Young Fredle

  “I guess every mouse has to went, sooner or later,” Fredle said, sounding to his own ears a lot like Grandfather. “It’s the rule.”

  “I’m hoping for later,” Neldo said. “Much later. What do you think happened to Axle? I bet she’d like me.”

  Fredle shook his head; he had no idea what might have happened to Axle, although he guessed she hadn’t found her way outside. He told Neldo, “I need to find a way back in.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s home. It’s where my family is.”

  “I wish you could come live with us,” Neldo said, but they both knew that wasn’t possible. That was not the way mice did things.

  “I wish I could find a way back,” Fredle countered.

  Neldo thought about that for a while. “We’ll find one,” she decided.

  “I already looked. There wasn’t any.”

  “You’ve been all the way around to the front of the house?”

  “What do you mean, the front of the house?” asked Fredle.

  “The house has four sides and this is only one of them, but—Fredle?—I’m hungry. Let’s forage,” Neldo said, and she jumped up. “They’ll start to wonder where I am and come looking and I don’t want them to find me here.”

  8

  Around Front

  Neldo set right to work helping Fredle look for a way back inside. The next midday, Fredle was at the compost pile taking bites out of an apple core and deciding if there was any way he could dig a hole large enough for a long crust of bread, or if he had to chew it into smaller sections, which would be easier to hide. He had decided to try digging one big hole and was working his paws hard, his nose buried in the soft compost, when he felt something damp and rather cold jabbed into his rib cage.

  He froze, nose in the compost.

  “What’s wrong with you, Fredle?”

  It was Neldo’s voice.

  “You’re supposed to run. Run first, look later, that’s the rule, that’s the way mice save themselves. Is it different for house mice? But what are you doing, foraging now? Don’t you know this is the time Snake and Fox come out from the barn?”

  “Snake and Fox?”

  “After they have a morning’s sleep, after the night’s hunting,” Neldo said.

  “A snake and a fox together?”

  “No, of course not. Don’t you know anything? I’m talking about Snake the cat, not Snake the snake. And Fox the cat, who isn’t a fox, either. Besides, foxes almost never go after mice. They like chickens, and eggs, and rabbits. They like their food bigger, except for eggs. But everything eats eggs, even humans. So maybe it’s eggs that are the bottom of the food chain?”

  “Bardo said this was the best time.”

  “Don’t blame Bardo. He has to do what’s best for his family. It’s not as if he wants you went. In fact, I think he likes you, or anyway he admires you, or at least he doesn’t understand you. Come on.”

  Before Fredle could ask her what she meant by that, she had run off. Fredle followed her along the garden fence, scurrying from post to post, across the rutted dirt road until they were safe behind the garbage cans. Once he’d learned how much danger he’d been in, Fredle had run faster and more nervously than usual, so it took him a minute to catch his breath, but when he did he asked Neldo, “Then what are you doing, foraging at midday?”

  “I wasn’t foraging, I was looking for you. Nobody will notice that I’m gone, not at midday. They’re all asleep. I thought we could look around front for your way back into the house. Didn’t we plan to look around front?”

  “I haven’t decided if I want to,” Fredle objected. He was feeling overwhelmed, as if he didn’t understand anything anymore. That feeling made him want to stay just where he was, until he did understand. After all, it was true that as well as being more easily seen in the bright midday light you could also see better yourself, which meant that it might be just as safe to forage at midday as at any other time. That would mean that Bardo had given him good advice, although he was fairly sure that Bardo had no intention of helping him. But Bardo had helped him, and maybe he had wanted to. How was Fredle supposed to know what was true? Not knowing how to know made him cross.

  “Yes, you do,” Neldo reminded him cheerfully. “You know you do, and I can show you where our nest is, too, and where the barn is, because you never want to go anywhere near the barn. Once the snake has eaten he stays full for a long time, but the barn cats never stop hunting even if they’re not hungry. So we’ll start off heading toward the barn.”

  If Neldo wasn’t going to be a grump, he wouldn’t be one, either, Fredle decided. “The inside cat is like that, too,” he told her. “It just likes catching mice.”

  Side by side they darted back across the grass and the rough dirt up to the shelter of one of the garden fence posts. There, they had to catch their breath and couldn’t speak for a long while. Then Neldo said, “I want to show you,” and they went along the garden fence heading away from the compost pile, until they came to the final post. “Look,” Neldo said.

  Fredle saw the chickens in their pen, with their own little house, which, since he was colorblind to red, he saw as dark gray. “Why should I look at chickens?” he asked, to show Neldo that he knew chickens when he saw them.

  She wasn’t a bit upset about that, or surprised. It was as if she thought he already knew everything. “No, look past the chicken pen.”

  Fredle did as he was told and he saw a large mass in the distance, dark gray, the same color as the chickens’ house, but huge. This was probably the same dark mass that he saw when he went out to look at the night sky. “What is that?”

  “A chicken pen,” Neldo told him, “but I said look beyond.”

  “I am. There’s something big, big as the house—”

  “Actually, it’s bigger.”

  “With a little white wall on one side—”

  “That’s our woodshed wall.”

  “What is it?”

  “That’s the barn. The cats like to lie in the sun in front of the barn.”

  Fredle didn’t see anything that looked like a cat. “What’s a barn for?” he asked, studying the flat-faced building, bigger than the house and as dark as the clouds that carried rain.

  “It’s where Snake the cat and Fox the cat live, and Mister keeps his tractor in there and his lawn mower and his chain saw, all the machines that cut things down or dig them up. The cows go in there at night, and in winter Mister and Missus keep the sheep behind it. Rats live in the barn, and there are families of mice, too, barn mice. They live on the oats and hay and other feed Mister keeps in there.”

  “Field mice live in the barn? They live with cats and rats?”

  “And the dogs in summer. In summer the dogs like to sleep in the barn.”

  “Don’t field mice have any sense of survival?” Fredle asked. “Your family lives near a snake, they live near rats and cats. Why don’t field mice live in fields?”

  “Live out in fields? In the wild?” Neldo shook her head. “That would be crazy. But I don’t know why you’re acting so superior. You house mice live with a cat, and traps, and it was eating something bad for you that almost got you went, eating something bad that you found inside, where you’re claiming it’s so much safer.”

  “But we know when it’s safe inside, we know what’s safe—mostly. Most of us are safe most of the time.” It sounded like they were having a contest. Were he and Neldo competing to see who had the safest territory? Who cared? he wondered, and, What difference did it make?

  Neldo apparently felt the same. “You’ve seen where we live, now, and the barn, so let’s go,” she said. “Didn’t you want to explore around the front of the house?”

  By the time they had returned to Fredle’s lattice wall, he had another question. “Why don’t any other mice have their nests under the porch? Like mine.”

  Neldo didn’t have to even stop to think, it was so obvious. “It’s too far from food, especially in winter. But you kno
w what? You’re right, Fredle. In winter you’ll be protected from snow—”

  Fredle stopped himself from interrupting to ask her what snow was.

  “—just like we are in the woodshed.”

  “Let’s go,” Fredle said, suddenly impatient with all the talking. “You lead.”

  They went on through bright midday sun, moving along close to the lattice wall. The grass shone green, the lattice wall shone white, and the air glimmered all around. Then they went around a sharp corner and the lattice was gone. Neldo went right on, but Fredle hesitated, looking back for places to run to for shelter, looking around, looking forward.

  That was when he saw something he could never have imagined, right in front of him, something as surprising as stars.

  “Oh,” said Fredle. “Oh my.”

  They were tall, and straight-stemmed, with two long wings of leaves rising up along the stem. The warm air near them was filled with a faint sweet smell and the stems held up tall cups, in different colors, white and yellow and the same dark gray as the barn, but shiny. That dark gray didn’t hold his eyes, but the white and yellow did, where they glowed in their loveliness.

  Fredle stood struck still, and looked. Row behind row, there were three straight rows of these shining things, standing in the sunlight. He looked up at the smooth-sided cups and then his eyes ran down the long green stems, then they flew up on the winglike dark green leaves. Did those cups catch the rain when it fell? he wondered. Were they there for the humans to bend and drink out of? He thought that water held in those cups, especially the white ones, would have a power no other water could match. He thought that if a mouse could drink that water he would become more of a mouse than he had been, wiser perhaps if he drank from the white cup, stronger and faster, maybe, if from the yellow cup. And if he drank out of the dark gray cup, what power would he learn?

  Neldo woke him from his dreaming thoughts with a sharp poke of the nose. “Come on! You can’t just—Don’t stand around in the open like that! What’s wrong with you, Fredle?”

  She was dancing on her four little feet, as restless as Bardo.

  “What are they?” Fredle asked.

  “You mean these flowers? I don’t know—get moving, Fredle!—roses, maybe, or tulips or daisies, it doesn’t matter, they’re not good to eat. Come on!”

  Fredle caught her nervousness and skittered after her into the shelter of the row of flowers growing closest to the wall of the house. He made himself pay attention to what was in front of his eyes, but it was an effort not to turn his head to look at and smell the flowers. Next time, he promised himself. Next time I’ll come alone so I can look as long as I want to.

  As if she could know what he was thinking, Neldo said, “Next time we’ll come just to look at the flowers. Early in the day, the dew on their petals catches the light and it’s as if the flowers have been sprinkled with stars.”

  “Oh,” said Fredle again, as he tried to imagine that.

  “You’ll see,” she assured him. “But right now, aren’t we looking for a way to get through the foundation?”

  “What’s the foundation?”

  “It’s what the house rests on. It’s these big, hard stones, and the humans put mortar between them to seal them closed. The foundation is what keeps the bad weather out of the house, too. The barn has a foundation but the woodshed doesn’t, and neither does the chicken coop.”

  “I just don’t know enough,” Fredle said. He wished there wasn’t so much to know.

  “Yes you do,” Neldo answered. “But you know about inside, not outside. But you’re learning about outside, and you do already know a lot. Even Bardo says so.”

  They were walking along, studying the stony wall beside them, noses close to the bottom, where the foundation met dirt. These stones were impenetrable. The mortar between them was sometimes crumbly, but the two mice found no opening, no way in. After a while, their progress was halted by a wooden wall.

  “Steps?” Fredle guessed.

  “See? What did I tell you? You do know things.”

  “Are these steps?”

  “I think so. Probably. They look like the other steps, don’t you think? But this is the farthest I’ve ever gone, around the house. I don’t know what comes next.” She hesitated, then asked, “Do you want to keep going?”

  Fredle did.

  Single file, they went along the edge of the steps, Neldo in the lead, but found no cracks or openings in the wood. They had just passed the first corner, where the steps came down to the ground, and were crossing over stones that were small and sharp enough to make the going uncomfortable, when Fredle heard a hissing, purring sound.

  He froze.

  “Well, well,” said a soft voice.

  Neldo had disappeared.

  “What have we here?”

  Fredle turned his head, just slightly, just enough to glimpse—exactly what he feared. A cat. He knew this cat. It was the kitchen cat, a long-legged, orange-colored, yellow-eyed beast that all the mice knew hunted only for the fun of it, just to catch and went mice and not because it was hungry. Missus fed that cat its own food in its own bowl. All the mice knew that, because when there was no other choice they sometimes raided that bowl.

  The orange cat was crouching, low, ready. Its tail—the end twitching—swept the ground. Fredle looked around desperately. There was no shelter. Where was Neldo hiding? There was no sound except for a distant barking and some insect, humming happily to itself.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asked the cat, still without moving. Any mouse knew that the moment you moved, the cat pounced. “It’s not as if Missus doesn’t give you enough food.”

  “I might as well ask what you’re doing outside, a fat, healthy house mouse like you.”

  “We never hurt you,” Fredle said.

  “You’ve taken my food out of my bowl,” the cat answered.

  So he was going to have to make a run for it. Fredle knew that, and he knew how slim his chances were. What he didn’t know was what way to run—ahead was unknown and behind there was no place for a mouse to hide from a cat except among the tall flowers, which would offer little protection.

  Back or forward? Forward or back? He couldn’t decide. But he had to get moving because if he didn’t, he had no chance at all.

  Back, he decided, since he’d rather went among those flowers than anywhere else, and he tensed his—

  “Patches! Hello, Patches! You’re outside! Do you want to play?” barked Sadie, bouncing across the grass toward the cat, with Angus following. “Look, Angus, it’s Patches! He’s outside!”

  Fredle took advantage of the cat’s momentary inattention to back away, slowly, slowly, toward the flowers. He didn’t even notice the sharp stones cutting into his paws.

  “I’m—” hissed the cat. Sadie’s head was now between the cat and Fredle. The cat’s tail waved angrily. “I’m hunting, can’t you see?”

  Fredle crept two more steps backward.

  “But, Patches, you only hunt inside. Snake and Fox are the outside hunters.”

  “Don’t you know that about cats, Sadie?” asked Angus. “Cats hunt wherever they are, all the time. It’s what cats do.”

  “Oh,” Sadie said. She turned to Fredle, who halted in mid-creep. “Do you live under the back porch?” she asked him.

  “That’s not me,” he said.

  “Yes it is. I can smell it. But you don’t smell like a field mouse. A field mouse smells wilder, different, smells like grass and—” Her noise pointed into the rows of flowers. “There’s a field mouse hiding in there,” she told Fredle.

  “So what if I am under the porch?” Fredle said, to distract her from Neldo.

  “What’s your name?” asked Sadie, but before he could answer she told him, “I’m Sadie and that’s Angus and this is Patches. I know this mouse,” she said to the cat. “I wish you wouldn’t hunt him.”

  “Dogs don’t know mice,” Patches answered, but the cat was no longer crouching. He sat up and
curled his tail around himself, as if he couldn’t care less about anything and especially about any mouse who might happen to be nearby.

  “Dogs don’t know cats, either,” Angus remarked. “I’ve told her that, lots of times, but she doesn’t listen. She never listens to me.”

  “Yes I do,” Sadie protested. “Just not when you’re wrong.” She turned back to Fredle. “What is your name, or don’t mice have names?”

  “We do,” Fredle told her, adding, “Fredle.”

  “Hello, Fredle,” Sadie said. “Do you want to play? You can run and we can all hunt you.”

  “Not in Missus’s flowers,” Angus warned Sadie. “You know the rules, not in the flowers.”

  Fredle was going to have to explain things to this Sadie dog, who didn’t seem to know who was who in the food chain. “You’re too big for me to play with. It wouldn’t be fun for either one of us.” Fredle was thinking that it especially wouldn’t be any fun for him, trying to survive hunting games with giants, and one of them a cat.

  “Oh.” Sadie was disappointed, but she accepted his decision. She lowered her head to the ground, her black nose pointing toward him. “I guess so. We have a baby.”

  “I know,” he said. “Can I go now?”

  “If you have to,” Sadie said.

  Fredle looked at Patches. The yellow eyes stared back at him.

  Fredle waited.

  “Oh, all right,” Patches said.

  “You wouldn’t eat one of my other friends, would you, Patches?” Sadie was asking the cat as Fredle broke into a full scurry. He tucked himself into the corner where the steps met the foundation stones, and huddled there, shivering.

  After a while, he heard the dogs go away. After another while, he heard the sound of the cat padding back up the steps. Only then did Neldo creep out from among the flowers to join him in his corner. For a long time, all they could do was look at one another, amazed that they were both alive.

  Finally Neldo asked, “How did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Get away from the cat.”

  “I didn’t. You heard what happened, you saw. Sadie saved me.”