Young Fredle (10 page)

Neldo had mixed everything up. “Why would they keep us like chickens?” he asked.

“To eat. Everything eats mice,” she explained. “We’re at the bottom of the food chain, except maybe for ants. And beetles. And spiders, too. Not counting vegetables, of course, especially the vegetables that grow out in the open, the tomatoes and peppers, lettuce and beans? They’re the real bottom because they’re so easy to forage.”

“But aren’t all vegetables the same?” Fredle asked.

Neldo gave the little squeaking sound that is a mouse’s laugh, and rarely heard. “That’s like saying all mice are the same and just look at us two, a field mouse and a house mouse, look how different we are.”

“There
is
something to what you say,” Fredle said. He guessed that if he could change his sleeping and eating habits, he could change his opinions, too. “And the differences don’t end with looks, do they? I’m a kitchen house mouse, which is different from being a cellar house mouse or an attic house mouse.”

“I’m a woodshed field mouse,” Neldo announced.

Fredle asked, “Aren’t there snakes in the woodshed?”

“There’s only one I ever heard of. It’s not easy, being a woodshed mouse, even though, actually, the snake lives up in the rafters and our nest is way at the back, in the bottom layer of wood.” Then she changed the subject. “Bardo says you’re easy to fool. Are you?”

“I don’t know,” Fredle said. “Maybe.” He thought about it. “But maybe not.”

“I think that if you escaped from the house you must be something special,” Neldo decided.

This was a compliment Fredle didn’t deserve. “I didn’t escape. No house mouse wants to go outside. It’s not as if we’re prisoners, inside. We live there.”

“Then what are you doing out here?” she asked.

“Well,” he said, starting at the beginning of the story, with finding the good thing.

Neldo interrupted him almost immediately. “It was brown? It was sweet? Don’t you know what that is?”

“The inside was white and it was almost all inside. The brown was only a thin shell. That white soft filling was … It tasted”—and unexpectedly Fredle could remember exactly how that flavor spread out in his mouth—“wonderful.”

“Chocolate, that was chocolate, that shell, I bet. We
never
eat chocolate,” Neldo told him, sounding a little bossy now. “Chocolate’s bad for mice.”

“How was I supposed to know that?”

“You’re a mouse. Where are your survival instincts?”

“I don’t know how you can talk to me about survival instincts when you live with a snake.”

They had made one another cross, and sat silent for a while, until Neldo asked, “Aren’t you going to finish the story? About how you escaped?”

“If I have to,” Fredle answered grumpily, and so he did, which, strangely, cheered him up.

When he’d finished, Neldo remarked, “Missus saved your life. Do you think she meant to?”

“Why would she want to do that?”

“Nobody saves mice,” Neldo agreed. “In the woodshed, if you’re too old, you’re left—we push that mouse out, we have to. Or if he’s sick? That mouse gets pushed out into the open space in front of the woodpile. For the snake.”

Then Neldo stopped talking.

Fredle told her, “When we push ours out, they just disappear. I think, maybe, the cat?”

“If there’s a cat in the house there’s no maybe about it.”

“I guess every mouse has to went, sooner or later,” Fredle said, sounding to his own ears a lot like Grandfather. “It’s the rule.”

“I’m hoping for later,” Neldo said. “
Much
later. What do you think happened to Axle? I bet she’d like me.”

Fredle shook his head; he had no idea what might have happened to Axle, although he guessed she hadn’t found her way outside. He told Neldo, “I need to find a way back in.”

“Why?”

“It’s home. It’s where my family is.”

“I wish you could come live with us,” Neldo said, but they both knew that wasn’t possible. That was not the way mice did things.

“I wish I could find a way back,” Fredle countered.

Neldo thought about that for a while. “We’ll find one,” she decided.

“I already looked. There wasn’t any.”

“You’ve been all the way around to the front of the house?”

“What do you mean, the front of the house?” asked Fredle.

“The house has four sides and this is only one of them, but—Fredle?—I’m hungry. Let’s forage,” Neldo said, and she jumped up. “They’ll start to wonder where I am and come looking and I don’t want them to find me here.”

8
Around Front

Neldo set right to work helping Fredle look for a way back inside. The next midday, Fredle was at the compost pile taking bites out of an apple core and deciding if there was any way he could dig a hole large enough for a long crust of bread, or if he had to chew it into smaller sections, which would be easier to hide. He had decided to try digging one big hole and was working his paws hard, his nose buried in the soft compost, when he felt something damp and rather cold jabbed into his rib cage.

He froze, nose in the compost.

“What’s
wrong
with you, Fredle?”

It was Neldo’s voice.

“You’re supposed to run.
Run first, look later
, that’s the rule, that’s the way mice save themselves. Is it different for house
mice? But what are you doing, foraging now? Don’t you know this is the time Snake and Fox come out from the barn?”

“Snake and Fox?”

“After they have a morning’s sleep, after the night’s hunting,” Neldo said.

“A snake and a fox together?”

“No, of course not. Don’t you know anything? I’m talking about Snake the cat, not Snake the snake. And Fox the cat, who isn’t a fox, either. Besides, foxes almost never go after mice. They like chickens, and eggs, and rabbits. They like their food bigger, except for eggs. But everything eats eggs, even humans. So maybe it’s eggs that are the bottom of the food chain?”

“Bardo said this was the best time.”

“Don’t blame Bardo. He has to do what’s best for his family. It’s not as if he
wants
you went. In fact, I think he likes you, or anyway he admires you, or at least he doesn’t understand you. Come on.”

Before Fredle could ask her what she meant by that, she had run off. Fredle followed her along the garden fence, scurrying from post to post, across the rutted dirt road until they were safe behind the garbage cans. Once he’d learned how much danger he’d been in, Fredle had run faster and more nervously than usual, so it took him a minute to catch his breath, but when he did he asked Neldo, “Then what are
you
doing, foraging at midday?”

“I wasn’t foraging, I was looking for you. Nobody will notice that I’m gone, not at midday. They’re all asleep. I thought we could look around front for your way back into the house. Didn’t we plan to look around front?”

“I haven’t decided if I want to,” Fredle objected. He was feeling overwhelmed, as if he didn’t understand anything anymore. That feeling made him want to stay just where he was, until he
did
understand. After all, it
was
true that as well as being more easily seen in the bright midday light you could also see better yourself, which meant that it might be just as safe to forage at midday as at any other time. That would mean that Bardo had given him good advice, although he was fairly sure that Bardo had no intention of helping him. But Bardo
had
helped him, and maybe he had wanted to. How was Fredle supposed to know what was true? Not knowing how to know made him cross.

“Yes, you do,” Neldo reminded him cheerfully. “You know you do, and I can show you where our nest is, too, and where the barn is, because you never want to go anywhere near the barn. Once the snake has eaten he stays full for a long time, but the barn cats never stop hunting even if they’re not hungry. So we’ll start off heading toward the barn.”

If Neldo wasn’t going to be a grump, he wouldn’t be one, either, Fredle decided. “The inside cat is like that, too,” he told her. “It just likes catching mice.”

Side by side they darted back across the grass and the rough dirt up to the shelter of one of the garden fence posts. There, they had to catch their breath and couldn’t speak for a long while. Then Neldo said, “I want to show you,” and they went along the garden fence heading away from the compost pile, until they came to the final post. “Look,” Neldo said.

Fredle saw the chickens in their pen, with their own little house, which, since he was colorblind to red, he saw as dark
gray. “Why should I look at chickens?” he asked, to show Neldo that he knew chickens when he saw them.

She wasn’t a bit upset about that, or surprised. It was as if she thought he already knew everything. “No, look past the chicken pen.”

Fredle did as he was told and he saw a large mass in the distance, dark gray, the same color as the chickens’ house, but huge. This was probably the same dark mass that he saw when he went out to look at the night sky. “What
is
that?”

“A chicken pen,” Neldo told him, “but I said look beyond.”

“I am. There’s something big, big as the house—”

“Actually, it’s bigger.”

“With a little white wall on one side—”

“That’s our woodshed wall.”

“What is it?”

“That’s the barn. The cats like to lie in the sun in front of the barn.”

Fredle didn’t see anything that looked like a cat. “What’s a barn for?” he asked, studying the flat-faced building, bigger than the house and as dark as the clouds that carried rain.

“It’s where Snake the cat and Fox the cat live, and Mister keeps his tractor in there and his lawn mower and his chain saw, all the machines that cut things down or dig them up. The cows go in there at night, and in winter Mister and Missus keep the sheep behind it. Rats live in the barn, and there are families of mice, too, barn mice. They live on the oats and hay and other feed Mister keeps in there.”

“Field mice live in the barn? They live with cats and rats?”

“And the dogs in summer. In summer the dogs like to sleep in the barn.”

“Don’t field mice have
any
sense of survival?” Fredle asked. “Your family lives near a snake, they live near rats and cats. Why don’t field mice live in fields?”

“Live out in fields? In the wild?” Neldo shook her head. “That would be crazy. But I don’t know why you’re acting so superior. You house mice live with a cat, and traps, and it was eating something bad for you that almost got you went, eating something bad that you found
inside
, where you’re claiming it’s so much safer.”

“But we know when it’s safe inside, we know what’s safe—mostly. Most of us are safe most of the time.” It sounded like they were having a contest. Were he and Neldo competing to see who had the safest territory? Who cared? he wondered, and, What difference did it make?

Neldo apparently felt the same. “You’ve seen where we live, now, and the barn, so let’s go,” she said. “Didn’t you want to explore around the front of the house?”

By the time they had returned to Fredle’s lattice wall, he had another question. “Why don’t any other mice have their nests under the porch? Like mine.”

Neldo didn’t have to even stop to think, it was so obvious. “It’s too far from food, especially in winter. But you know what? You’re right, Fredle. In winter you’ll be protected from snow—”

Fredle stopped himself from interrupting to ask her what
snow
was.

“—just like we are in the woodshed.”

“Let’s go,” Fredle said, suddenly impatient with all the talking. “You lead.”

They went on through bright midday sun, moving along close to the lattice wall. The grass shone green, the lattice wall shone white, and the air glimmered all around. Then they went around a sharp corner and the lattice was gone. Neldo went right on, but Fredle hesitated, looking back for places to run to for shelter, looking around, looking forward.

That was when he saw something he could never have imagined, right in front of him, something as surprising as stars.

“Oh,” said Fredle. “Oh my.”

They were tall, and straight-stemmed, with two long wings of leaves rising up along the stem. The warm air near them was filled with a faint sweet smell and the stems held up tall cups, in different colors, white and yellow and the same dark gray as the barn, but shiny. That dark gray didn’t hold his eyes, but the white and yellow did, where they glowed in their loveliness.

Fredle stood struck still, and looked. Row behind row, there were three straight rows of these shining things, standing in the sunlight. He looked up at the smooth-sided cups and then his eyes ran down the long green stems, then they flew up on the winglike dark green leaves. Did those cups catch the rain when it fell? he wondered. Were they there for the humans to bend and drink out of? He thought that water held in those cups, especially the white ones, would have a power no other water could match. He thought that if a mouse could drink that water he would become more of a mouse than he had been, wiser perhaps if he drank from the white cup,
stronger and faster, maybe, if from the yellow cup. And if he drank out of the dark gray cup, what power would he learn?