“Here it is,” he said: “X. I found it at a Them place, and I must say I don’t care for the smell of it, besides which it’s a great deal bigger than I’d like it to be.” He limped around the ax, looking down at it uneasily. “Well, why not?” he said. “Once you accept X, the size doesn’t really matter. Now, then — to work! Our objective is … ah … our goal is … um …”
“To fell a tree,” said the mouse father.
“Exactly,” said Muskrat. “You have a head for detail; I admire that. Now to begin! For applied thought you need string,” he said. After finding his ball of string where it lay in the clutter, he took the ax and the mouse and his child out through the tunnel and up to the stand of birch and aspen trees beside the pond, where the beavers had been working earlier that year. Gnawed and pointed stumps stood everywhere, casting their lopped-off shadows on the snow among the full-length shadows of the bare trees all around them. Muskrat’s breath made little clouds in the clear, cold air as he limped about, blinking in the sunlight while he considered where his project should be sited. High above them flew the blue jay on his journalistic rounds, pausing to sail for a moment on motionless wings so sharply dark against the blue sky that an edge of white showed all around them. The mouse and his child stood dark and still on the white snow. The keen wind whistled through their tin and hummed in the father’s unwound spring. The muskrat stood solidly planted on the earth, thinking hard as he looked with admiration at the tooth marks on the stumps.
“Those beavers may not have intellect,” he said, “but they’ve got method.” He began to fuss with sticks and stones, muttering to himself.
“Will it take long?” asked the mouse father.
“Not very long, as these things go,” said Muskrat. Having found a short, thick branch that had fallen during a storm, he was seated astride it, laboriously planing it flat with the heavy ax head.
“Now,” he said, panting from his efforts and puffing out little clouds of misty breath, “the up-and-down is ready, and we attach the X.” He had split the end of the stubby plank he had fashioned, and now he wedged the short length of broken ax handle into the split so that the cutting edge of the ax was at right angles to the plank.
Muskrat looked up at the tree he had chosen, an aspen not far from the edge of the pond. The tree was two feet thick, and the gray trunk towered sixty feet up into the clear sky. He took the little plank with the ax head and balanced it like a seesaw on a rock so that the cutting edge rested against the tree. Then he tied a stone to one end of the plank to weight the ax head, and another heavier stone at the other end for a counterweight.
Now when Muskrat touched the plank, the ax head lifted, and when he let it go it came down and bit into the tree with a satisfying CHONK. “There,” he said. “It just goes up and down like that until it gnaws down the tree.”
“What will make the X go up and down?” asked the mouse child.
“You will,” said Muskrat, “and I must say that I envy you your part in this.” He tied a long piece of string to the end of the plank, then led the string under a forked twig that he stuck in the snow like an upside-down Y. He tied the free end of the string to the mouse father’s arm, and he scooped out an oval track in the snow for the mouse and his child to walk in.
“Are you ready?” said Muskrat.
“Yes,” said father and son together.
Muskrat wound up the father, and the mouse and his child walked around the oval track in the snow. The forked twig acted as a pulley for the string, and as they walked away from the tree the plank tilted to lift the ax; as they walked back toward the tree the ax fell with a CHONK.
“Well,” said Muskrat. “Why times How will, in time, equal What. There we are. That’s it!”
“How long will it take to fell the tree?” asked the mouse child, backing around the oval as his father pushed him.
“Let me see,” said Muskrat. “This is late winter, and the tree is about thirteen X’s around the trunk. Once around the track equals once up and down equals CHONK!” His voice trailed off into a low mumble as he calculated. “We’ll get it done by late spring,” he said. “Easily.”
“Late spring!” said the father. “Does it take the beavers that long?”
“No,” said Muskrat. “But of course they have the tools, you see, and we must use makeshifts.”
“What a long time to walk in a circle!” said the mouse child.
“It’s an oval,” said Muskrat. “Don’t think of the walking. Think of the crash; think of the splash; think of the ever-widening ripples!”
The mouse and his child walked steadily around the oval while the ax rose and fell, its blade biting into the tree with a CHONK, CHONK, CHONK that sent echoes ringing across the pond. As they walked the muskrat moved the plank and the rock closer to the tree, so that the ax progressively bit deeper; and when the cut was well started he moved the whole apparatus around to a new part of the trunk. Then he made a new oval track in the snow for the mouse and his child.
“Do you suppose,” the father asked Muskrat, “that while we walk you might begin to think about self-winding?”
“Ah!” said Muskrat. “That’s not pure thought, you know; that requires some tinkering. I can’t consider the Hows and the Whats of your clockwork without taking you apart; and I can’t take you apart until we’ve finished our work here.”
“In the late spring,” said the father.
“That’s right,” said Muskrat. “But the time always passes quickly on an exciting project like this. You’ll be done before you know it.”
He looked up as the blue jay reporter passed overhead, circled, and came back. “Very good,” said Muskrat. “Our work has already begun to attract attention. Good morning!” he called to the jay. “I’ll be happy to give you a brief statement.”
“Later,” said the reporter. “I have a lot of ground to cover.”
“Have you seen an elephant or a seal?” called the child.
“Don’t remember,” said the blue jay. “MUSKRAT, WINDUPS ACTIVE IN WINTER SPORTS,” he announced in a less than front-page voice, and flapped away.
* * *
DAY AFTER DAY the muskrat and the mouse and his child worked at the tree, until the overlapping oval tracks radiated from the trunk like the petals of a flower, and in every oval the tin feet of father and son had worn away the snow until they walked on the bare earth.
While Muskrat’s project trudged ahead, the life of the pond went on as always: The beavers were busy in their lodge with production plans for spring; the fish moved slowly in the dark water beneath the ice; and turtles, snakes, and frogs slept through the winter in the mud at the bottom. On the shore the chipmunk and the groundhog slept the season out in burrows down below the snow, while the wood mouse and the rabbit foraged through the frozen nights, pursued by owl and fox and weasel. High in the glittering sky Orion the Hunter shone down on the hunted who ran their nightly race and left their tracks for each day’s morning sun to see, a record in the snow of who had lived and who had not. Above the mouse and his child waxed and waned the icy moon, and bright Sirius kept his track across the sky while they trod theirs below.
And beyond the beaver pond the world went its way. The Caws of Art decided not to attempt The Last Visible Dog again that season. Having lost both their rabbit and their repertory, they recruited a stagestruck opossum and patched together a revue with which they continued their tour. In the meadow and along the stream new regiments of shrew soldier-boys marched and drilled and took up arms for territory. At the dump the broken carousel still played, and rats caroused along the midway as before. The dollhouse, ravaged as it had been by a nursery fire that started when its youthful owners played with matches, became in its romantic ruined state a trysting place for young rat lovers, then a social and athletic club. Of the ladies and the gentlemen all that remained was the globe the scholar doll had had beneath his hand, and that was now a football for the rats. Elsewhere in the dump the gambling dens and dance hall
s prospered as before. The sexton beetle and other small businessmen enjoyed full profits for a change, and trade throve unassisted, for Manny Rat had not returned to claim his share. His forage squad stood leaderless in rusting immobility, and at the beer-can avenue’s end his television cabinet gaped emptily at the distant fires.
Starting from the pine woods where the weasels had given up the chase, the frustrated rat, bitten, torn, and generally smarting and stinging from his theatrical debut, went back to where he had last seen the mouse and his child. From there he cast about in ever-widening circles, but found no track or trace of them. He was sorely perplexed and troubled, and growing ever more doubtful of the quest to which he found himself committed. It had begun simply enough: Two tin mice had made a fool of him, and he, in order to maintain his self-respect, was bound to smash them. Then, just as the whole affair had reached the point of final resolution, the frog had made a fool of him again, and had taken off his rightful victims with the shrews. By then it had become clear to Manny Rat that nothing was simple anymore, but sheer tenacity had driven him upon his third humiliation, in the role of Banker Ratsneak.
He grew morose, and felt himself half overcome by funk. Why must he go on pursuing clockwork mice, he asked himself. Why must he travel all the night, and sneak through thorns and brambles in the daylight, studious to avoid the blue jay’s eye? And what would his reward be at the end? By the time he smashed these trumpery windups his name would be forgotten at the dump, his enterprises taken over by younger, upward-moving rats. The frog’s words came into his mind: “A dog shall rise; a rat shall fall.” Were dogs to track him down?
But Manny Rat had no choice left; some force beyond himself was pulling him whichever way his quarry turned. He wound the elephant, cursed forlornly at the now-empty provision bags she carried, and shuffled on as if at the end of an invisible chain by which his prey would drag him to his doom.
And in another part of that world beyond the pond, high in a hickory tree, in a leafy squirrel nest into which he had providentially fallen when he slipped out of his woolen glove and the horned owl’s talons, the frog, under a kind of polite duress that amounted to house arrest, told fortunes night and day, and begged the squirrels to help him down and on his way.
The mouse and his child worked through the winter rains and snows while Muskrat hovered near to wind and oil them and to shift his tree-cutting machinery as necessary. The project was interrupted only when hunger or fatigue forced him to abandon briefly the world of applied thought for the physical refreshment of the thinker. Lessons were suspended indefinitely, and the young muskrats of the pond enjoyed a holiday, while father and son walked their ovals night and day. Sometimes the work stopped when a storm buried the mouse and his child in snow, and Muskrat had to dig them out; sometimes the father’s clockwork froze, and Muskrat would take him and the child back to his den until they were warm enough to work again.
Most of their fur was gone by now, and what was left was long past mildew, and sprouting moss. Their whiskers were blackened and draggled; their rubber tails had lost their snap; their glass-bead eyes were weatherworn and dim, and the last shreds of the blue velveteen trousers flapped forlornly about their legs. The father’s motor, so often wet in rain and snow, had stiffened somewhat despite the oiling. Pushing his son backward around the track, he walked more slowly than before, his eyes fixed on the coin that swung from the child’s neck with the drum.
“That coin grows heavier each day,” he said. “It’s hard enough to keep going without pushing any additional weight.”
“It belonged to Uncle Frog,” the child said. “Maybe it will bring us luck.”
“It didn’t bring him luck,” replied the father. “And in any case, I fear that we shall soon be beyond the reach of any luck that may be forthcoming. At this rate our motor will be quite worn out long before we attain self-winding.”
A white mist rose up from the melting snow; the ice had vanished from the pond; the water shivered in the chilly air. The dark earth reeked of spring; the oval tracks were scored in mud. The calling of the crows upon the east wind had the sound of winter’s passing. High overhead there flew two northbound Canada geese. Their honking seemed to fall in silent, frozen crystals of encapsulated sound that melted on the warming earth below, releasing, quiet, small, and clear, the voices and their message. The geese swung low, turned upwind, landed on the pond, and rocking on the water, moored to their reflections.
Onward walked the mouse child, backward, in his oval track that was only the old and endless circle made more narrow. He followed his own footsteps going nowhere, his one reward the tension of the string as he moved outward from the tree, the chonking bite as he returned to see the ax blade fall again. The thick base of the aspen, marked by thousands of ax strokes, tapered sharply inward to the point on which it balanced.
“Soon!” said Muskrat. “Very soon now, our project will reach completion. I must plan the final X-strokes so the tree will fall with maximum splash.” He looked about him moodily. “Then, perhaps,” he said, “there’ll be some notice taken.”
Certainly very little notice had been taken so far. The animals around the pond were fully occupied in living, dying, or waiting, dormant, for the spring. Only the birds had time to watch the project: Chickadees told one another to come and see, see, see; cardinals whistled sharply at it; and nuthatches, upside down and busy pecking for grubs on the aspen trunk, said, “Ha, ha,” as the ax strokes rang out on the cold air.
“You may laugh,” said Muskrat to a nuthatch, “but you’ll see something soon.” He retired to his den for lunch, and the mouse and his child, left to themselves, walked their track until the father’s spring ran down.
“It must be soon,” the father said. “We have been patient for a long time.”
“And then, self-winding!” said the child, and as he spoke he saw two dark figures in the white mist rising from the melting snow. Passing into and out of sight among the bare, black trees and stumps, they came toward the mouse and his child.
Manny Rat still bore the scars of his brief thespian career, and his paisley dressing gown hung all in tatters. He was thinner and sharper-looking than before, and seemed to be thrust forward through the fog by all the darkling midnights that had brought him to this gray and misty morning. He bent to the trail with such concentration that he did not see the father and son until he was almost upon them. Then he lifted up his head, and his smile was that of someone who, after long and painful separation, finds his dearest friends.
The elephant moved slowly. Nothing had been able to force a daytime word from her, nor did she any longer speak between midnight and dawn; in silence she plodded at her master’s heels and endured her shame. What was left of her blackened plush was streaked with rust; her one ragged ear had heard no good word for a long time; her one glass eye looked out at life askance.
“Look!” said the child. “The elephant! We’ve found her, Papa!” He had never been so happy, had never felt so lucky. He had never doubted that he would make his dream come true, and all remaining difficulties shrank before him now — the dollhouse and the seal would certainly be found, the territory won, and he should have his mama. And then it came to him that Manny Rat was there to take away the whole bright world and smash him.
The elephant was completely overwhelmed. Until now she had thought only of herself and the injustice done her; the child and the father had been nothing to her. But now into her one glass eye there rushed the picture in its wholeness of the foggy day, the steaming snow, the black trees, the tired father, the tiny, lost, and hopeful child. A world of love and pain was printed on her vision, never to be gone again.
The father could not find a word to say. The sight of the elephant and the rat flashed upon him with such intensity that he seemed to hear the seeing of them; his ears crackled and roared, and the two figures expanded in the center of his vision while all else blurred away. The elephant was shabby and pathetic; her looks were gone, departed wit
h the ear, the eye, the purple headcloth and her plush. The father saw all that, and yet saw nothing of it; some brightness in her, some temper finer than the newest tin, some steadfast beauty smote and dazzled him. He wished that he might shelter and protect her, and all the time he saw the rock uplifted in the paws of Manny Rat. He fell in love, and he prepared to meet his end.
Manny Rat sighed with immense relief as his world spun out of chaos into order once again. Large ease and happiness were his once more; the headache that had plagued him recently was gone. He drew closer with his rock, but his curiosity for the moment overcame his desire to smash the nightmarishly durable father and son. “Winter sports, eh?” he said. “What in the world are you doing? It’s absolutely fascinating. Good heavens!” he said. “You’re chopping down that great, enormous tree. What a crash that’ll make when it goes! How much longer do you think it’ll take?”
“What does it matter now?” said the father.
“I must see the outcome of this,” said Manny Rat. “Let’s speed things up a little.” He put down his rock, seized the string that was tied to the father’s arm, and ran full speed around the track, dragging the mouse and his child along with him while the ax struck faster and faster, its echoes ringing out across the pond.
A long shiver ran up the gray trunk of the aspen to the topmost branches bare against the sky. Slowly at first, then faster, leaving empty sky behind it, the tree leaned earthward with a rending groan, tore one by one its final splinters loose, and fell.
Muskrat had intended to direct the last strokes of the ax so that the tree would fall into the pond in a place where no damage would be done. But now as the aspen toppled it struck a taller tree that had been split by lightning, which fell in turn against a giant that stood dead and rotting at the water’s edge. One after another they crashed and fell, and the last one landed squarely on the beaver dam and smashed it. A great splash went slowly up into the air as the saplings were scattered like matchsticks and the waters of the pond poured out into the valley.