The Mouse and His Child

  “I know you’ll like this place,” said the female to her mate. “I came here the other night, and it’s really a darling little hollow. There’s always something good. Mmm! Smell those shrews!”

  “I don’t know,” said the male. “Shrew is what I had for lunch.”

  “There’s no pleasing you,” said the female. “And they’re such tempting little fellows too.” Below them both armies were dragging off the wounded and the dead; as the moon sank low their moving shadows lengthened on the bloodstained snow; the glittering crust was unbroken by the tiny trampling feet. “Look,” said the female as both armies drew back and closed ranks for another charge, “they’re all lined up in rows, ever so neat.”

  “Oh, all right,” said the male. “Let’s have shrew then. I don’t want to argue about it.”

  The weasels flowed like hungry shadows down into the hollow, and once among the shrews, struck right and left with lightning swiftness, smiling pleasantly with the blood of both armies dripping from their jaws. Not a single shrew escaped. When the weasels had satisfied their thirst for blood they bounded away, leaving behind them heaps of tiny corpses scattered on the snow.

  “This is a nice territory,” said the female. “It’s the nicest we’ve had yet. I’d kind of like to settle down here for a while.”

  “It’s not bad,” said her mate. “Not a bad little territory at all. I could see us making a home here.” They nuzzled each other affectionately as they ran, and their heads were so close together that when the horned owl swooped down out of the moonlight his talons pierced both brains at once.

  “My land,” wheezed the owl as he rose heavily with the weasels’ limp bodies dangling from his claws. “Two at once! The missus won’t believe me when I tell her. Yessiree!” he chuckled, “as territories go, this is a mighty good one!”

  He flew on, and the earth slid back below him, silver in the moonlight. Over the Meadow Mutual Hoard and Trust Company he flew, and the fields beyond the woods; over the trash-fire beacons of the dump and the windups in the beer-can avenue; over the rats’ midway where the carousel played its cracked waltz; over new rubbish hills, and over the charred ruin of a dollhouse with its mansard roof smashed, its lookout missing, its chimneys toppled, its ladies and its gentlemen long gone.

  * * *

  THE FROG and the mouse and his child, seeing no immediate danger after a cautious look all around, left the trees and struck out for the pine woods beyond the stream at the far end of the meadow. The full moon, low behind the black trees, watched them like a yellow eye as they reached the stream and followed it. Frog thumped softly on the snow as he hopped; the matchbox rattled; the clockwork buzzed; the tin feet of the mouse and his child scraped and slid upon the snow; the stream beside them gurgled under the ice.

  “Onward, mice!” muttered the father to himself as he pushed his son ahead. Most of the cloth of his trousers had been torn away by spears, and his bare tin glinted in the moonlight where his fur was missing. The child, similarly battleworn, listened to the drum that thumped and rattled on his chest, but walked backward in silence.

  “There are the pines on the far side of the stream,” said Frog. “We can cross here.” He helped the mouse and his child down the bank and onto the ice.

  “Destiny has many rivers —” he began, but never finished the sentence. There was a swoop of soft wings as he spoke, a gust of cold air, and Frog rose up above the stream in the talons of the horned owl’s mate. Father and son, knocked flat, heard the fortune-teller’s coin clink on the ice beside them. “Good luck!” called the deep, sad voice of their friend and uncle, and the frog was gone in the last of the moonlight.

  * * *

  THE SKY was brightening into dawn when Manny Rat approached the hollow where the shrews had fought. He moved slowly and laboriously, clanking as he walked, for he had fashioned armor for himself from two tin cans, and thus protected from poisoned spears, had come to snatch his victims from the shrews. The elephant labored behind him in the snow, her one eye fixed on him as though hatred alone kept her rusty works in motion.

  Manny Rat walked through thickets of spear shafts among the silent ranks of the dead, cursing quietly as he looked in vain for signs or remnants of the toy mice and the frog. After making sure that no live shrews lurked nearby, he divested himself of the tin cans, straightened his paisley dressing gown, and considered the situation. “Well,” he said at length, “having come this far, I might as well continue. It’s really quite remarkable how they keep on going! What a relief it will be to smash them!” Sighing philosophically, he dined on what the weasels had left, then, provisioning the elephant’s paper bags for future travel, he took up the trail again.

  The sun was up, and the spears in the snow, like gnomons, marked the hour with their shadows, when the blue jay reporter flashed over the battlefield. “LATE BULLETIN!” he squawked. “NIGHT BATTLE ON MEADOW BORDER RESULTS IN … ” He paused and flew lower, in some confusion as to who had won and who had lost. “VICTORY!” he concluded, and pleased with the sound, extended his headline. “VICTORY! VICTORY! VICTORY!” he screamed, and was gone into the business of the day.

  Behind him on the battlefield two tin cans glinted in the sunlight, and from one of them a scrap of paper fluttered like a little banner in the morning breeze. BONZO DOG FOOD, said the label, and on it half a little black-and-white spotted dog, wearing a chef’s cap, smiled at his image on the smaller BONZO can he carried on his tray.

  THE MOUSE and his child lay on the ice where they had fallen, the father’s legs moving slowly back and forth as his spring unwound.

  “My Uncle Frog is gone!” wept the child. “What happened?”

  “He was taken by an owl, as the weasels were,” the father said. “He kept his word, and guided us as far as he was able. Now our destined roads have parted, and once more we are alone.” Alone to face Manny Rat, he thought even as he spoke, for he knew that soon or late the rat would be on their trail again. He saw those burning eyes as clearly as if he stood before him now, and heard again the soft voice saying to the fortune-teller, “Step aside; I’m going to smash your friends.”

  The father said nothing more to the child; they lay in silence through the night, while the wind brought them the smell of the pines to remind them of the Christmas tree where they would never dance again.

  “Act One, Scene One,” said a scratchy voice across the stream as the sun rose. “The bottom of a pond: mud, ooze, rubbish, and water plants.”

  “That kills me,” said a second, more resonant voice. “That is deep. That is the profoundest.”

  “Shall we call for help?” the mouse child asked his father. “They don’t sound as if they’d hurt us.”

  “We’ll have to take the chance,” said the father. “Help!” they both yelled as loudly as they could with their little tin voices. “Help!”

  “Two tin cans, standing upright, half buried in the mud at center stage,” continued the scratchy voice. “At stage left, a rock.”

  “Help!” called the mouse and his child again.

  “A head rises from one of the tin cans,” the voice went on.

  “Wait a minute,” said the other voice. “I heard something. If that’s a farmer with a shotgun, get ready to take off fast.”

  A large crow came walking out of the pines and cocked his head to listen. A tall, well-set-up bird, he wore his great black, glossy wings in the manner of a cloak thrown carelessly over his shoulders, and he had what his wife and fellow actors admiringly described as “presence”: Wherever he was, he simply seemed to be there more intensely than any other bird. “It’s a couple of stranded windups,” he called to his unseen companions.

  The crow flew down to where father and son lay on the ice, and there he saw the coin that Frog had dropped. He flipped it up with one foot, caught it in his beak, removed it with a flourish, and held it out at leg’s length to look at it. The coin had been gold plated when Frog had found it at the bottom of a pond, but now it was worn down
to the original brass. YOU WILL SUCCEED, said the lettering around the rim, and in the center was a four-leaf clover.

  “Well, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” said Crow to the mouse and his child. “You will succeed. Says so right here.”

  “When?” asked the child.

  Crow looked at the other side of the coin, on which a horseshoe appeared, and the partial message YOUR LUCKY DAY IS … The rest had been obliterated by the hole drilled for the string. “When your lucky day arrives,” he said, and hung the coin from the mouse child’s neck, where it clinked against the drum.

  Then he picked up father and son and flew back into the pines to land beside a rather showy lady crow and three pretty starlings. The other members of the company were a gaunt and dejected-looking rabbit and a brilliantly colored but frowsy parrot who wore two or three sleeveless doll sweaters and a woolen muffler. It was she whose scratchy voice they had heard earlier. Long ago she had been somebody’s pet Polly, but having since spread her wings and flown to freedom through an open window, she felt herself entitled to a more resounding name, and now was called Euterpe.

  Mrs. Crow, who had been stranded more than once herself, was cordial in her welcome. “After all,” she said, “they don’t eat. They might as well join the company and make themselves useful if they can.” She leaned down to look more closely at the child. “What do you do when you’re wound up?” she asked. “Do you play that drum?”

  “No,” said the child. “We used to dance.”

  “But now we walk,” said the father. “And behind us an enemy walks faster.”

  “That’s life,” said Euterpe.

  “We’re looking for a seal,” the mouse child said.

  “And a rat is looking for us,” the father added.

  “Two toy mice in search of a seal and followed by a rat! That’s too much!” said the starlings together, fluttering up and flapping their wings as they laughed. Crow and Mrs. Crow laughed also, while the parrot looked thoughtful.

  “She used to have a red-and-yellow ball on her nose,” said the child. “We’re looking for an elephant too. We’re going to have a family.”

  “Fantastic!” said the starlings.

  “It’s got possibilities,” said Crow. He wound up the father and stepped back. “All right,” he said. “Let’s see what you can do.”

  The mouse and his child walked across the snow until they bumped into a twig and fell down. They lay there, the father’s legs moving slowly back and forth while the company watched in silence. The sky was bright and cold; the white snow sparkled in the sunlight; a woodpecker drummed beyond the frozen stream, and the wind sighed in the pines. “Can you help us?” asked the father. “We must keep moving on; we cannot stop here.”

  “Pathos,” said Crow. “Real pathos.”

  “They’ve definitely got something,” said Mrs. Crow, as she helped the mouse and his child to their feet. “The patter about the seal and the elephant needs working up, but the walk is good and the fall is terrific. Maybe we can use them the next time we do a revue.”

  Crow draped a black wing over the shoulders of father and son. “Welcome to the Caws of Art Experimental Theatre Group,” he said.

  “Last year it was the Caws of Art Classical Repertory Group,” said Mrs. Crow.

  “You’ve got to move with the times,” said Crow.

  “But we don’t want to be in the Caws of Art Experimental Theatre Group,” said the child. “We’ve got to find the seal. We were told she was with you. She had a platform on her nose.”

  “Who?” said Crow. “What platform?”

  “The seal,” said the child. “Have you seen a tin seal with a platform on her nose?”

  “That seal!” said Crow. “A windup seal. Now I remember.” He made a whirling gesture with one wing. “She did an acrobatic routine with a sparrow?”

  “That’s right,” said the child.

  “Sure,” said Crow. “That was back when we did the Caws of Art Follies — our best season, as I remember. We had a line of red-hot chickadees in that show that everybody was crazy about.” He shook his head, opened his beak, and shut it with a clack.

  “Where did you find her?” asked the child.

  “We got her from Manny Rat,” said Crow. “He books most of the windups. You know him?”

  “It is Manny Rat who is following us now, to destroy us,” said the father.

  “Oh, it can’t be so bad as all that,” said Crow. “Why in the world would he destroy windups? He fixes them up and sells them. And he’s not the rat to destroy his own profits. We paid three bags of jelly beans for that seal, for instance, which is a pretty stiff price for a broken-down windup. I mean, you know, business is business, even if it is show business. They were new jelly beans too — out of a case that fell off the back of a truck.”

  “Where is she now?” asked the child.

  Crow shrugged. “Who knows? On tour somewhere, I guess. I traded her to a rabbit with a traveling flea circus.”

  “For what?” asked the child.

  “For a pair of doll roller skates and part of a gyroscope,” said Crow. “Let’s go, everybody! I want to run through Dog again, from the top.”

  “Won’t you help us?” begged the father.

  “Look,” said Crow, “give yourself a chance to calm down a little, and we’ll talk about it later. Believe me, you’re safe here. Nobody’s going to bother you while you’re with me.” He struck a boxing pose, grimaced ferociously, and launching a slow-motion roundhouse blow, gently nudged the father’s jaw with one wing. Then he winked at him and turned to the company. “All right,” he said, “let’s get started.”

  “Are you absolutely sure you want to do The Last Visible Dog tonight?” said Mrs. Crow.

  “Sure, I’m sure,” said Crow. “It’s the hottest thing we’ve got. It’s new. It’s far out. It’s a play with a message.”

  “What’s the message?” said Mrs. Crow.

  “I don’t know,” said Crow. “But I know it’s there, and that’s what counts.”

  “It seems to me The Woodchuck’s Revenge is a better bet,” said Euterpe, who was, if not the company’s lyric muse, at any rate their repertory, since it was she who stored in her memory all the plays presented by them. “You can’t go wrong with a plot like Woodchuck,” she asserted. “The whole family loses its territory when the fox forecloses the mortgage and throws them out of their den.”

  “Territory again,” said the father to the child. “Must I always be reminded of our placelessness!”

  “If we could find the dollhouse, that could be our territory,” said the child. “Couldn’t it, Papa?” He felt the weight of the coin on the string around his neck. “Maybe we’ll succeed,” he said. “Maybe we’ll have a lucky day.”

  Euterpe, meanwhile, was still putting forward the merits of The Woodchuck’s Revenge. “Banker Foxcraft!” she declaimed. “More deadly in his treachery than trapper who with sharp-toothed steel besets the woodland path. What new pitfall has his perfidy prepared for us! That’s always been surefire,” she said.

  “Look, Euterpe,” said Crow, “as Director of the Caws of Art, I intend to further the cause of Art. We’ll do Dog tonight. All right — Act One, Scene One. Let’s go.”

  “The bottom of a pond,” squawked Euterpe: “mud, ooze, rubbish, and water plants. Two tin cans, standing upright, half buried in the mud at center stage. At stage left, a rock. A head rises from one of the tin cans. It is the head of Furza. The head of Wurza rises from the other tin can. Gretch enters stage right and crosses to the rock.”

  “Some play,” said the rabbit, who was Gretch. “I don’t get any lines until the third act. All I do is stand on that rock.”

  Crow silenced the rabbit with a look, and turned to Mrs. Crow. “All right,” he said, “Furza speaks first. That’s you.”

  “What’s the latest?” said Mrs. Crow, as Furza.

  “Latest what?” replied Crow, as Wurza.

  “Ooze news,” said Furza
.

  “Dogs,” said Wurza. “A manyness of dogs. A moreness of dogs. A too-muchness of dogs. Also a jiggling and a wiggling.”

  “A jiggling and a wiggling of what?”

  “Of nothing.”

  “Where, O, where was it, for goodness’ sake?”

  “Out among the out among the out among the dots.” After which Crow stepped out of his role and said, “You feel it building?”

  “No,” said Mrs. Crow. “I’ll be honest with you. I don’t feel it building.”

  “Never mind,” said Crow. “Just let it happen. Your line.”

  “Where among the dots?” said Mrs. Crow.

  “Out among the dots beyond … ”

  “Yes, yes. Go on. Beyond?”

  “Beyond the … ”

  “Don’t stop now…. Beyond the … ?”

  “BEYOND THE LAST VISIBLE DOG!” shouted Crow. “There!” he said to his wife. “See how it pays off? Up and up and up, and then Zonk! BEYOND THE LAST VISIBLE DOG!”

  “It’s getting to me now,” said Mrs. Crow. “But what does it mean?”

  Crow flung wide his broad wings like a black cloak. “What doesn’t it mean!” he said. “There’s no end to it — it just goes on and on until it means anything and everything, depending on who you are and what your last visible dog is.”

  “ ‘Beyond the last visible dog,’ ” said the mouse child to his father. “Where is that, I wonder?”

  “I don’t know,” said the father, “but those words touch something in me — something half remembered, half forgotten — that escapes me just as it seems almost clear.”

  “Do you think that’s where the rabbit and the flea circus are?” said the child. “Shall we find the seal and the elephant and the dollhouse out among the dots?”