Young Fredle (25 page)

The answer to
that
question came, quickly and clearly, in his own voice from inside his own head, and Fredle barely had time to work out a plan before the nest began to wake up for the night.

The first mice he spoke to about the idea were his mother and father. He would have preferred to speak to all the kitchen mice at once, but unlike the cellar mice they didn’t gather all together. It was too dangerous out in the kitchen and there was no room within the walls.

“Father?” Fredle began.

“Now what?”

“What if I were to go back outside? That’s where I’ve been and you can see that I’ve survived, so what about if I did go back? And what if I took some mouselets with me? There’s lots of room outside.”

His territory behind the lattice would be a good place for mouselets to run around and play, and grow strong and healthy. They could make as much noise as they wanted to in the territory behind the lattice.

“Grandfather could come with me,” Fredle added.

“Mice stay in the nests they were born in. You know that as well as I do, Fredle,” Father said.

“And I’m about two and a half steps from went,” Grandfather said. “What would be the point?”

Fredle ignored his father. He thought of Rilf and the Rowdy Boys and said to his grandfather, “You could see the moon, before. Wouldn’t you rather have seen the moon, before you went?”

“If Fredle did that,” said Mother, keeping her voice low, “he could take Ardle with him. And Doddle, too; Doddle has never been as healthy as a mouselet should be. And Kidle?” she suggested.

“Kidle is certainly headed for more trouble than I want to have to deal with,” Father agreed. “Right now, all he does is talk. It’s all talk, now, but you remember Fredle, what he was like at that age. And look at Fredle now,” Father said. “He refuses to grow up and settle down.”

“If Kidle wants to come with me, I’d like that,” said Fredle.
“And any mouselets, too.” He didn’t give Father the time to say
I don’t remember giving you permission
. “Tell them all to wait for me behind the stove when they’ve foraged. You, too, Grandfather. I promise, it’s a long journey, and difficult, but not impossible, and if you come with me and if you see the moon—”

“I don’t know that I can make it,” Grandfather said.

“Just try,” urged Fredle, and he slipped over the rim of the nest to go find Axle.

Axle, however, wasn’t interested in moving to a new nest, especially a new nest outside. “Didn’t you learn
anything
from what happened to us?” she asked. “Honestly, Fredle, don’t you remember?”

He did. He remembered everything. The taste of chocolate and feeling sick, being alone and frightened, being near barn cats and snakes and raccoons, the way raptors fell out of the sky—of course he remembered. But he also remembered the look of those yellow flowers, their shining cups, and the way squirrels leapt through the grass in a burst of speed to run up the trunks of trees, and the taste of orange rind and the sound of chickens and what it was like to go out in the sunlight, if you wanted to, into a world full of color, or by moonlight into a world of silver shadows.

“Axle,” he pleaded. “You’ll like it. And besides, you could always come back here if you don’t.”

“I am quite happy here, now, where I am. Being grown-up.”

“That’s not the only way to be grown-up. I know one other and there are probably more than just those two.”

“It’s the only way
I
want to know, Fredle. So you can forget about dragging me around behind your wild ideas and I’m sorry that you can’t see what’s best for you.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Fredle said, but he didn’t mean at all the same thing as Axle.

After that, he climbed down the walls into the kitchen. He didn’t worry about foraging, because he knew that once he got to the cellar there would be plenty of food for everyone. And now that he thought of those baskets of food, he realized that with a nest behind the lattice, he could make piles of food, too, like the humans did, stores for the cold winter Neldo and Bardo had spoken of. Mice could carry food in their mouths, just like raccoons did, and pile up enough to feed them for a long time. He and the others might even move to the cellar when winter came, because if you could go from one nest to another, you could go from one to another to another. As he had said to Linu,
If you know the way to get there, then you also know the way back
.

Maybe Linu would want to come outside with him, and he and Neldo could show her flowers and squirrels and stars.

“Hello, Grandfather,” he said as the old mouse came up to join him, with Kidle and four mouselets close behind.

“Here we are, then, young Fredle,” Grandfather said. “What’s next?”

Fredle told them, “We’ll go down to the cellar, which isn’t easy but we can do it, and then, after we have as much as we want to eat”—he could promise them that—“then we’ll go up the cellar wall and across the dirt to outside.”

“Will there be a moon?” Grandfather wondered.

“I don’t know. It certainly could happen that one of the moons will be out in the sky.”

“What’s a moon?” asked Kidle.

“Or stars,” Fredle said, remembering. “And stars.”

“What’s the sky?” asked Doddle.

“You’ll see,” Fredle told them. “You have no idea how much there is to see, and probably neither do I.” He laughed with gladness, “Woo-Hah.”

Later, much later, when things had turned out—sometimes as he’d planned, sometimes not as well as he’d wanted, and sometimes better than he’d hoped—Fredle told it like one of Grandfather’s stories. He enjoyed it a great deal more in the
telling than he had in the living of it, or so he sometimes thought. And why should that be? he wondered, as he began, “When I was young, it was between the walls—inside—that was home.”

As Fredle unfolded the story, there were certain points at which he was often interrupted: “But, Father, if she was too frightened to forage, why didn’t your mother just eat from the stores?” “Aunt Linu, is that our same Sadie?” “Raccoons, Fredle? Did you hear that, Neldo? Fredle escaped from raccoons!” “What’s a stove, Uncle Fredle?” “Did your grandfather get to see the moons? He did, didn’t he?”

“I could never do what you did,” they said, to which Fredle responded, “You’d be surprised at what you can do, if you need to, if you have to, if you really want to.” However, there was always at least one of the mouselets who maintained, “I could, I could do it,” and to him or her Fredle always said, “I know you could. I hope I’m around to see that.”

And finally, after many seasons there came a mouselet who looked off up into the star-filled sky with dreaming eyes and repeated the word “Lake. Lake. Wouldn’t you like to see a lake, Grandfather?”

Cynthia Voigt is the award-winning author of many books for young readers. Her accolades include a Newbery Medal for
Dicey’s Song
(Book 2 in the Tillerman cycle), a Newbery Honor for
A Solitary Blue
(Book 3 in the Tillerman cycle), and the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Outstanding Literature for Young Adults. She is also the author of the Kingdom series, the Bad Girls series, and
Angus and Sadie
.

Cynthia Voigt lives with her husband in Maine. Please visit her on the Web at
cynthiavoigt.com
.

Louise Yates is the talented creator of two acclaimed picture books:
A Small Surprise
(“Will be sure to have readers in stitches.” —
Kirkus Reviews)
and
Dog Loves Books
(“A gentle tale with a winning message.” —
Publishers Weekly
, Starred).

She lives in London.