Young Fredle (21 page)

“His name is Patches,” Fredle told them.

“Cats have names? What do they need with names?”

“Everything has a name,” Fredle announced, adding, so as not to sound so bossy, “in my experience.”

Was the kitchen cat also a predator? they asked. Was it crowded on their wooden board behind the pantry wall? How
did you ever relax, out in the wild, never knowing if you were going to be hot or cold, or even wet? “It’s always dry, here,” they explained. “It’s always this same temperature. That’s another reason the cellar’s the best place for a mouse.”

“Not
always
dry. Sometimes water leaks in through the walls and there are puddles.”

“Well, almost always.”

They couldn’t imagine birds flying through the air. They couldn’t imagine the sky or clouds or rain, compost or flowers or birds.

“Are birds like flies? We’ve seen flies. Only big, really big? Birds that big would be loud as Missus’s machines.”

“You have to let Fredle play with
us
now. We’ve waited for a long time,” the mouselets told their parents.

So Fredle played Follow-the-Leader (Fredle), after which there was a game of Hide-and-Seek (Fredle was It), then Tickle-and-Run-Fast, and finally Three Blind Mice (Fredle, Ellnu, and a high-spirited young mouse named Linu, who was particularly clever about nosing out the mouselets even with her eyes tightly closed). There was much squealing and laughing and excitement, all night long.

Afterward, when the mouselets were tired out, the families sat around in groups, talking. They reviewed what Fredle had told them, and decided, “It’s a terrible place, outside.”

“Actually,” Fredle said, “it isn’t, it’s—”

“Makes you appreciate your own home, doesn’t it?”

Then they talked much more about the question of whether carrots were sweeter than apples, and about the difference in taste between a new young potato and an older, riper
one, and tried to describe to Fredle how to combine different foods in his mouth—apples and onions, potatoes and onions—the possibilities were endless, they said. If you chewed slowly, tasting with full attention, you would find that each food had a new, and wonderful, flavor.

It was a long, lazy night out on the cellar floor. The different families mingled in groups that occasionally changed, the young sometimes staying close to their parents or grandparents, sometimes going off to be with others their own age. If you were thirsty, you went over to the big machine to drink from the pipes. If you were hungry, you made the quick trip up to the baskets and chose what you wanted to eat. Eventually, the dark air grew lighter and the mice began to yawn and go their separate ways to their own nests, for a good day’s sleep. For the second time, Fredle went with Tarnu and Ellnu and their mouselets to the nest behind the big, ill-smelling oil tank.

Tarnu apologized. “There
are
some bad smells down here. Over by the machines it’s soap, which I personally think is much worse. Oil isn’t so bad, once you get used to it.”

Fredle could think of no reason to try to convince Tarnu that the fresh air outside was preferable, or the warm, food-flavored kitchen air. He had never seen mice like this, unworried, unafraid, contented. These mice were happy, he realized. They lived every night of their lives in this lazy, easy way and they played with their mouselets on the dirt floor of the cellar as if there were no danger at all. They seemed to understand something about how to be a mouse alive in the world that no other mouse—no other creature—Fredle had ever met had figured out.

Of course, it you didn’t have to worry about food, it might be easy to be happy, especially if you almost never had to worry about cats, and never about traps, raptors, or raccoons, either. Whatever the reason, it seemed to Fredle that these cellar mice knew how to enjoy just being awake, eating and talking and playing with their mouselets.

17
The Way Up

Fredle spent several nights in the cellar, answering questions about outside (Colors? Squirrels? Ramps? Stone walls? Trees!) and asking questions of his own (Baskets of food that never ran out? How many different games? How many kinds of spiders?). There was talking, and more talking, about the danger of chocolate and why Missus saved Fredle’s life, about ice cream and where outside turned into wild, about why humans liked cats but not mice, and whether another creature, like a dog, like Sadie, could be trusted. Anything that could be thought about or asked about got talked over, in the cellar. Even though he was always thinking about a way back to the upstairs, Fredle enjoyed those nights. He was always sorry when another night had slipped peacefully by and it came time to go to sleep. He was always pleased to wake up
and begin another long, easy night. Until, one day, things changed.

They were all asleep in their nests after a busy night of good food, play, and conversation when, suddenly, the weak light from the high windows disappeared in a blast of silent and immediate brightness.

Fredle’s eyes snapped open. His heart raced. He looked across at Tarnu and Ellnu, who were sleeping peacefully. In fact, the whole family slept peacefully on, undisturbed. Fredle crawled out of the nest and saw Linu looking out over the rim of her own family’s nest, also behind the oil tank. Fredle whispered, “What is it?”

The light was not as bright as sunlight and didn’t infuse the air the way sunlight did, but it was uncomfortably bright, especially after the usual dimness of the cellar. Linu said, “There’s nothing to worry about. It’s just Missus. You want to see her use the machines?”

Of course Fredle did and of course Linu was happy to show him. “It’s the only thing that happens here in the cellar, almost. Not like outside, with all your adventures. Not like the kitchen, with its traps and that cat you told us about, with Mister and Missus and the dogs.”

“There’s a baby, too,” Fredle said. He knew he was showing off but he said it anyway.

“Not like the wild, either.”

Fredle agreed. In fact, the cellar was just about the absolute opposite of wild.

“The only dangerous thing that happens here is when those two cats come in. Missus isn’t at all dangerous. She
comes here a lot, sometimes to check the food in our baskets, sometimes like now for the machines. Look.”

They had come to the front leg of the oil tank and Fredle saw Missus, at the other end of the cellar, with a tall white container beside her. She was bending down and taking things out of the container to put them into one of the big square machines, which shone whiter than usual in the brightness that now filled the cellar.

A faint, sharp, unpleasant smell—definitely
not
food—floated briefly by his nose, and then it was gone. The machine started making noises and Missus went up some stairs. The light disappeared.

“She’ll come back, turn on the other machine, come back again and fill the basket back up, and take it away with her,” Linu explained. “Each time, there’s light, and then it’s gone. But that’s not very exciting, is it? Especially not for you.”

Fredle couldn’t argue about that. Instead, he said, “I’m looking for a way to get upstairs.”

“I know. We’re all trying to think of one. Could you sneak into Missus’s container?”

“That’s too dangerous. Is that the only idea you’ve had?”

“Why don’t you want to go back outside?”

“Upstairs is home. Besides, I already know how to get back outside, if I want to.”

“Are there flowers upstairs? I think I’d rather see flowers than stars. Which do you like better, Fredle?”

“Woo-Hah,” Fredle laughed. “Both.”

“Maybe I do, too,” Linu said. Then she said, looking around at the cellar with its shelves of food and unseen families
of sleeping mice, “I’m sorry I don’t know a way for you to get home, Fredle. Do you want to look for one together? We could look tonight.”

“Why not now?”

“Now? It’s daytime. Mice sleep during the day.”

“We’re not asleep,” Fredle pointed out. “Anyway, since I’m awake I’m going to do it. Come on along if you want to.” He actually hoped she would want to join him in the search, because things were more enjoyable when you had company. But he would go looking, with or without her.

“All right,” Linu said. “I’ve been thinking about upstairs. It’s pretty easy to see that to get there you’d have to find a way through the ceiling. So,” she finished, in case Fredle couldn’t think it out for himself, “the first thing is, you have to find a way to the ceiling.”

They both looked up.

The ceiling was not made of impenetrable stones and mortar, like the cellar walls. It was made out of strips of wood, like the cupboard shelves. Wooden boards ran across it, and there were also the round white pipes, as well as the long black lines. Linu was right; Fredle knew that as soon as she had spoken. The ceiling was the only possible entrance to upstairs.

Was it possible to move across the ceiling? Upside down? He couldn’t imagine it. But that was a problem he couldn’t solve from down below. If it
was
possible, he wouldn’t see how until he actually got up there.

The first thing, then, was to find a way up the wall. Fredle and Linu climbed to the shelves where the baskets stood, which was a known and easy path, and from there, continuing
slowly, they found footholds on stones that jutted out from the wall. When they had arrived at the top of the wall, they discovered a board just wide enough to walk along single file. That was easier going, and for mice, with their natural balance and light-footedness, not perilous.

However, they had no known route to follow. They were exploring.

Fredle looked all around, noticing everything he could, and he thought. He wondered aloud, “Where do the pipes go?” and he answered himself, “Upstairs. I’ve seen pipes in the kitchen. In the sink cupboard.”

“They look like they go through holes in the ceiling, don’t you think? See?” Linu asked. “Can you see a board that leads over to the pipes? I think this one—” And she was off.

“Don’t go too fast,” Fredle advised, and followed her.

They were in the middle of the ceiling when once again light exploded all around them. This time, Fredle knew enough to simply freeze where he was. He looked down at Missus from above, and she didn’t look so very big after all, bending to take things out of one machine and put them into the other, which immediately started making its own rumbling noises, like hundreds of raccoons, snoring. Then she went out of sight. When they could no longer hear her footsteps ascending, the light disappeared again. After a while, “Is it safe now?” Fredle asked.

“Did you see how high we are? I didn’t know you could get up onto these boards and be so high. You
are
an adventurer, Fredle.”

Fredle was surprised to hear that, but he didn’t mind. “Maybe I am, sometimes,” he said.

“I think we can get from here to the pipes that go from the
top of the water heater,” she told him. “We can get to a lot of new places from here.”

Moving quickly but carefully, because you wouldn’t want to fall from so high up, they made their way across to the boards that crossed above the water heater. Standing there, looking up, they could see a pipe entering the ceiling through a hole large enough for a mouse to squeeze through.

“What did I say?” asked Linu.

“And you were right!”

For a while, they looked at it. Then they talked about how easy it would be for a mouse to get up there from where they stood, and Fredle knew that he was almost home. He turned to Linu.

“Make my farewells to everyone. Especially Tarnu. Can you remember that?”

“I’m not silly,” she told him crossly. “Of course I can. But, Fredle?”

“What’s wrong? Do you want to come, too?” Fredle hadn’t thought of that before, but now that he had he wondered what Linu would think of life in the kitchen, and wondered how the kitchen mice would react to learning what it was really like to live in the cellar. Now that he had thought of it, he rather hoped she would come with him.

But she was shaking her head. “I better not.”

“If you know the way to get there, then you also know the way back,” he told her.

Linu continued shaking her head, but she said, “I’d have to say goodbye, and explain where I’d be, and tell them I’d be with you so I’d be safe.”

Then Fredle was shaking
his
head. He had learned that if you didn’t get going right away—if, for example, you went back to say goodbye or take a last look at the stars—then something might easily happen to keep you from ever reaching your destination. Or even to make you went. If reaching your destination was important, you couldn’t hesitate. “I can’t wait,” he apologized to Linu.

Just as he was saying that, she was saying, a little sadly, “I can’t go.”

So they parted, Linu to retrace her steps along the boards and Fredle to go along the pipe until it turned up, into the ceiling, into the house above.