to be taught a lesson.”

  “And we’re the ones to teach him,” Rimble agreed.

  “If you two are looking for a fight, why not pick on someone your own size?” asked Rad. “Like me, for instance.” He growled low in his throat. Rec snarled, showing his teeth. Fredle moved back toward the shelter of the stone wall, in case one of their fights broke out.

  But Rilf interrupted. “Is that right, Fredle?” he asked. “No one ever told you about moonbits?”

  “I’m a house mouse,” Fredle said. He wanted badly to tell those raccoons everything he knew about the moons that came out among what he knew humans called stars. However, his plan was to not be eaten, which was more important than showing off how smart he was.

  “Makes sense, then, that he wouldn’t know, doesn’t it, Cap’n?” asked Rad. “Being that house mice live inside. These two stupids wouldn’t have the imagination to figure that out. You should tell the mouse the story.”

  “What story?” asked Rimble. “You mean the moon story?”

  “I thought we were heading out, to forage,” protested Rec.

  “There’s all night for that,” Rilf told him, and turned to Fredle. “That little bright thing you asked about, the one that looks like it’s tangled up in those tree branches? That’s a moonbit. There are moonbits all over the sky but you can only see them at night when the air is dark. During daylight they blend in with the air, because they’re so pale. Those moonbits used to be part of the moon, way back. Way back, when the moon was young and just starting to grow, the way young things do, way back then, the raccoons wanted the moon to get bigger. When there were none of those big gray sky-leaves covering him, the moon gave out a bright light for raccoons. We could see everything clearly, mice in the fields, squirrels running over tree roots, fish in the lake, ramps and dandelions.” Rilf broke off and remarked to Fredle, “I bet you don’t know what a lake is.”

  “Or a fish,” Fredle agreed.

  “You curious?” Rilf asked.

  Fredle nodded.

  “The lake’s water that’s always there. Some summers the banks and beaches get wider, but it never dries up. In fact, it keeps filling up, we know it has to, because there’s a stream always running out of it, down the side of the mountain to land up nobody knows where. But the stream doesn’t matter because there are no fish in it.”

  “There are frogs in the stream, Cap’n,” said Rad. “Frog is good. Better than mouse.”

  “There’s not enough meat on a frog. Give me a plump mouse anytime, especially a plump house mouse,” Rec said. “Mouse is better than squirrel, too, because they don’t have all that fur. Fur—ick-ko.”

  “I see you’re bored with the story,” Rilf said crossly.

  “No, Cap’n, not a bit of it,” Rec answered quickly. “Or anyway, I’m not. You two, snap shut. And you”—he turned to Fredle—“no questions. Understood?”

  Fredle wasn’t about to answer. It was the frogs that did it. Those frogs reminded him of what it was he’d been trying to think of, ever since Rilf took him across the field to eat ramps and drink water—from the stream! He remembered hearing Sadie’s voice saying something. But he couldn’t remember what it was he’d heard.

  Rilf went on with the story, and now there were two things Fredle was paying close attention to, both at the same time: the full moon question and the stream-Sadie memory. He took a deep breath, looking straight at Rilf. I can do this, he thought.

  “For a long time,” Rilf was saying, “the raccoons left food out for the moon, all the things the moon likes, fish bones and chicken bones, grassy stalks, eggshells, apple cores, too. The moon has a real taste for apple cores
. The moon ate everything and grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger. He grew so big the raccoons began to get worried. Do you want to know why, young Fredle?” he asked.

  Fredle nodded. He could think about two things at the same time, but he couldn’t talk as well. Three was too many for him.

  “The moon was grown so big, it was starting to crowd down from the sky onto their territory. The raccoons were afraid that before long that moon would either crush them or crowd them back into corners where nothing grew and no prey lived. After that, they knew, it wouldn’t be very long before there were no raccoons left at all. But what could they do?”

  “They could stop feeding him,” Fredle suggested, unable to stop himself.

  “Wow, Fredle, that’s a really good idea,” Rimble said, in a sarcastic voice. “Like it wasn’t already way too late for that.”

  Rilf ignored both of them. He went on with his story. “What they did was gather together the wisest and strongest raccoons. To talk about ways to get rid of the moon, all the wisest and strongest raccoons, each one cleverer than the last—because raccoons are famous for being clever. Even mice know that, right, Fredle? But that big fat moon was right there, always, listening in on everything they said.”

  He waited, to let them consider that problem.

  In the silence, Fredle remembered: Sadie had said she wanted to run over to the stream for a drink of water, that it was close by, but she couldn’t go because she had her job of watching the baby. He remembered being in the garden and Sadie saying that to him. He almost melted into the dirt with relief.

  “They did stop feeding the moon and they totally ignored him, hoping that he would go away to another sky. But the monstrous thing hung around. Getting bigger. Not getting bigger as fast as he had, but still … Things were dire, you can imagine. Until finally they had an idea. Just one hope, the only plan they could think of.”

  “It was a great plan,” Rad told Fredle. “If it hadn’t been for them, we wouldn’t be here today.”

  Fredle wasn’t sure that would be such a terrible thing, but he certainly didn’t say that out loud. He was being careful to pay close attention to Rilf’s story so as not to give away his excitement at what he had just remembered. He asked, “What was the plan? How could raccoons stop the moon?”