When Fredle had settled himself safely behind the metal mass of stove, Sadie lay down close beside it and Patches went back to wherever cats go. From the narrow space behind the stove Fredle could see Sadie’s brown-and-white fur, and he could also see flowers in a glass on the table, tall yellow flowers among their green leaves. He knew he should go back to the nest, but he didn’t want to stop seeing colors, not yet. Soon enough he would be back in the dim gray light.
From outside, Angus barked. “Sadie? Sadie, can you hear me? They took the baby.”
“I’m in the kitchen!”
“They took the baby in the car.”
“I’m waiting inside!” barked Sadie.
Fredle tried to think of something to cheer Sadie up. “Maybe they’ll get another baby and you can have the job of taking care of that one.”
“But I already have this one. I can’t take care of two.”
“But they took this one away,” Fredle reminded her. Sadie really was forgetful.
“But they’re going to bring her back. After the vet fixes her.”
“The baby’s sick, Sadie. Sick things don’t come back. They get pushed out to went.”
“When my leg was broken, the vet fixed it. That’s the vet’s job, to make you better, and when that’s done you come home.”
This sounded unhappily like the moonbits story to Fredle, but Sadie seemed confident of her information. “Then why are you worried?” he asked.
“At night, we all go to sleep until morning,” Sadie explained. “But now it’s night and Angus is outside and I’m alone inside. You’re inside, too,” she added in case Fredle had forgotten that, reminding him, “You used to be outside.”
“I did,” he agreed. He tried one last time to get Sadie ready. “What makes you so sure they won’t push the baby out?”
“Why would they do that? That would scare her, and she’d cry. She doesn’t like to be alone,” Sadie told him.
Fredle gave up. Poor Sadie would find out the truth, soon enough. He just waited with her, the dog stretched out on the floor beside the stove behind which the mouse sat, waiting. Every now and then Sadie sighed, and shifted her nose from one paw to the other. They didn’t talk, they just waited.
Fredle did wonder why he cared about what happened to Sadie. Then he remembered that the bravest thing he had ever done had to do with Sadie and her baby. The good feeling that memory gave him made him feel connected to Sadie and made him want to be there to comfort her when Mister and Missus came back home without the baby and she realized that Fredle had been right.
After a long, long time, Angus barked again, even more loudly. “Hello! Hello!”
Sadie jumped up and ran to the door, also barking, “Hello! I’m in the kitchen! I came downstairs, I’m sorry!”
Fredle crept as close as he dared to the stove’s edge.
Heavy footsteps sounded from outside and the door opened. Fredle didn’t dare stick his head out to see. He couldn’t be sure where Patches was and he knew that without Sadie next to him, he wasn’t safe from Patches, inside. So he listened as hard as he could, to find out.
“You should have obeyed. Mister called you and you didn’t obey. They wanted us to be outside and they were already worried. You have to obey better, Sadie.”
“I know. I was sorry right away. But Fredle was here.”
“Fredle? Never mind that, I’m telling you something important.”
“Good boy, Angus,” Mister said. “Hello, Sadie, you’re a good dog, too. You OK, honey?”
“Fine,” Missus said, in a tired voice.
Poor Sadie, Fredle thought. Nobody was saying anything about any baby and he knew what that meant. Angus wasn’t being very sympathetic, either.
Missus said, “Turn off the lights, will you? We don’t want to wake the baby.” Suddenly the light disappeared and the colors disappeared with it. Once again the kitchen was in shadowy darkness. This gray world, which had once been the only world he knew, now made Fredle sad, maybe because now he knew what he wasn’t seeing.
“I’m worn out, aren’t you?” Mister asked. “What a night.”
“Exhausted,” Missus agreed.
Behind his sadness, an idea was barking at Fredle, trying to get his attention. It barked and barked until at last he listened to what it wanted to tell him: You can’t wake up a baby that has been pushed out and left to went. You can’t wake up something that isn’t alive and asleep.
Fredle was shocked. He was shocked and surprised and then he was so excited he thought he might bark, himself. The baby had been fixed and brought back home. Sadie had been right. Everything was all right, after all.
Without waiting any longer, he ran back to the mousehole behind the stove, and from there he climbed back up to his nest, his mind awhirl with a jumble of new ideas. The baby had been sick and the humans had kept it with them. They would keep it until it got better, whenever it was sick. Sadie had had a broken leg, like his grandmother, and a vet—whatever that was, it must be a human who fixed broken things—had fixed it for her. That was the way humans did things. Fredle didn’t know what to think.
But when Fredle woke up the next evening, he knew just exactly what he thought. He thought: Mice don’t know everything. He thought: Some of the rules are wrong. OK, maybe not wrong so much as unnecessary. Not all the rules, and maybe not wrong for all mice, but definitely wrong for some. That cheered him up. Another cheering thought was other creatures had some good ideas, and he already knew some of them.
Fredle needed cheering up because he was beginning to understand that with this living in light that was always gray and dim, with there being almost no color all around him all the time, and no stars, either, with rules that told you how you had to act even if you wanted to act differently, and with living among mice who were always so frightened and cautious that if you even said a mouse could act differently they would push you out—with all of these things … What about with all these things? he asked himself, but without any curiosity. He didn’t want to know the answer to that question. These were uncomfortable and unhappy thoughts he was having. They made Fredle wish he didn’t have to be a kitchen mouse, and what could he do about that?
What could he do, anyway, about anything? he wondered, but again without curiosity, since he already knew the answer, which was: Nothing. What could any mouse do? he asked himself hopelessly.
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 c
ertainly 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.
Cynthia Voigt, Young Fredle
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