Young Fredle (23 page)

Following Father’s quiet progress down to the pantry floor entryway, he got close enough to Grandfather to whisper, “Is Axle really and truly alive?”

“Of course. She’s young and strong. I’m the one you should be surprised to find still here.”

That was good enough for Fredle, for the time being. He could wait to hear the details. He was content to be back in his usual place between Grandfather and Kidle, one of a line of mice creeping out into the kitchen to forage. Being home, with familiar mice all around him, familiar boards under his feet and the familiar dim light all around, knowing where he would look for food and what he might find, knowing that somewhere ahead in the night kitchen Axle was foraging (and wouldn’t she be surprised to see him!), Fredle had the feeling that nothing had changed.

It was a wonderful, comfortable feeling. It was the feeling he had been longing for ever since he had been shoved down along the wall and pushed out onto the pantry floor. He was home, where Father and Grandfather knew what a mouse had to do, where they had their own nightly routines, where he knew what the dangers were, and where Father’s family had its own territory, its very own section of the board behind the pantry wall, trespassed upon only by the occasional ant or spider. Within the walls, a mouse could move in perfect safety from the kitchen to his nest, or to the cupboard under the sink and the narrow space behind the stove. Fredle felt once again that he was a very lucky mouse. He had had an adventure and he had come safely home.

He found Axle foraging under the table. “Axle!” he cried.

“You?” she gasped. “I never thought—I thought—Fredle? Is that you, really?”

“Woo-Hah,” he laughed. “Yes, it is.”

“Quiet!” she warned him.

Fredle lowered his voice. “Am I glad to see
you
. How did you—”

“You know the rule, Fredle.
Forage comes first
. I’ll try to come to your nest, later, after. Talking now is too risky.”

Axle was as bossy as ever, but Fredle didn’t mind. He was so glad to see her strong, gray body and round, dark eyes, and the familiar curve of her half-ear that—now that he had seen them, he knew—resembled one of the moons he had glimpsed in the night sky.

He couldn’t wait to tell Axle about the moons and the stars, the compost and the raccoons—especially the raccoons. Axle would enjoy those raccoons. He would be able to admit to her that it was his sweet tooth that got him into that particular
bit of trouble, too. She’d like that, and she’d understand the temptation.

Fredle’s foraging didn’t go particularly well. He found only one kibbles; it was enough to fill his stomach, but its dry tastelessness only made him think about the sweetness of onions and apples, the crisp freshness of ramps and bitter chewiness of orange peel, all the good things he’d learned to eat. After a trip into the kitchen sink cupboard for water, he was ready to return to the nest.

The others, however, weren’t. “Don’t
rush
us,” Father said crossly. “The mouselets aren’t experienced foragers like you, Fredle. I don’t know
what
kind of bad habits you’ve picked up wherever you’ve been, but you can start getting rid of them right now.”

Father grumbled on. “And two of those mouselets can never find themselves enough to eat. Of course they’re failing to flourish, what does your mother expect to happen? What does she think I can do about it?”

“Um-hmm,” answered Fredle. This was a downside to having been away for so long: you had to catch up on all the bad things that had happened while you weren’t there.

Or maybe, he thought, it was a downside to coming back?

And then he wondered: Was Father sorry that he had come back?

The foraging continued and Fredle waited by the pantry door, alert for Patches. He heard Mother’s voice telling the mouselets, “Hurry up, it’s dangerous. You can’t
still
be hungry, Ardle. Stay close, Doddle. Remember the cat, everyone—Idle,
NO
!”

He heard other whispered comments: “Hungry season coming, mark my words.” “Used to be, there were more crumbs under the table.” “Was that the cat?” “Used to be, there were always kibbles.”

Grandfather came to stand near Fredle, within easy reach of the hole through the pantry door. “You’ve come back to hard times, young Fredle.”

“You know, Grandfather? Down in the cellar there’s—” Fredle began, but he was interrupted.

“I’m glad I’ll soon be went. It won’t be too long now.”

Fredle wanted to deny this, but it was true. Grandfather
was
old. Hoping to cheer the old mouse up, he started to tell Grandfather what had happened to him, even though Grandfather hadn’t asked. “I was outside, Missus carried me outside. At night, outside, it’s dark, not dim like inside. Outside, it’s a bright darkness and sometimes there’s a moon. Grandfather? Or maybe it’s a lot of moons, I don’t know, nobody knows, but a moon is like …” He tried to think of what a moon
was
like. “Like a white circle that shines out light. It floats in the dark air, way up high, and only at night. It’s nocturnal, like mice.”

He waited, but Grandfather had nothing to say to this. Grandfather just stared into the shadowy kitchen and waited.

“And in daylight—which is so bright, you can’t imagine it—there are colors,” Fredle went on. But Grandfather hadn’t even looked at him, so he stopped trying to talk and turned his attention back to listening. He listened to Mother’s worried voice urging the mouselets to hurry up, and Father saying, “Stop that chattering, you two, just stop it.”

Then, after a long time, Grandfather did speak, so softly it
was almost a whisper. “
Moon
. What a word that is. There’s a word to dream about,
moon
. Hear it, Fredle?”

Father came up to the door in time to hear this. “Get started, Grandfather. You know you’re slow and we can’t always be waiting for you.”

Fredle heard a dog bark, too far off for him to know if it was Angus or Sadie, and he wondered if the dog was barking at something seen through a window, out in the garden or near the chicken pen, or moving across in front of the barn. He heard faint baby cries, and then Father had gathered his whole family together, to file back up to the nest.

There Fredle curled up beside Kidle. “Are you still hungry?” Kidle asked. “I am.”

“You want to go back down and forage some more?” Fredle offered.

“We can’t do that. It’s almost day, and besides, what if Father found out?”

“But—” Fredle began, but Kidle said, “It’ll be all right once I go to sleep. Maybe tomorrow night will be better, don’t you think?”

Soon, Fredle’s whole family was asleep. Fredle rested his head on the rim of the nest to make it easy for Axle to find him. He waited and waited, but Axle did not come. Eventually, he fell asleep himself.

Fredle didn’t sleep deeply, however, and he didn’t sleep well. He woke up several times during the day and had to wait patiently, motionless so as not to disturb the others, for sleep to return.

* * *

The next night, after foraging briefly and with enough success to keep his stomach quiet through the next day, he set out to find Axle. He looked under the table and around the refrigerator, and finally found her beside the stove. “You didn’t—” he started to say.

“I forgot,” she said, so quickly that he knew he couldn’t believe her. “You didn’t come find me, either.”

“I thought you said—”

Axle shook her head. She didn’t want to hear this. She looked right at Fredle. “I don’t know what happened to you, all this time you’ve been gone, but it must have been better than what happened to me. A lot better.”

Fredle had been looking forward to telling Axle his story. “Well, it was Missus who—”

“I was trying to find a way up to the attic, where they’re not cellar mice, dirty, and half-crazy from eating soap. I thought I could stand it, up with the attic mice, I could learn to eat the weird things they eat, cloth and wood and insulation. But I couldn’t find the way and I was all alone in some spidery corner between the kitchen and the attic, somewhere, I didn’t know where, and I was so thirsty. I just barely had the strength to creep into a cupboard—not the kitchen one, but I could smell water, and there were pipes, like in the kitchen, and paper, in rolls, in a stack. I ate soap, Fredle.”

“I think I was there, too!” Fredle cried. “I smelled—”

“I was in that cupboard for nights! Where else could I go? It was so dark,” Axle remembered. “I had to eat that paper. I was alone. I was all alone, Fredle.”

“I know about that,” Fredle said. “When I was alone—”

“I couldn’t sleep, there was only that paper to eat, except for soap, it was … I
hated
it. I was alone,” she said again, as if that explained everything. “So I came back.”

She glared at Fredle.

“It took me a long time to find the way home,” he told her, so that she would know that he, too, had wanted to come back.

“They let me stay. I was sure they’d push me out, even though by then I was fine again, but they never even mentioned it. We never figured it out, Fredle. We just didn’t understand. We treated it like some game, but—it’s—Bad things happen when you break the rules.”

“I know,” Fredle said, first remembering how glad he’d been to see Bardo and then almost wishing he could see Neldo and her brother again. “But not always, not all bad.”

Axle continued. “Something was bound to happen, sooner or later. We were heading for trouble. I
was
sorry to hear you got pushed out.”

Fredle waited for her to ask him about what had happened to him, how he had managed, where he had gone and what he had seen, but she didn’t have a single question. Instead, she told him, “It’s getting pretty crowded behind the pantry.”

“In the cellar—”

“A lot of the mouselets will have to be pushed out, unless we all want to go hungry. It’s not easy, these days,” Axle said. Then she
did
have a question. “Where are you going?”

Fredle had turned around to leave. He looked back to explain, “I want to …” But he was too sad to say more.

He went to wait by the pantry door with Grandfather. Grandfather didn’t even greet him, he just said, “Really and truly? Up in the air? Moons?”

Fredle was glad to be able to say to him, “Really and truly.”

“I wish I wasn’t old,” Grandfather said.

“You’d like the lattice wall, too,” Fredle said, wishing the same thing. “You can see through it, to outside and the green of the grass, and—”

“I don’t know,” Grandfather answered quietly, but he didn’t tell Fredle if what he didn’t know had to do with grass and the lattice wall or with something else. “I just don’t know.”

As they made the trip back up to their nest, Fredle asked Kidle, “Is something wrong with Grandfather?”

“He’s worried about how we’ll manage. I think he expects, any day, that he’ll be the one pushed out.”

“I shouldn’t have come back.”

“That’s not it,” Kidle assured him. “We’re all glad and I’m
really
glad. It’s only, what Father says, it’s hard times.”

“What can we do to make them better?” Fredle asked.

“When times are hard, all a mouse can do is hunker down. That’s the way mice are.”

Not me
, Fredle wanted to tell him, but first he wanted to talk to Axle again. That is, he wanted to
try
to talk to Axle. He wanted to give her another chance.

So before he went to sleep, he crept back along the board to her family’s nest. “Axle?” he whispered. “Axle!” and eventually he saw her head rise over the rim. “Come down,” he said.

“I can’t. You know that, Fredle.”

“I wanted to tell you,” he whispered. “I met raccoons.”

“Raccoons?”

“A band of them, they were going to eat me—
after
they showed me the lake and fed me some fish. But I escaped.”

“You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?” Axle asked. “We’re too old for stories now, Fredle,” she told him. “I’ve grown up and you should have, too.”

“And there were stars,” said Fredle, desperately.

Axle didn’t ask him what any of those things might be, stars, or fish, or lake, and she didn’t ask him what raccoons looked like and smelled like, or talked about. “Go to sleep, Fredle,” she advised him. “That’s what I’m going to do. That’s all a mouse can do when he has to go to bed hungry.”

Fredle didn’t move. “In the cellar—” he tried again, but she was gone.

Fredle didn’t want to return to his nest. He wasn’t tired. But where could he go? Here, inside, within the walls, there was no place to go, and even if you got somewhere, it would be just like the place you left. Everything was the same, here, inside, he thought. Everything didn’t change and mice didn’t change and the way things were was the way things had to be. He had certainly heard the rules often enough.

Thinking that made Fredle tired, but not in the way that made him simply want to sleep. He was tired in a way that made him not want to
do
anything except go back to the nest and wait for sleep to come and find him. He turned slowly around.

Why couldn’t mice change? he wondered tiredly. And
then he was awake and paying full attention to his own question because he knew that he
had
changed. He had changed, and not just once but many times. This thought gave him a surge of energy and he no longer had any desire to return to the nest. Instead, moving along within the walls so as to be safe (he hadn’t changed
that
much; it would be really stupid for a mouse not to worry about safety), he made his way to the cabinet under the kitchen sink, hoping that once again the door would be open and maybe he could hear something happening or—this would be the best—maybe he would have a chance to talk with Sadie.