The Mouse and His Child

  “We can’t find anything unless we continue to move ahead,” said the father, “and I don’t suppose there’s any chance of that until after the performance.”

  The rehearsal continued through the afternoon, while the starlings set up scenery and props on the open ground beyond the pine woods, where a bowl-shaped hollow formed a natural amphitheater. Toward sunset the blue jay was heard, screaming, “CAWS OF ART PRESENTS — What are you presenting?” he yelled as he flew overhead.

  “We’ll announce it at curtain time,” said Crow. “I want the audience to come to it with an open mind.”

  “PRESENTS EXCITING NEW PLAY,” shouted the jay. “BANK-ROBBER WINDUPS MAKE DRAMATIC BOW TONIGHT.” And he was gone before the crow could correct him.

  “That’s pretty fancy billing for a couple of unknowns,” said Crow. Bird of the world that he was, he refrained from questioning his new recruits about their past.

  “We have a small following,” said the father wryly, and in his mind’s eye he saw Manny Rat.

  When evening came the full moon, rising honey-colored above the pines, showed a scattered crowd converging in the snowy bowl. The animals and birds paid their acorns, beechnuts, seeds, and grubs, along with turnips and dead beetles saved for the occasion, and were ushered by the starlings to their places, where they combined sniffs, growls, whines, and twitters in the general murmur of an audience waiting for an entertainment to begin.

  The crowd filled up a semicircle of the slope in tiers, facing the flat open space that was the stage at the center of the hollow. There were pines at both sides and on the slope at the rear of the stage, and a tattered length of brocaded crimson velvet, attached to two of the trees, was the curtain. From behind it the mouse and his child and the little troupe peeped out at the audience.

  “That’s a good house,” said Crow as the bowl filled up. “There is a place for Art in our meadows. There is a genuine need.”

  “There’s a need for something,” said Mrs. Crow. “Let’s hope it’s for The Last Visible Dog.”

  Now the starlings rushed back from their ticket-taking and ushering duties to sing an overture, and the lively music lilted over the moonlit meadow. The audience sighed and leaned back, and Crow strode onstage in front of the curtain, throwing back his wings to receive a burst of applause.

  “Thank you,” said Crow, “thank you. As you know, the Caws of Art have stood for the best in wholesome family entertainment for longer than most of us care to remember. We have brought you classics and chorus girls, always moving with the times and always striving to offer art that is new and vital.” He paused, and his voice took on a more serious note. “Tonight,” he said, “we continue that tradition. We offer you the newest effort of one of the deepest thinkers of our time. The Caws of Art Experimental Theatre Group proudly presents The Last Visible Dog, a tragicomedy in three acts by C. Serpentina.”

  There were scattered groans amidst the applause that followed. A possum shifted uneasily in his seat and said to his wife, “I’m afraid he means business this time.”

  “Stay awake, that’s all,” said the lady as the starlings lifted the curtain to reveal two large rusty grapefruit-juice cans in which sat Crow and Mrs. Crow, their heads covered by their black wings. Euterpe’s voice was heard offstage, setting the scene. “The bottom of a pond,” she squawked: “mud, ooze, rubbish, and water plants. Two tin cans, standing upright, half buried in the mud at center stage.”

  An irate weasel rose from the audience, baring his white teeth in a snarl. “You watch that stuff!” he shouted. “We don’t want none of your modern filth around here!”

  “Tell ’em, Alf!” called one of his friends, and a low growl ran through the crowd.

  Crow and Mrs. Crow duly rose from their tin cans as Wurza and Furza. The rabbit, as Gretch, entered and stood on his stone, shading his eyes with one paw as he looked around, hopeful of investing his silence with heavy meaning before he settled into immobility.

  “Get that phony rabbit out of here!” yelled a tired porcupine. “Bring on the chickadees!” His fellow playgoers broke out in laughter and catcalls, and the actors did not become audible until Wurza reached the line “A manyness of dogs. A moreness of dogs. A too-muchness of dogs.”

  “That’s what this play is,” shouted an enraged marten. “Too much of a dog!”

  “The meadow isn’t ready for this yet,” said the local field-mouse critic to his wife.

  “And neither are the woods,” said she.

  “Also a jiggling and a wiggling,” continued Wurza, scanning the crowd nervously.

  “A jiggling and a wiggling of what?” said Furza.

  “Of nothing.”

  “That does it!” yelled Alf the weasel. “Let’s go, boys!”

  “Look out!” screamed Mrs. Field-Mouse Critic, but she screamed too late. The starlings backstage fluttered up in time to escape, but Crow and Mrs. Crow disappeared in a rush of weasels before they could get off the ground, and the rabbit lay dead, his lifeblood staining the moonlit snow around him.

  “One so seldom gets anything really complete from these road companies,” said the field-mouse critic.

  Mrs. Crow, scattering weasels right and left with her wings, cried, “Hoodlums! You don’t deserve Art!”

  Crow defended his wife and himself like the veteran trouper he was, but they were unable to break clear. “Come on, fellows,” he gasped, “you’re acting like a bunch of hayseeds!”

  The mouse and his child, unwound and motionless, watched the disaster, while Euterpe, on a bough above them, swore softly to herself. “This looks like the end of the Caws of Art,” she said. “In a couple of minutes there’ll be nothing left but fur and feathers and a few bones.”

  “Can’t you do something?” said the child.

  “What would you suggest?” asked the parrot.

  “Wind us up,” said the father, “and send us onstage.”

  “Certainly,” said the flabbergasted Euterpe. “Why not!” She wound up the father, and shaking her head, watched him walk across the snow, pushing the child before him.

  The weasels who were striving ardently to end the Crows’ career looked up as the backward-walking mouse child bumped into them and stopped, the father continuing to tread the snow without being able to move forward.

  “Excuse me,” said the child.

  “What is it?” said Alf.

  Row by row the crowd on the slope stood up for a better view of the two small figures, and some of the playgoers began to titter.

  “We were wondering, sir, whether you might have seen a seal?” said the child.

  “A seal?” said the weasel.

  “That’s right,” said the father. “We’re looking for a seal — and there’s a rat looking for us.” Crow and Mrs. Crow listened as they lay on their backs, wings folded prayerfully, while several grinning weasels sat on them.

  “She’s probably out beyond the last visible dog by now,” said the child.

  “And he’s probably hiding behind the last visible pine,” said the father.

  “She used to have a red-and-yellow ball on her nose,” said the child.

  “But she doesn’t have a ball anymore,” said the father, and there was more laughter from the crowd, this time louder than before. Crow and Mrs. Crow let out their breath in one joint sigh.

  “Go on, Alf! Help them find the seal!” called the weasel’s friends.

  “Or at least stand aside and let us go on before our spring runs down,” said the father.

  “We’ve got to find an elephant too,” said the child. “Then we’re going to look for a territory of our own,” and the crowd roared its approval.

  “That little act has something,” said the field-mouse critic to his wife. “I think that Last Visible Dog business was just the buildup for this. The whole thing was a joke. Too bad it backfired on the rabbit.” Animals sitting near the critic heard, and passed the word along. “They’re marvelous!” said a mole. “They’re almost animal-like!”


  The weasels onstage chuckled good-naturedly while father and son walked straight ahead until they bumped into the rabbit’s rock and fell over. The crowd laughed until it cried.

  “Do it again!” shouted the audience. “Encore!”

  The weasels cleared the stage, the crows flew up into the pines, and father and son were carried back to where they had made their entrance.

  As the mouse father, rewound by a helpful weasel, started once more across the stage, he looked beyond his son and saw a familiar figure waiting in the shadows of the pines with a heavy rock uplifted. The child, walking backward, heard his father whisper, “Manny Rat!”

  “Help!” the mouse child cried. But Manny Rat was downwind; no one else had seen or scented him as yet. The audience laughed, anticipating new comic variations in the toy-mouse act. The irony was too much for the child; it made him giddy. “Just let it happen,” he said to his father. “Your line.”

  “Banker Ratsneak!” yelled the father, “more deadly in his treachery than trapper who with sharp-toothed steel besets the woodland path!”

  Manny Rat, watching the two small figures advancing toward him in the moonlight, was startled and made vastly ill at ease by the father’s shout. He wondered whether it might not be wise to withdraw for the moment, and he turned to go back through the pines to where he had left the elephant. But the audience had moved in close around the stage; he could not escape unnoticed.

  “Banker Ratsneak!” yelled the mouse child at the top of his tin voice. “What new pitfall has his perfidy prepared for us!”

  “Ah!” said the audience, and settled back to watch contentedly.

  “Does he hound us still?” declaimed the father, “— he who drove us forth to wander denless through the world?”

  “He hounds us still!” the child replied, still advancing backward toward Manny Rat, who could retreat no farther, and now tried to make himself as small as possible.

  “Banker Ratsneak, skulking in the shadows!” called the father. “Come out and face your victims! The day of reckoning has come — this final, fateful day that settles all accounts, this day that shall leave one of us to share a territory with the worms!”

  “Come out!” the audience roared as one. “Banker Ratsneak, come out!”

  “What kind of an outfit is this?” complained Alf the weasel. “When they finally give us something we can get our teeth into, the actors fall asleep on their cues!” He strode across the stage into the wings, growled, “Let’s get on with it!” and pulled out Manny Rat.

  “Unhand me!” cried the rat, and improvising desperately, he crept onstage. “I, Banker Ratsneak, have come here to collect a debt long overdue!” he wailed. “I will have justice!”

  “Villain!” screamed the crowd. “Territory stealer!”

  “Tremendous talent, that rat,” said the field-mouse critic to his wife. “How well he plays the villain! I’ve never seen a character I detested more thoroughly!” The rest of the spectators, all of whom shared, uncritically, the same emotion, hissed and booed the hapless rat.

  Manny Rat, who would have been well content to abandon his role, could scarcely make himself heard. “Justice!” He wept, and the audience, responding eagerly, rushed the stage and mobbed him.

  “I always gave Manny Rat credit for more sense than that,” said Crow to Mrs. Crow. “What in the world made him want to break into show business?”

  “Everybody gets the bug at one time or another,” said Mrs. Crow, shouting above the uproar on the stage.

  “Help!” screamed Manny Rat, rising to the surface of the crowd like foam upon an angry ocean.

  “Sorry,” said Crow, as the crowd rolled over the rat again. “Once you go onstage, you’ll have to take your chances like the rest of us.”

  Bitten, clawed, and pinched by bird and beast, Manny Rat fought like a demon, while the mouse and his child, having for the moment escaped demolishment by him, were in immediate danger of being trampled flat by the enthusiasts who stormed the stage.

  “Onward!” said the child wildly to no one in particular.

  “And upward,” replied his father as they felt themselves lifted into the air. Euterpe, the repertory parrot, seeing their plight, had sailed into the tumult in a blur of bright feathers and frayed sweaters, and now winged up into the night carrying the mouse and his child in her claws.

  Circling over the pines, the parrot looked down and assessed the situation. The entire Caws of Art company, with the exception of the luckless rabbit, were safe — at least until their next performance. The mass of struggling figures onstage separated, and Manny Rat streaked off across the snow with several of the more diligent weasels in hot pursuit, while the rest of the audience abandoned themselves to general riot and thereby purged themselves of all remaining pity and terror.

  “That’s show business,” said Euterpe, “and I’ve had enough of it for a while. How about you?”

  “I think we have sufficiently furthered the Caws of Art,” said the father, “and I have no intention of continuing a theatrical career.”

  “Where are you bound for now?” asked Euterpe. “I don’t want to fly in circles all night.”

  “We don’t know,” said the father.

  “Let it be south, then,” said the parrot, “because that’s where I’m heading. I can use a vacation.” She flew higher, set a straight course, and the pine woods and the Caws of Art were left behind.

  * * *

  THE PARROT’S WINGS fanned gusts of cold air on the mouse and his child, and the darkness flowed by on either side. The moon had set; below them all was dim and gray. The father and son felt the wind race like a road unwinding underneath their feet as, motionless, they traveled on.

  “I wonder what happened to Manny Rat,” said the child. “I wonder if he got away.”

  “If he did, we can expect to see him again,” said the father. “He seems determined to smash us, and I don’t think he’ll give up.”

  “Neither will we,” said the child. “Will we, Papa?”

  The father said nothing, and the child’s only answer was the wind that whistled by them as they flew.

  “We’ll find the elephant and the seal, and we’ll find the dollhouse too, and have our own territory, won’t we, Papa?”

  “You simply won’t understand how it is,” said the father. “How can we find anything? How can we ever hope to have our own territory?”

  “But look how far we’ve come!” said the child. “And think of all we’ve done! We got out of the dump; we came through the war safely; we saved the Caws of Art.”

  “We escaped after the attempted bank robbery and survived the war only because we had Frog to help us,” said the father. “And we saved the Caws of Art by making animals laugh at us. They laughed because we cannot even walk without being wound up, because we have no teeth or claws and can do nothing for ourselves. They laughed because we are ridiculous.” Then he was silent, looking down at the child who hung from his arms in the darkness, the nutshell drum and good-luck coin swinging from his neck.

  “Believe me,” said Euterpe, “Crow doesn’t think you’re ridiculous, and neither do I. What you did was pretty clever, and it was brave too. You might have been smashed by that mob.”

  “Yes,” said the father, “we’re brave and clever — but not clever enough to wind ourselves up, unfortunately. If only we could!”

  “Ah!” said Euterpe. “There’s nothing you can do about that. Although, come to think of it, maybe there is.”

  “What do you mean?” asked the father.

  “The beaver pond isn’t far out of my way,” said Euterpe. “Old Muskrat lives there. Ever heard of him?”

  “No,” said the father.

  “Well,” said Euterpe, “except for Manny Rat, he’s the only one I know who can do anything with clockwork. He figures out all kinds of things.” She changed course and swung north. “He’s fixed broken windups for the Caws of Art once or twice,” she said, “so maybe he can help you t
oo.”

  “We’re not broken,” said the father. “Not yet.”

  “I mean, maybe he can fix you so you can wind yourselves up,” said Euterpe. “I’ve heard he can do almost anything.”

  The parrot flew steadily on, and the child, hanging from his father’s hands, now saw again the bright star Sirius. It seemed to fly onward, keeping pace beside them through the distant sky. As before, the child found its light a comfort. His good-luck coin clinked against his drum, and now he felt luckier than ever before. “Maybe we shan’t always be helpless, Papa,” he said. “Maybe we’ll be self-winding someday.”

  “Maybe,” said his father.

  Below them, scattered houses and farms gave way to wooded hills, and the parrot flew lower. The trees came close as Euterpe swooped down to glide over a valley where a stream widened into a frozen pond. At one end of the pond was an irregular dam made of saplings and cut branches, and below the dam the ice-covered stream continued through the valley.

  “That’s the beaver dam,” said the parrot as they flew over it, “and that big snowy mound in the middle of the pond is the beaver lodge. Muskrat has a smaller one right over there, and the entrance tunnel is somewhere on the bank. I think I see his tracks.” She landed at the edge of the pond and set down the mouse and his child on the ice.

  “Muskrat’ll be sure to find you here,” she said, “and if anybody can do anything for you, he can.” Father and son felt a wingtip brush them softly as Euterpe took off. “Good-bye and good luck,” she said, and was gone.

  THE MOUSE and his child stood in the darkness and heard the wind whistling over the ice and snow. Under the wind the winter silence waited, and the ice creaked with the cold. Hours passed, and the sky was growing light when the child, who stood facing the bank, said, “Someone’s coming.”

  “Is it Muskrat?” asked the father.

  “I don’t know,” said the child. “He doesn’t look anything like Manny Rat. He’s larger and stouter. He has a different kind of tail. And he has a nice face and he limps.”

  The muskrat, who looked somewhat like a large brown meadow mouse, approached them slowly. He had lost one leg in a trap, and as he walked he bobbed with a step, step, hop — step, step, hop. His whole manner suggested one continuous train of solid, round, furry thought, and he was mumbling softly to himself.