The Amazing Adventures of Freddie Whitemouse (3 page)

Two more days and nights went by, and although when Freddie went to the pool in the evenings he could smell goat, he didn’t see one. By now he was famished – starving, he felt
– and he could think of nothing but food.

On the third morning, he went – very early – back to the grassy slope where he had seen the village. This time he noticed that there was a track where the boys had herded the goats.
It was quite narrow and on each side of it there was the usual long dry grass and a few trees. It was not straight, so when he started to follow it he could not see ahead further than the next
bend. He padded cautiously down it, ready to leap aside and take cover if any people appeared. The scent of the goats got stronger and stronger as he descended, and his excitement and hunger were
so intense that he was trembling as he became sure that any moment now he would at last find his next meal. Then, suddenly, the path or track divided into two paths, and just as he was trying to
choose between them he was struck by a really strong odour of raw meat. It came from the left-hand path, so he started along it.

Then he saw it. A large piece of goat was hanging from a low branch of a tree ahead. Blood was dripping from it. All ideas of caution vanished. The branch was only about five feet from the
ground and he sprang towards it. Plonk! Before he could grab the haunch, the ground gave way under him and he fell heavily into a deep hole.

For a moment he lay stunned. His right shoulder was hurting and he saw that it had been pierced by a sharp stick that was still embedded in his fur. The shock and pain made him snarl. He tried
to get to his feet – the pit, though deep, was so narrow and small that there was hardly space for him, but in any case his shoulder had become a stabbing pain. If he was to escape, he must
pull the stick out. So he gripped it with his front teeth and, growling in agony, he tugged until it suddenly came loose. The wound started to bleed, but gradually he licked it clean.

Escape! He must get out of this awful hole. His eyes were getting accustomed to the gloom and a small amount of light came from the top where he had fallen through. But he could now see that the
sides of the pit were studded with sticks like the one that had wounded him. There was no room for him to spring out, and if he tried to claw up the sides the sticks would stab him. It was a trap,
he realised. The boys had made a trap and put the piece of goat on the branch to get him to fall into it. If he was to escape, he would have to wait until the people came to get him out. Then a
really awful thought came to him. Supposing they did not come? Supposing they just left him to die of hunger and thirst? And how could they get him out anyway? He was so cramped that there was
hardly room for him to stand. He tried to be angry and not frightened; when they came he’d go for them – he’d teach them not to mess about with tigers – he’d wrap his
mighty paw around one of their necks . . . but then a fresh wave of terror overcame him; he could feel his heart thumping and he was trembling with fear. He let out one despairing roar – a
kind of growling groan – the loudest noise he had ever made in his life. It somehow made him feel a little bit better, so he did it again – twice more.

He could hear the people coming; several of them, he did not know how many. They were jabbering away. When he looked up, he could see one of them peering down at him. He kept up a low growl, but
there was not even room for him to lash his tail. Eventually one of them climbed a little way down into the pit – staying well out of Freddie’s reach – and then, once the man had
stopped climbing, Freddie felt a sudden piercing pain in his shoulder – the one that hadn’t been stabbed by the stick – and he snarled with the shock. The pain wasn’t like
the stick had been; in fact, this one didn’t go on hurting. He stood for a moment; he felt very unsteady – tired – so tired he wasn’t even frightened, he just wanted . . .
and as he tried to think of what he wanted, he collapsed in a furry heap.

‘
W
ake up! Your week is up! None too soon, by the look of you.’

There was no mistaking the croaky voice, and when he managed to open his eyes (he felt very groggy), there were the two black eyes very wide apart in the flat head looking down at him. Freddie
felt extremely weak, and one of his shoulders ached: the sorcerer was so much larger than he was, that he realised he was no longer a tiger, but back to being himself – Freddie Whitemouse.
The relief was enormous. There was a brief silence while he was fixed with an unblinking gaze.

‘Well?’

‘Well, what?’

‘How did it go – being a tiger?’

‘Not too bad.’ He was determined to put a brave face on his extraordinary week, and that cost him much effort, as it is difficult for a mouse to put a brave face on anything.

The toad’s already amazingly wide mouth seemed to get momentarily wider; if he was smiling, it was rather a sarcastic smile. ‘Perhaps you would like to go back to it then?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Well, at least you escaped being in a cage in a zoo for the rest of your life.’

‘Is that what was going to happen?’

‘Certainly. Those men who trapped you know that they get far much more money for a live tiger than a dead one. You would have ended up in a very small cage with a lot of people staring at
you and telling each other you were a tiger. If you ask me, you’ve been pretty lucky for a mouse.’

‘I suppose I have.’ He did not feel in the least lucky: his shoulder was throbbing and he felt weak with hunger. ‘I didn’t actually ask you,’ he said after a
moment.

‘Ask me what?’

‘Whether I was lucky.’

‘No. Well, gratitude is not your strong point.’ He paused to deal with a passing fly. ‘In fact,’ he said after thinking about it, ‘it is quite difficult to think
what your strong points are.’

Freddie thought – or tried to think.

‘Brave? I think I’m quite brave about most things.’

‘Poo! Tigers don’t have much to be brave about.’

‘But mice have to be brave about nearly everything. I’ve had quite a lot of practice, and compared to the rest of my family I am regarded as having the most courage. I
am
brave,’ he finished defiantly, but his voice was all squeaky and shaky from having been so frightened and hungry for so long.

There was a pause, and then the sorcerer – in a much kinder voice – said, ‘I was saving this bluebottle for my lunch, but you can have it if you like – I can see you need
sustenance.’

Freddie looked at the uninviting sight of the fat dead bluebottle.

‘I don’t need sust— whatever you said; it’s food I really need. I’m so hungry I could eat a dog biscuit.’ This was a saying well known in his family, because
Mrs Whitemouse insisted upon keeping a very old pink dog biscuit in the home, ‘In case,’ she frequently said, ‘of an emergency.’ So far they had never had one, and most of
the younger mice had no idea what she even meant. It was the biscuit that had blocked up the front door in Freddie’s dream. As he remembered this, a wave of homesickness overcame him; his
beady eyes glittered with tears, but he was determined not to cry in front of the toad, so he swallowed several times and thought hard about his reputation for braveness.

‘I think I’d like to go home and think things over before I try the next thing.’

‘All right. But you can only have two days if you do want another go. I’m not prepared to hang about waiting to use up my sorcery on you whenever you happen to feel like it. Two
days, and then either you meet me by the water tank in the greenhouse, or you stay a mouse forever.’

‘I don’t want to do that.’

‘Suit yourself. And next time you are offered a treat, you should thank the person who offers it, whether you want it or not.’

And then, as Freddie nodded obediently, the toad added, ‘It’s called gratitude. Or simply good manners. Take your pick.’ And he turned his immensely broad back on Freddie and
at the same time disappeared.

Freddie looked around and realised that he was in the back garden of No. 3, The Grove, outside the battered old greenhouse with its panes of broken glass and rotting woodwork. Home was only
minutes away, or at least it would have been only minutes if he had been up to running, but his shoulder hurt and he felt so weak and tired that he was practically crawling and had to keep stopping
to rest. Luckily there was a way in through the back of the house. ‘Never mind,’ he said to himself; he would be going back to a hero’s welcome; his mother would give him a
delicious supper and then, with any luck, he would go to sleep in the Hat.

But it didn’t turn out at all like that. His mother was pleased to see him, but she was also cross with him for disappearing for a week without telling her, and her crossness somehow
spoiled the pleased bit. I don’t know whether you have noticed this about some grown-ups: they will ask you quite boring questions like ‘Did you have a good day at school?’ but
when you tell them something really fascinating, they don’t seem at all interested. She did give Freddie a nice meal – some cornflakes, two sultanas, a walnut and a strand of macaroni
that had delicious flakes of cheese in it – but when he started to tell her about being a tiger, she simply said things like, ‘Yes, dear,’ and, ‘Well, I never!’ and,
‘Really, Freddie! I don’t know where you get it all from.’

His younger relations, however, were absolutely riveted. They sat in a circle around him and wanted to know every single detail – about the jungle and the other animals and how he had got
food to eat. When he told them about the jaguars and elephants, they trembled and squeaked with excitement and fright and frequently said how brave he must have been. He was a hero to them.

He was just about to tell them about the cobra when Mrs Whitemouse interrupted. ‘That’s enough of all that nonsense. If you go frightening the young ones with your silly stories,
they won’t sleep a wink.’ And she sent them all to bed, and no, he could not sleep in the Hat, because it was full of the new babies. He did not mind this too much, because several of
the older mice had quite a quarrel about who should sleep next to him. But one of his youngest sisters did have a nightmare, and woke up squeaking with terror; ‘Freddie! Freddie! Save
me!’ and not until she was safely squeezed against his chest and everybody else was awake did he find out that she thought a tiger was going to eat her up entirely. ‘You said eating a
mouse for a tiger would be like us eating a cake crumb! I don’t want to be a crumb!’ she wept. Freddie told her again and again that tigers did not eat mice, but she got to sleep next
to him, which he suspected was why she had had the bad dream in the first place.

The next day there was hardly any breakfast. The mice who were supposed to have been foraging during the night had practically all stayed at home listening to Freddie, and one of his uncles
– who never did a stroke of work – now went on and on about team spirit, but the few mice who had gone foraging did not seem inclined to share their food.
Not much team spirit
there
, Freddie thought. He was hungry and felt that if he was such a hero, he should be one of the first to be fed.

So – feeling rather sulky, but brave; after all, he had become used to hunting for his meals during the last week – he went out in broad daylight to have a look around the dustbins
in the front garden of No. 3, The Grove.

He was lucky. One of the bins had overflowed and he found the remains of a ham sandwich – the crust and a small sliver of ham – and an open and almost empty tin of dog food (he knew
from the smell that it was dog food because Mrs Whitemouse had once brought some back from the bowl in the kitchen when some of the people had gone out for a walk with their dog). He had to get
into the tin to eat it, but it was absolutely delicious. By the time he emerged from the tin, he was completely full (in fact he felt rather sick) so he found a nice dark place under the garden
hedge where he could clean his sticky whiskers and fur. He no longer wanted the sandwich so he decided to leave it. It would be madness to try to drag it back in daylight. He had a little
refreshing sleep before returning to his crowded and noisy home.

And it
was
noisy – and crowded. There simply wasn’t enough room for the whole family.

His mother was reproachful and distracted. ‘Where have you been? Your brothers have been working all morning on the new apartments in Skirting Board East: they were counting on you to help
them.’ She was cleaning some very new tiny mice in the Hat and trying to make some of the older ones share two apple peelings, and they were all protesting ‘I found them! . . . I
dragged one of them back here . . . She didn’t do anything, so why should she have any of them?’ But when they caught sight of Freddie, they dropped the apple peel and rushed over to
him crying, ‘Tell us a story; Freddie, please, please, tell us another story. The one about the wicked snake you started last night!’

‘I’ll only tell it if you do as Mother says about the apple peel.’ And they did. They gnawed the peel into twenty pieces without eating any of them, and then crouched quietly
around Freddie: twenty pairs of beady eyes fixed on his face, twenty sets of whiskers twitching with excitement.