The Mouse and His Child

  Muskrat looked up as he bumped into the mouse and his child. “You’re a little early,” he said, “but that’s all right. We can start right here. The lesson for today is the Them Tables. Begin.” He settled back on his haunches and waited.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said the mouse father.

  “Very well,” said Muskrat, “I’ll help you. Them times Us equals?”

  “I don’t know,” said the father. “Really, I —”

  “Equals Bad,” said Muskrat, whacking the ice with the flat of his tail. “You were supposed to have learned that.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the mouse father.

  “Don’t be sorry,” said Muskrat. “Come next time with your lesson prepared. Continue, please. Them plus Trap times Us equals?”

  “Worse?” said the mouse child.

  “Good boy!” said Muskrat. He came closer and peered nearsightedly at father and son. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I took you for two of my regular pupils. You’re new here, then?” He wrinkled his nose. “You smell a little Themmy. Been in a trap, have you? You must tell me about it. Come over to my place and visit for a while.”

  “You’ll have to wind me up,” said the father. “There’s a key in the middle of my back.”

  Muskrat looked at the key. “Of course,” he said as he wound it, “I remember now: Key times Winding equals Go. She had just such a key in her back.”

  “Who?” said the father.

  “The tin seal,” said Muskrat.

  “The seal!” said the child. “Did she have a platform on her nose?”

  “No,” said Muskrat. “There was only a metal rod that turned, and that was how she used to wind up string for me. Many a cozy evening we spent that way. Charming young lady!” He smiled, lapsing into a silent reverie.

  “Where had she come from?” asked the child.

  “Who?” said Muskrat.

  “The seal.”

  “Ah, the seal! She had been traveling with a rabbit flea circus, but the whole concern broke up not far from here. A fox ate the rabbit, the fleas joined the fox, and the seal came to stay with me.”

  “Where is she now?” asked the father as they walked toward the other side of the pond.

  “I don’t know,” said Muskrat. “She found the life here dull after a time, and went off with a kingfisher. Was she a friend of yours?”

  “We were close,” said the father, “long ago.”

  “Well, that’s how it is,” said Muskrat. He shook his head thoughtfully as he went with his step, step, hop — step, step, hop. “Why into Here often equals There, and so one moves about.”

  “You have a strange way of speaking,” said the mouse father.

  “I’m always looking for the Hows and the Whys and the Whats,” said Muskrat. “That is why I speak as I do. You’ve heard of Muskrat’s Much-in-Little, of course?”

  “No,” said the child. “What is it?”

  Muskrat stopped, cleared his throat, ruffled his fur, drew himself up, and said in ringing tones, “Why times How equals What.” He paused to let the words take effect. “That’s Muskrat’s Much-in-Little,” he said. He ruffled his fur again and slapped the ice with his tail. “Why times How equals What,” he repeated. “Strikes you all of a heap the first time you hear it, doesn’t it? Pretty well covers everything! I’m a little surprised that you haven’t heard of it before, I must say. It caused a good deal of comment both over and under the pond, and almost everyone agreed that the ripples from it were ever-widening.”

  “Your work is, of course, known everywhere,” said the mouse father, “and although we were not acquainted with Muskrat’s Much-in-Little we have heard a great deal about you.”

  “Ah!” said Muskrat. He smiled a little smile and groomed his fur complacently. “Yes,” he said. “I have some small reputation, perhaps. I am not entirely unknown. Not that I care about such things.” He wound up the father again, and they continued across the ice.

  “We have traveled far to see you,” said the father, “in the hope of learning how to be —”

  “Like me,” said Muskrat. “I thank you humbly for the compliment, and I have the most profound respect for your admiration. Yes. There is a small but growing circle of students and followers whom I hope to guide along the path to —”

  “Self-winding,” said the father.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Muskrat. “What did you say?”

  “Self-winding,” said the child. “We want to be self-winding, so we can wind ourselves up. Euterpe the parrot said that you’ve fixed broken windups. Can’t you fix us?”

  “I’m afraid that’s a little out of my line,” said Muskrat. “Oh, I’ve tinkered with clockwork now and then, but I have long since gone beyond the limits of mere mechanical invention. That’s applied thought, you see, and my real work is in the realm of pure thought. There is nothing quite like the purity of pure thought. It’s the cleanest work there is, you might say.” He nodded and mumbled softly to himself as he bobbed along with his uneven limping gait.

  The sun was up when they reached the beaver lodge and the snowy dome gleamed rosy in the morning light. Muskrat sniffed as he looked up at the structure that towered above them, its snow-covered smoothness broken by projecting brush and twigs and the cut ends of saplings. “They came here a few seasons back,” he said, “when there was nothing here but a little trickle through the grass. They built the dam, made the pond, put up this lodge, and they pretty well run the whole place now.”

  There was a murmur of voices inside the lodge, and Muskrat leaned close to listen. “Always the same thing,” he said. “How many aspens they’ve cut down. How many birches. How they’re going to improve the dam next year. Dull fellows! Yet I suppose they have their place. It is, after all, their pond that supports my pure thought. And in spite of the hurly-burly of industry and the working-class atmosphere, my roots are here. Not only my roots, but my stalks and leaves — arrowhead and smartweed, cattails and wild rice. Yes,” he said, “this is my home, where my work has brought me pondwide respect and esteem. Let the beavers have their wealth! I am content with the treasures of the mind.” He smiled with satisfaction, and limped along beside the mouse and his child with a step, step, hop — step, step, hop.

  “Here’s my place,” said Muskrat, as they came to the smaller of the two domes on the ice. “But we can’t get into it here; the entrance is underwater, from a tunnel on the far bank.” From inside the lodge came the sound of two young muskrats laughing. “Merry little rascals!” said Muskrat. “That must be Jeb and Zeb, come for their lesson.”

  “Hee!” said one of the voices inside the lodge. “Hee times Hoo equals Hechoo!”

  “Rinkum times Dinkum equals Rinkumdinkumdoo!” said the other.

  “What are they talking about?” asked the mouse child.

  “They’re making fun of my Much-in-Little,” said Muskrat, managing a smile. “High-spirited lads!”

  “Jeb,” said the voice of Zeb, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “A beaver,” replied Jeb without hesitation.

  “A beaver?” said Zeb.

  “A beaver!” echoed Muskrat.

  “Right!” said Jeb, clicking his teeth and whacking the floor of the lodge as hard as he could with the flat of his tail. “Beavers do things! They cut down trees! CHONK! BONK! Make dams! SPLASH! KERPLONK! Beavers get rich!”

  “Maybe old Muskrat knows all that stuff too,” said Zeb. “Maybe he could cut down trees if he wanted to.”

  “Who, him?” snorted Jeb. “He can’t do anything! My daddy says old Muskrat got caught in a trap once and it shook his brains up. All he’s good for now is teaching kids the Them Tables.”

  “Ahem!” said Muskrat. He climbed onto the lodge and jumped up and down several times, stamping heavily on the roof. There was instant silence inside. “Boys!” he called.

  “Yes, sir!” came the polite response.

  “No lesson today,” said Muskrat. “Very busy.
Great many things to do. Come back next week. Bye-bye.”

  There was a single splash inside the lodge as Jeb and Zeb dove into the water and swam home under the ice.

  “You were saying —” began the father, hoping to bring the muskrat back to the subject of self-winding.

  Muskrat turned away from him. “Crushed!” he said in a choked voice. “I am utterly and completely crushed! Good for nothing but to teach children the Them Tables! That’s what the whole pond thinks of me!” he whispered brokenly. “That’s the sort of respect they’ve had for me!”

  “You mustn’t be so upset,” said the father. “Your work is admired everywhere. That is why we came to you for —”

  “Beavers!” hissed Muskrat, doing a little limping dance of irritation. Then he began to pace back and forth slowly: step, step, hop — step, step, hop. “CHONK! BONK!” he said. “Beavers do things, eh? Very well, then, I’ll do something!”

  “What will you do?” asked the mouse child.

  “I don’t know,” said Muskrat, “but it’ll be something that’ll make them sit up and take notice!” His pacing quickened to a step-step hoppity — step-step hoppity. Then he stopped.

  “I can’t pace right anymore,” he said. “My best Much-in-Little thinking was done before I lost my leg in the trap; I can’t reason as I did when I was whole. There’s a universal rhythm that the mind must catch. I used to feel it; now I don’t. My mental powers are hobbled, like my gait.”

  “Perhaps,” said the mouse father, lurching ahead on his bent legs, “if we pace for you until you solve your problem, you might help us with ours?”

  “What’s that?” asked Muskrat.

  “What’s what?” said the father.

  “The problem you want help with,” said Muskrat.

  “SELF-WINDING!” said the father.

  “No need to shout,” said Muskrat. “Yes, that seems fair enough, and your pacing, while lacking something in style, is nonetheless steady. Let’s go to my workroom and get started.”

  They had reached the shore of the pond, and Muskrat took the mouse and his child down into the tunnel that led to his underground den. Crystals of frost winked from the frozen walls, and the dark, cold, chthonic smell of earth pervaded the slanting passage. A faint, greenish glow appeared ahead at the doorway of the den.

  “This is where I do most of my thinking,” said Muskrat. “The lodge in the pond is rather too much in the middle of things.” He followed the mouse and his child into the room. A little group of firefly students had lit up when the muskrat’s familiar step was heard in the tunnel, and now they said in unison, “Good morning, sir.” Devoted followers who had outstayed the summer, they lived in a glass jar in a corner, and their dormitory cast its pale and blinking glow on the clutter all around them. An oilcan and a ball of string lay among mussel shells and the forgotten nibbled ends of roots and stalks beside a small terrestrial pencil-sharpener globe; a BONZO DOG FOOD can stood filled with salvage from the bottom of the pond: rusty beer-can openers, hairpins, fishhooks, corroded cotter pins, tangles of wire, drowned flashlight batteries, a jackknife with a broken blade, and part of a folding ruler. Near it sprawled improvisations of discolored pipe cleaners, tobacco tins, old fishing-license badges, draggled wet- and dry-fly feathers, coils of catgut, jointed lures that bristled with hooks and staring eyes — all the neglected apparatus of past experiments in applied thought. Against the wall leaned a bit of broken slate with X’s, Y’s, and Z’s scrawled on it. The air was still and warm, the odor studious and strong.

  Muskrat rubbed his paws together, hummed a little tune, heaved everything anyhow into the center of the den, and smoothed a circular track around the floor. “Now, then,” he said, and winding up the father, he started the mouse and his child on their rounds.

  The curved walls of the den kept them in the track. The child’s good-luck coin gleamed in the pale light of the fireflies as it clinked against the drum; the glass-bead eyes of father and son caught the glow as — now seen, now lost behind the jumble — they circled steadily around the muskrat while he pondered.

  “We’re going in a circle again, Papa,” said the child, “but this time it’s going to get us somewhere.”

  “Yes,” said the father, “things seem to be looking up. And Manny Rat will certainly have lost our trail by now; I’m beginning to think Frog may have been wrong about the enemy waiting for us at the end.”

  “And maybe Uncle Frog wasn’t killed by the horned owl,” said the child. “Maybe he’ll find us again. He’s very wise.”

  “Wise or not, I don’t think anyone returns from the horned owl’s talons,” said the father sadly.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Muskrat, “but I must ask you to be quiet. Absolute silence is essential to Much-in-Little thinking.” The mouse and his child said no more, but paced in silence.

  “First,” said Muskrat, “we must define the problem; that’s how you begin.”

  “Hear him!” said the senior fireflies, and the junior ones made mental notes. Muskrat sat on his haunches, rocking slightly, his whiskers quivering with the intensity of his thought, which he interrupted only when it was necessary to wind up the mouse father.

  “The problem,” he said, “is to do something, something big, something resultful — something, in short, that will make both a crash and a splash and show the whole pond how truly much is meant by Muskrat’s Much-in-Little.”

  “Why times How equals What!” blurted one of the smaller fireflies, on the chance that an oral examination was taking place.

  “Quiet!” said his elders, and quenched his light.

  “Now,” continued Muskrat, “what’s big and crashful and splashful? CHONK! BONK! The felling of a tree. Suppose we say, then, that the problem is to fell a tree.” His usually mild eye flashed with something more than the fireflies’ feeble light. “A big tree,” he said.

  “To fell a tree,” repeated the mouse father as he paced.

  “Hush!” said Muskrat. “Now, who fells trees? Beavers. How do beavers fell trees?” He clicked his teeth.

  “Teeth!” said the mouse child.

  “Do be quiet,” said Muskrat. “Teeth is right. The teeth of beavers are of the proper size, shape, and sharpness for cutting down trees. Mine are not, but theirs are. When a beaver gnaws at a tree for a period of time, that tree will fall.” He picked up a withered brown arrowhead stalk and chewed it reflectively. “So we may now reduce this data to the following Much-in-Little — ”

  “Pay attention!” said the senior fireflies, glowing brighter.

  “Beaver plus Teeth times Gnaw times Time times Tree equals Treefall,” said Muskrat.

  “Bravo!” the mouse father cried out involuntarily.

  “Thank you,” said Muskrat. “That’s first-rate pacing, by the way.” He drew himself up and launched himself anew upon his thoughts. “Let us now disassociate the tooth from the beaver,” he said.

  “How his mind soars!” exclaimed the fireflies all together, and intensified their light, so that the glass eyes of the fish lures blazed up in the gloom, staring in wild surmise.

  “You’ve got to be able to make those daring leaps or you’re nowhere,” said Muskrat. “Where was I?”

  “Disassociate the tooth from the beaver,” said the mouse father.

  “Yes,” said Muskrat, “and consider it simply as any tooth of the proper kind, or as we might say, ToothK.”

  “ToothK,” said the mouse child.

  “ToothK times Gnaw,” said the father.

  “ToothK times Gnaw times Time times Tree equals Treefall,” said Muskrat. “Wait — it’s coming to me now!” The fireflies had dimmed a little; now they kindled up again. “I’ve got it!” shouted Muskrat.

  “What?” said the mouse and his child together.

  “X!” said Muskrat, “X!”

  The fireflies abandoned all reserve, and flashed with such a light that Muskrat’s shadow loomed up huge and black upon the wall behind him.

  “He?
??s done it!” said the father to the child. “He’s made the leap.”

  “X!” said Muskrat, dancing about with a steppity hop, and bumping into things with every step. “It needn’t be a tooth at all! Anything of the proper k, which is to say size, shape, and sharpness, will do it.” He limped to the broken piece of slate, hastily rubbed it clean with his paw, wrote XT = TF, and sat back, rocking on his haunches. “X times Tree equals Treefall,” he said huskily, and crooned beneath his breath a little song of triumph.

  “Ah!” said the fireflies. They blazed up once more all together, then sank back, exhausted, to a pale glimmer. The room grew dim and dark.

  “Tremendous!” said the mouse father. “Simply tremendous.”

  “Well, we’ve solved the problem,” said Muskrat, “and I tell you frankly I couldn’t have done it without you. Steady pacing is what does the trick.”

  “Thank you,” said the mouse father. “Now we can go on to the problem of self-winding.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Muskrat, “ — as soon as we’ve felled the tree. There’s very little to it, I’m sure, once you’ve got the X, and I’m off to find one now.”

  “What will the X be?” asked the mouse child.

  “I don’t know,” said Muskrat, “but I’ll know it when I see it.” And he was out of the den, into the tunnel, and gone, with a step, step, hop — step, step, hop.

  * * *

  THE MUSKRAT was away for several days. The fireflies, out of courtesy, kept going at half strength the whole time, while the mouse and his child, unwound, stared at the Much-in-Little on the dim slate and smelled the darkness of the earth.

  When they heard the muskrat’s footsteps in the tunnel on the day of his return, the sound was new and different: scuff, scuff, slide, hop — scuff, scuff, slide, hop. At length Muskrat came into the den and flung down an ax, the handle of which had been broken off short.