“I can’t, Cap’n,” Rad answered. “The boys are none too pleased. You think we should have gone right after him last night?”
“With all that food in our bellies? Besides, how was I to know he wasn’t off in the orchard, stuffing his face,” Rilf’s voice said. “Then the rain. It was bad enough without the rain watering up his scent,” he grumbled.
“You know, Cap’n, if you think about it, we don’t have to go back. Not you and me. We could go straight on to the lake. Those two will never find the lake on their own and we’d never have to see them again.”
“My guess is, he fell in. What do you think, could he fall in?”
“Drowned, then?”
“And the body washed up who knows how far downstream. Too far for us to retrieve him. I didn’t think he’d do this to me.”
“In all fairness, Cap’n, we were going to eat him. You can’t really blame him.”
Then Rilf laughed, “Woo-Hah. You’ve got the right of it, Rad. I could almost admire that mouse.”
“So, are we going to go back to the burrow?” asked Rad. “I have to say, I could use some sleep. I’m pretty worn out.”
“We might just be going back to trouble,” said Rilf, not unhappily, and Fredle was almost sure that he heard the nasal voice moving away. “A bit of trouble always cheers me up,” Rilf said, his voice now faint.
After that, there was silence. It was not a complete silence, naturally. There was the rush of the stream and, with growing daylight, the voices of birds. Fredle waited on the root, resting. The sun came out and dried him and as he waited it also dried the dirt on the bank in front of him. He continued to wait, and rest.
If you will have only one chance, you want to make it the best it can be.
After a long time, Fredle reached out, cautiously, gently, to grab at the dirt with one front paw while digging the nails of the other into the top of the stone. With his two back paws still on the root, using all the strength in his haunches, he pushed himself off.
He scrabbled and clung, climbed over up onto the rock and stretched his front paws up, up, to the grassy edge of the bank. Then it was just a scramble up over the top until he could lie panting among the grass and overgrowth of the field. When he had caught his breath, he dug up a ramp, and then another, and ate them both.
By then the sun had thoroughly warmed the air and insects flew busily about. Fredle set off, following the fast-moving water, going downstream. He had no idea what waited for him next. The only idea he had was home.
15
Downstream
Fredle did not rush the journey. He knew better than to exhaust himself by trying to race over rough ground. As he traveled along the bank of the stream, stopping to eat ramps when he was hungry, to sleep in the best protection he could find when he was tired, he enjoyed all the scents of the field and stream, the calls of the birds and the humming of insects, the blue or gray of the sky, the green of the grass, and even the blackness of crows. At night, although he could not enjoy the screeching of raptors or the cries of their victims, he could see the stars and moons. The night a full moon shone in the sky, Fredle stayed still for a long time, watching, while the silvered stream whispered beside him. Had he been lucky? Or had he been brave? Or only clever? A little of all three, he decided, staring at the flat white circle whose light made darker shadows than the sun ever did. Fredle wondered if there really was only one moon—but how could it change itself? That would be as if Fredle could shrink from a whole mouse to, for example, half a mouse and then just a mouse tail, and then could grow back to being his entire self again and after that—strangest of all—diminish again.
But was that any more improbable than several different moons appearing only one at a time? Fredle watched and wondered.
Although it was the more dangerous time for a mouse out in the wild, Fredle preferred traveling by night, with the stars so beautiful overhead and the shadows all around so mysterious. He was the most anxious and afraid traveling by night, but also the most awake.
He trudged on and on. He grew tired of the taste of ramps, and of the bitter green watercress leaves, too. He wondered if there were other wild plants a mouse might eat, but didn’t want to risk trying what others hadn’t assured him was safe. Others were not always right and they were not always wrong; they didn’t always know what was true and they didn’t always tell the truth. But Fredle had come to prefer first listening to what others had to say and then deciding for himself. He would, he thought, be an easier mouse to get along with when he got back home.
One afternoon, he knew. He breathed in, and knew. He had been scrambling along the side of the stream, listening to the contented watery gurgling beside him, the sharp cries of crows, and then, unexpectedly, unquestioningly, he knew.
Home was off this way. He could hear nothing familiar, could see nothing familiar, but he knew. He turned in this direction, entering a field. These tall stalks were not grass. They were higher and narrower and not as green as grass. He didn’t know what they were, but they were the way home.
It was a good thing he was sure of his direction, because with the dense stalks waving over his head as well as slowing his progress, he had no way to see what lay ahead. The day wore on and Fredle was both thirsty and hungry, but he did not stop. There was, after all, nothing to drink and nothing to eat there in that field.
He came to its end and peered ahead, and recognized the dark gray mass of the barn up ahead. A wide, muddy patch of ground with fence poles along it lay between him and the barn, but that didn’t bother him because he knew now exactly where he was. He skirted the fence, sticking close to whatever cover he could find, dashing from post to post and then scurrying in close to the wall of what he knew must be the woodshed.
Now he could begin to worry about those barn cats, and he did. Ahead of him lay the wide, grassy distance between woodshed and garden that he would have to cross in order to make his way back to the garbage cans, and the way in. The barn cats patrolled that area. If he was lucky, they wouldn’t be patrolling it now. If he was unlucky …
Cautiously, Fredle rounded the corner by the open front of the woodshed. There he hesitated, trying to see in late-afternoon shadows if there were cats on the prowl. He saw nothing. He heard nothing from the woodshed mice. One of the roaring machines roared into the barn and then fell abruptly silent. Fredle knew from experience that at the approach of one of those machines all creatures, even the dogs, retreated to shelter. So he judged that it was safe—or at least safe enough—to make a move. He took two small steps out from the protection of the woodshed wall.
The voice came from above him. “Slowly, slowly—a smart little mousie it is. That it is.”
Fredle froze. He looked up.
The snake hung down from a ceiling beam, swaying in the shadows like the branch of one of the apple trees when a wind pulled at it. A tongue darted in and out of the snake’s mouth. Its golden eyes shone.
“Lucky little mousie, too.”
Fredle inched backward.
“Why lucky? Because I just finished eating. Maybe you knew my supper? Although I didn’t catch the name.” There was a hissing sound. Was that snake laughter? “I just caught the mousie.”
Fredle inched another two steps back toward the wall. He couldn’t look away from the glistening hooded eyes.
“Maybe,” the snake said, as if the idea had just struck it, “it’s just smart? If this little mousie had tried to run, I’d have had to catch it, and crush it. Any black rat snake knows that rule. If it runs, you catch it, you crush it, you eat it if you’re hungry. That’s our way.”
The snake swayed above and Fredle inched below. “Do you have instinct, too, little mousie?” the snake asked.
But Fredle had backed away out of sight and retreated around the corner of the woodshed. He stayed there, pressed up against the wall, until the shivers stopped running back and forth across his shoulders. He had a new respect for Neldo and Bardo. He didn’t think he could manag
e to live so close to that long, black, hissing thing.
After that, and giving the open front of the woodshed a wide berth, Fredle moved without thinking, moved fast so as to be out of sight before the cats emerged from wherever they had fled to when the roaring machine entered the barn. This time he didn’t look around to see whatever there was to be seen, and, hungry as he was, he didn’t even want to stop in the grass by the chicken pen to see if the woodshed mice had missed any kernels of corn. He would much rather be hungry and thirsty than crushed in the coils of a snake or trapped under the claws of a cat. It wasn’t until he had huddled up against the protection of a garden fence post that he allowed himself to think ahead, and even then he thought no farther ahead than his passage across the dirt road to the garbage cans.
He planned to be far away from those garbage cans and the compost before dark. It was unlikely that the raccoons would have returned from the lake, and its fish, so soon, but as Fredle had learned, unlikely was very different from sure and certain. For a mouse it was, anyway. So when he had rested enough to make another all-out run, Fredle just dashed off. He thought he could hear the dogs, barking, but not clearly enough to know what they were saying. He might have heard his name being called, but he wasn’t about to be diverted. He ran at top speed, using all the strength and energy he had left.
Behind the big green containers he stopped again, to rest, but as soon as he could he crept around them to get to the foundation and its protecting bushes. He felt a strong urge to go in the opposite direction, that way—to return to his lattice wall and the solitary nest behind it—but he resisted, making himself turn this way. He followed the foundation, scrambling over the roots of the bushes and through their thick, tangled branches, until he came to the remembered window, with its cracked frame. Without a second’s hesitation, he squeezed through and dropped down onto the dirt, where at last he could stop running.
Fredle was back inside.
16
In the Cellar
It was as he remembered it, a soft dirt floor and in the distance a faint glimmer of gray light. For a long time, Fredle sat where he was, glad to have made it, glad to feel the dry ground under him, glad to feel a ceiling even closer overhead than the ceiling over his territory under the porch, mostly just glad to have gotten safely back inside. After that long time, he began to make his way toward the light.
This was nothing like sun-filled daylight, or even the cold brightness of the moon. In fact, it was the dim kind of light he remembered from home. As he crossed the packed dirt, sometimes stumbling over a stone or a piece of wood, his eyes gradually grew accustomed and he saw that the brighter space ahead had the same shape as the windows in the foundation of the house.
Coming closer, he began to hear something. Voices, he thought, and maybe even mouse voices. But it couldn’t be, and especially it couldn’t be the voices of many mouselets, which was what it really sounded like. One of the first things a mouselet learned was to be silent, no matter what was making him unhappy, no matter how hungry or frightened or even excited he might feel. Any sound could attract the cat. These mouselet voices—and every now and then Fredle also heard an adult—were so abnormal it made him nervous. He tried to remember everything he had ever heard about the cellar mice.
They had to live on soap and string, he remembered, but that was all he knew. If they ate soap and string, they were probably as scrawny as any field mouse; probably he could escape easily from any one of them, although probably also he could fight his way free. He’d learned how to fight from watching the raccoons.
When he arrived at the window-shaped opening, which went through a thick stone-and-mortar wall just like the foundation, Fredle stopped, to get his bearings and to figure out what awaited him up ahead. He crept cautiously across the wall. The voices grew louder, clearer. They were not angry voices, and neither were they unhappy, and especially they weren’t fearful.
“My turn now!”
“Roar, roar, I’m the cat!”
“Me, chase me!”
“I’m getting ready to spring! Freeze, mouselet!”
“You can’t scare me, Mr. Cat.”
“It’s not her turn, it’s mine!”
When kitchen mouselets played, they played in whispers, but if they had played out loud it might have sounded like this.
Fredle crept farther forward. He leaned out into the empty air, to smell, to hear, and even to see whatever there was to be seen. Then, unable to see anything yet, he leaned farther out.
He just had time to smell something—food?—before he tumbled down, off the stone-and-mortar wall, and fell into empty air.
There was nothing to grab on to, but luckily he thumped to a stop almost immediately and lay there, the breath knocked out of him.
He had landed on something hard, and smooth, and round. When he landed on it, it shifted underneath him and, instinctively, still struggling for breath, still recovering from the shock of his fall, he dug every one of his sharp little nails into it.
It was soft inside, and it smelled … like food, smelled almost like ramps, smelled so good he couldn’t think of anything else and he certainly didn’t notice that all the voices had been stilled by the sound of his fall.
Then he did notice it and grew worried. He saw that wherever it was he had fallen had high walls circling up all around him. He was on top of a mound of these round things—onions! He recognized them now. All around him rose a dark, curved wall, much higher, and much, much wider, than the sides of the ice cream container had been. He would never be able to climb up and out, although he was going to have to try.
He heard faint, faint sounds, the sounds of mice moving quietly, not far away. After that, silence fell again.
Could he go down rather than up? Fredle wondered. Could he make his way through these piled-up onions without getting trapped among them?
And what were all these onions doing here, anyway? Probably it was something that had to do with the humans. After all, it was their cellar, so anything in it would be something they put there.
Fredle decided that he would try moving down to escape, since he couldn’t move up. He crawled over to the edge of the pile and discovered that the whatever-it-was was not made of thick, impenetrable plastic like the garbage containers, or of paper like the ice cream container, but of something between straw and wood, by the smell of it. If he had to, he knew, he could chew through wood or straw. However, before he tried eating his way out, he began to squeeze and squirm between the onions, moving toward the bottom of the pile. He wouldn’t want to take all the time and trouble of chewing through, only to find himself so high above any ground that he would have no other choice but to leap out into empty space, and hope.
He made his way down around one of the onions, and another, and another, until he could feel them piled high above him, heavy. He didn’t like to think about that, so he stopped himself from thinking about anything and squeezed himself down again, always staying close to the side of the whatever-it-was.
From below, a voice asked, “Mouse or foe?”
“Mouse,” Fredle answered without thinking, and then he realized that that was just the way a cat, or a snake, might try to trick you.
“I don’t know,” said the voice, sounding now a little closer, and definitely mouselike. “You don’t smell like mouse. You smell like onion.”
“I’m no onion,” Fredle said, and then he laughed. “Woo-Hah. What do you expect to smell, in all these onions? Apples?” But while he was laughing, he tried to position himself so that at least his front paws were free and his mouth was not blocked, so that if need be he could do some serious scratching and biting.
“Apples are in another basket,” said the voice, which hadn’t moved either closer or farther away. “Exit’s down this way. Follow my voice.”
What else could Fredle do? He crept toward the voice. It was very dark in among the onions—in the basket, he repeated to himself—and the spaces were tight, even for a mouse. He
dug his claws in deeply at every change in position, and the sweet, rich, sharp smell of onion rose around him. Pretty soon he decided that, whatever lay ahead, he would be better able to meet it on a full stomach, so he scraped away the thin outer skin of an onion and began to take bites out of the smooth, soft whiteness. It was juicy and sweet, delicious.
“What are you doing?” asked the voice. “I don’t hear you moving, are you all right?”
Fredle swallowed. “Eating,” he called back.
“Don’t bother. There’s always plenty to eat and we were in the middle of a game of Cat. Which you’ve interrupted.”
“Oh,” said Fredle. “Sorry.” The humor of his apology struck him. “Woo-Hah.”
“And stop with the weird noises. You’re scaring the mouselets,” said the voice.
Fredle could hear how close he was to the other mouse now, and how close to being free. He tasted a change in the air. The air he was breathing now tasted a little damp, not like outside, more like the air behind the refrigerator or the air around the back of the stove. He squeezed forward and found his nose at an opening. After the oniony darkness, the dim light ahead seemed almost bright. He stuck his head and shoulders through the opening and saw, standing right before him, a fat gray mouse.
“Come on out and introduce yourself. All clear, mouselets,” the mouse called, turning away from Fredle. “It’s a house mouse, just like us.”
Fredle hesitated.
“Not far now,” the mouse said. “This is the last leg. Are you up to it?” he asked Fredle. Then he called down again, “Back to your nests, all of you. That’s all the games for tonight. Tell your mothers we’ve got company.”
There was a muffled chattering and scurrying from below. Fredle didn’t move.
The mouse said, “This is a wooden shelf. You can see I’m standing on it. It’s perfectly safe.”
So Fredle crawled all the way out.
This mouse, despite his size, didn’t look strong. He looked well fed, not fierce. He sat back on his round haunches, giving Fredle time to have a good stare and having a good stare right back at Fredle.