Young Fredle (11 page)

Neldo woke him from his dreaming thoughts with a sharp poke of the nose. “Come on! You can’t just—Don’t stand around in the open like that! What’s
wrong
with you, Fredle?”

She was dancing on her four little feet, as restless as Bardo.

“What are they?” Fredle asked.

“You mean these flowers? I don’t know—get moving, Fredle!—roses, maybe, or tulips or daisies, it doesn’t matter, they’re not good to eat. Come
on
!”

Fredle caught her nervousness and skittered after her into the shelter of the row of flowers growing closest to the wall of the house. He made himself pay attention to what was in front of his eyes, but it was an effort not to turn his head to look at and smell the flowers.
Next time
, he promised himself.
Next time I’ll come alone so I can look as long as I want to
.

As if she could know what he was thinking, Neldo said, “Next time we’ll come just to look at the flowers. Early in the day, the dew on their petals catches the light and it’s as if the flowers have been sprinkled with stars.”

“Oh,” said Fredle again, as he tried to imagine that.

“You’ll see,” she assured him. “But right now, aren’t we looking for a way to get through the foundation?”

“What’s the foundation?”

“It’s what the house rests on. It’s these big, hard stones, and the humans put mortar between them to seal them closed. The foundation is what keeps the bad weather out of the house, too. The barn has a foundation but the woodshed doesn’t, and neither does the chicken coop.”

“I just don’t know enough,” Fredle said. He wished there wasn’t so much to know.

“Yes you do,” Neldo answered. “But you know about inside, not outside. But you’re learning about outside, and you do already know a lot. Even Bardo says so.”

They were walking along, studying the stony wall beside them, noses close to the bottom, where the foundation met dirt. These stones were impenetrable. The mortar between them was sometimes crumbly, but the two mice found no opening, no way in. After a while, their progress was halted by a wooden wall.

“Steps?” Fredle guessed.

“See? What did I tell you? You do know things.”

“
Are
these steps?”

“I think so. Probably. They look like the other steps, don’t you think? But this is the farthest I’ve ever gone, around the house. I don’t know
what
comes next.” She hesitated, then asked, “Do you want to keep going?”

Fredle did.

Single file, they went along the edge of the steps, Neldo in the lead, but found no cracks or openings in the wood. They had just passed the first corner, where the steps came down to the ground, and were crossing over stones that were small and sharp enough to make the going uncomfortable, when Fredle heard a hissing, purring sound.

He froze.

“Well, well,” said a soft voice.

Neldo had disappeared.

“What have we here?”

Fredle turned his head, just slightly, just enough to glimpse—exactly what he feared. A cat. He knew this cat. It was the kitchen cat, a long-legged, orange-colored, yellow-eyed beast that all the mice knew hunted only for the fun of it, just to catch and went mice and not because it was hungry. Missus fed that cat its own food in its own bowl. All the mice knew that, because when there was no other choice they sometimes raided that bowl.

The orange cat was crouching, low, ready. Its tail—the end twitching—swept the ground. Fredle looked around desperately.
There was no shelter. Where was Neldo hiding? There was no sound except for a distant barking and some insect, humming happily to itself.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked the cat, still without moving. Any mouse knew that the moment you moved, the cat pounced. “It’s not as if Missus doesn’t give you enough food.”

“I might as well ask what you’re doing outside, a fat, healthy house mouse like you.”

“We never hurt you,” Fredle said.

“You’ve taken my food out of my bowl,” the cat answered.

So he was going to have to make a run for it. Fredle knew that, and he knew how slim his chances were. What he didn’t know was what way to run—ahead was unknown and behind there was no place for a mouse to hide from a cat except among the tall flowers, which would offer little protection.

Back or forward? Forward or back?
He couldn’t decide. But he had to get moving because if he didn’t, he had no chance at all.

Back
, he decided, since he’d rather went among those flowers than anywhere else, and he tensed his—

“Patches! Hello, Patches! You’re outside! Do you want to play?” barked Sadie, bouncing across the grass toward the cat, with Angus following. “Look, Angus, it’s Patches! He’s outside!”

Fredle took advantage of the cat’s momentary inattention to back away, slowly, slowly, toward the flowers. He didn’t even notice the sharp stones cutting into his paws.

“I’m—” hissed the cat. Sadie’s head was now between the cat and Fredle. The cat’s tail waved angrily. “I’m hunting, can’t you see?”

Fredle crept two more steps backward.

“But, Patches, you only hunt inside. Snake and Fox are the outside hunters.”

“Don’t you know that about cats, Sadie?” asked Angus. “Cats hunt wherever they are, all the time. It’s what cats do.”

“Oh,” Sadie said. She turned to Fredle, who halted in mid-creep. “Do you live under the back porch?” she asked him.

“That’s not me,” he said.

“Yes it is. I can smell it. But you don’t smell like a field mouse. A field mouse smells wilder, different, smells like grass and—” Her noise pointed into the rows of flowers. “There’s a field mouse hiding in there,” she told Fredle.

“So what if I
am
under the porch?” Fredle said, to distract her from Neldo.

“What’s your name?” asked Sadie, but before he could answer she told him, “I’m Sadie and that’s Angus and this is Patches. I know this mouse,” she said to the cat. “I wish you wouldn’t hunt him.”

“Dogs don’t
know
mice,” Patches answered, but the cat was no longer crouching. He sat up and curled his tail around himself, as if he couldn’t care less about anything and especially about any mouse who might happen to be nearby.

“Dogs don’t know cats, either,” Angus remarked. “I’ve told her that, lots of times, but she doesn’t listen. She never listens to me.”

“Yes I do,” Sadie protested. “Just not when you’re wrong.” She turned back to Fredle. “What
is
your name, or don’t mice have names?”

“We do,” Fredle told her, adding, “Fredle.”

“Hello, Fredle,” Sadie said. “Do you want to play? You can run and we can all hunt you.”

“Not in Missus’s flowers,” Angus warned Sadie. “You know the rules, not in the flowers.”

Fredle was going to have to explain things to this Sadie dog, who didn’t seem to know who was who in the food chain. “You’re too big for me to play with. It wouldn’t be fun for either one of us.” Fredle was thinking that it especially wouldn’t be any fun for
him
, trying to survive hunting games with giants, and one of them a cat.

“Oh.” Sadie was disappointed, but she accepted his decision. She lowered her head to the ground, her black nose pointing toward him. “I guess so. We have a baby.”

“I know,” he said. “Can I go now?”

“If you have to,” Sadie said.

Fredle looked at Patches. The yellow eyes stared back at him.

Fredle waited.

“Oh, all right,” Patches said.

“You wouldn’t eat one of my other friends, would you, Patches?” Sadie was asking the cat as Fredle broke into a full scurry. He tucked himself into the corner where the steps met the foundation stones, and huddled there, shivering.

After a while, he heard the dogs go away. After another while, he heard the sound of the cat padding back up the steps. Only then did Neldo creep out from among the flowers to join him in his corner. For a long time, all they could do was look at one another, amazed that they were both alive.

Finally Neldo asked, “How did you
do
that?”

“Do what?”

“Get away from the cat.”

“I didn’t. You heard what happened, you saw. Sadie saved me.”

“She knows who you are. How did you get to know a dog? I wondered why you didn’t run, the way mice are supposed to, but that explains it. I guess things really
are
different inside.”

“You ran away,” Fredle remembered now. “You didn’t even warn me.”

“That’s what mice are supposed to do, run. First you run and then—if you make it—you hide. What’s to talk about?”

“I didn’t say talk, I said warn. You didn’t even poke me.”

“It wouldn’t have done any good,” Neldo told him. She didn’t sound a bit sorry. “You were frozen there, not moving a whisker, like a went mouse. I’d just have been eaten, too.”

Fredle had been thinking, while his shivering slowed down to the occasional shudder. “I was lucky.”

“Well,” said Neldo, “you seem to be a pretty lucky mouse in general. The dog saves you from the cat. Missus carries you outside when your family tries to went you. If that’s not luck, what is it?”

Fredle couldn’t disagree, but he still minded the way Neldo had just bolted off, without even giving him a warning nudge, so he kept up the quarrel. “Didn’t I just say that?”

9
Helping Sadie

Over the next days, Fredle explored the front of the house, and then he went to the side beyond that, which had neither porch nor steps nor flowers, although there were green bushes growing close to the foundation where a mouse could hide. Often Neldo was with him, and then he learned about trees, and the long-haired, mouselike creatures called squirrels, who ran up and down the trunks, faster than anything Fredle had ever seen. Just as often, however, he went on his own. Alone or in Neldo’s company, he took time to admire the flowers. Going along the foundation one day, the two mice came to something new and different, something not stones and mortar, and not wood, either, although the glass center had wood all around it.

“It’s a window.” Neldo anticipated his next question. “I
don’t know what they’re for or what this smooth part is. Windows are something humans have.”

“It’s glass,” Fredle told her.

“Glass?”

“It’s hard and you can see through it. Mister and Missus could see the grass through these windows. They could go down into the cellar and look at the grass,” Fredle said, “and the trees, too.” If he’d been a human, he’d have put a window where he could see the flowers through it.

“What’s a cellar?” asked Neldo.

As he studied the wood around the window, which struck him as a likely place for mouse-sized cracks to appear, Fredle told her about the way the inside of the house was built, one floor on top of the other, all of it resting on the cellar. “I’ve never actually been to the cellar.”

“Then how do you know it’s there?” asked Neldo.

“I don’t,” Fredle admitted. “But I think it is. Because the walls keep going on down,” he explained. “The walls don’t stop at the floor, inside.”

They found no cracks, no openings into inside. Fredle looked through the window but could see only darkness. As they came to the end of the wooden window frame, he asked, “Are there any more of these?”

“I don’t know.” Then Neldo said, “But, Fredle? I’ve been thinking. If you go back inside you won’t see me anymore.”

“That would be the plan,” Fredle told her, but right away he had second thoughts, because he did enjoy her company. “You know,” he said, “if I can get back in, then I can come out again, too.”

“Would you do that?” asked Neldo.

“Probably not.” Fredle hadn’t realized that. He asked Neldo, “Would you like to come inside with me?”

“Nunh-uh.” She was vehement. “I couldn’t live anywhere as dangerous as inside. Everybody says house mice have it easy but I don’t believe that.”

“Neldo,” he reminded her, “you live in the same woodshed as a snake.”

“But we know the snake. We know his habits, and besides, the snake only eats one mouse at a time. Never more than one. He’s not like the cats.”

“I guess no mouse has an easy life.” This was what Fredle was coming to understand, that no mouse has it easy, despite whatever other mice might think and say.