Freddy Goes to the North Pole (6 page)

At Mrs. Wiggins's request, Charles and Henrietta were allowed to join the party, although Ferdinand grumbled that he didn't see what they wanted to take a lot of poultry along for. But when the four mice who had been on the first trip to Florida came boldly forward and said they were going too, he burst into harsh laughter. “Mice!” he exclaimed. “Who ever heard of mice on an arctic expedition? What good could you do, I'd like to know? Could you fight a walrus or lick a polar bear? Listen to this, Bill. Look what wants to join the rescue party. Why, you can't hardly
see
'em!”

Now nothing makes a mouse madder than to be made fun of on account of his size, and when Eek and Quik and Eeny and Cousin Augustus heard the loud laughter of Bill and Ferdinand and the suppressed snickers of the other animals, they were wild with rage. “What could we do, eh?” shouted Eeny, and his voice was about as loud as the whistle on a peanut stand. “We'll
show
you what! You big black imitation of a stuffed mantelpiece ornament! Come on, boys! “And with that he and Eek made a rush for the crow, while Quik and Cousin Augustus dashed at Bill and, swarming up his legs before he could shake them off, ran up along his back and began chewing at his ears. Ferdinand tried to hold off the mice by jabbing at them with his beak, but they managed to keep behind him and dash in and nip his ankles whenever they saw an opening, until he cawed with pain. Meanwhile Bill was shaking his head and dancing and bucking frantically to get rid of the other two mice, but they just dug their sharp little teeth in deeper and hung on.

“Stop!” yelled Ferdinand. “Oh—ouch! Stop it, I say! I take it all back; you're worse'n lions and tigers. I'll let you go if you'll—ow
yow!
—if you'll only
quit!
”

So Eek and Eeny quit and sat down on the door-sill and didn't say anything at all, which was very sensible of them, because it is very silly, when you've won an argument, to keep on arguing. And the other two mice jumped off Bill's back and sat down beside them, and then Ferdinand made a speech. It was rather a good speech, but it was also rather too long, as most speeches are, so it is not set down here. He told the animals that he was going to be captain of the expedition, since he had had some arctic experience and knew what roads they would have to travel, and he said that any animal who wasn't willing to agree to take orders from him had better drop out right now at the start. He said that it was a long, hard, perilous trip they were starting on, as he knew personally, and that he expected every animal to do his duty. And when the speech was over, the mice climbed aboard Mrs. Wiggins, and Charles and Henrietta climbed aboard Uncle William, and Ferdinand perched on one of Bill's horns, and the party set out amid the prolonged cheering of the stay-at-homes.

For the first few days they travelled steadily northward through a pleasant farming country. The people here had become accustomed to seeing a great many animals on the roads and paid little attention to them. But as they got farther north, and the farms began to give way to woodland, the people were more curious about them, and they had one or two narrow escapes from being captured, so they did most of their travelling by night. They had a good deal of trouble with Cecil. Porcupines can't walk very fast, and Cecil was always lagging behind and making them wait for him. They tried having him ride on Uncle William's back, but they only tried it once, for his quills were as sharp as needles, and every time he moved, a dozen or so of them would stick into Uncle William. He was awfully sorry and apologetic about it, but, as Uncle William said, apologies make poor poultices. So after that Cecil walked again, and the others just had to put up with his slowness.

As they went on, the woods grew thicker and wilder, and the roads grew narrower and ruttier, and the houses fewer and farther between. By the end of the first week Ferdinand's wing was all right again, so that he could fly on ahead and spy out the land, and this enabled them to take a good many short cuts. One night they crossed the Saint Lawrence River by a long bridge, and then they were in Canada. They had some trouble crossing the bridge because customs men lie in wait at each end and make travellers pay a tax on certain articles. These articles that can't be brought into a country without paying are called dutiable. Of course the animals didn't have any luggage with them, but the Canadian customs man thought some of the animals themselves were dutiable, so he held them up. “Let's see,” he said. “Milk and feathers and beef and hides—I dunno but there's a duty on all of 'em.” And he took out a little book and licked his thumb and began looking through the pages to see if he could find out what the duty would be on Mrs. Wiggins and Charles and Henrietta. Things looked bad for a minute, but Ferdinand whispered in the goat's ear and then flew straight at the man and knocked the book out of his hand. The latter stooped to pick it up, and as he did so, Bill put his head down and charged at him. The goat's hard head with the strong curving horns hit the seat of the customs man's trousers with a smack and shot him into the ditch at the side of the road, and before he had even begun to pick himself up, the animals had galloped off into the night.

Soon after this the roads disappeared altogether and they plodded along through the deep forest. The woods animals were very kind to them and showed them paths and gave them directions how to avoid swamps and lakes. Sometimes a deer would guide them for a day or more over the forest trails, just for the sake of hearing a little gossip about what was going on in the outside world. Deer lead very secluded lives, and although they are curious, they are too timid ever to venture into the more cultivated regions where important things are going on. A quite small bit of gossip will last a deer for a month, and he'll tell it over and over to all his friends, and they hurry to tell it to their friends, until it is known all over the north country. But they are very honest animals and never gossip maliciously.

One afternoon the animals came out of the gloomy forest on to the shore of a shining lake. At their feet—which were hot and dusty, for they had walked fast and far—a beach of fine white sand sloped down into the cool water. With a whoop they dashed down and were soon splashing and shouting and playing the kind of tricks on each other that are lots of fun when you play them on someone else, but not so funny when they're played on you. Even the mice found a little pool between two stones, about half an inch deep, where Eeny, who had taken lessons in swimming from Freddy, showed them how to swim the breast stroke. But of course mice never make good swimmers.

Mrs. Wiggins wasn't a very good swimmer either. She had practised a good deal in the pond at home, and maybe she would have learned, but she was so clumsy in the water and looked so frightened that the other animals all laughed at her, and then she would begin to laugh at herself and would swallow water and choke and have to be towed ashore practically helpless. Today she was just paddling round when Bill decided that it would be fun to duck her. He climbed up on her back in the water, and down she went. When she came up, she looked so bewildered that they all went into fits of laughter, and Bill did it again. Then he did it again. Then Mrs. Wiggins waded ashore and sat down in the sand. “I like a joke as well as the next one,” she said, “but enough's enough.”

The late afternoon sun wasn't very hot and she felt a little chilly, so she decided to take a walk along the shore to get warm. When she got down to the end of the beach, she went round a point, and there on the other side was another little beach, and behind it a tumbledown house in a clearing. Corn was growing in the clearing, and Mrs. Wiggins was very fond of corn. There were no people in sight, and the house looked deserted, but “It's better to be safe than sorry,” said Mrs. Wiggins to herself, and so she crouched down and tried to sneak up through the underbrush as she had seen Jinx do when he was stalking a bird. She wasn't very good at it. She made an awful lot of noise, and she must have looked very funny. But it didn't matter, for there wasn't anyone to hear her; and pretty soon she was in among the corn and munching the ears with her big teeth.

When she had eaten a peck or two, she thought she'd explore a little. “Funny,” she said—she had a great habit of talking to herself when she was alone—“funny there's no one around. The house looks lived in. There's a wash-tub outside, and that ax can't have been there long—it isn't rusty. Folks must be away.” She walked round the house at some distance, then she walked round it a little closer, then she walked up to the kitchen window and looked in—and got the surprise of her life. For there was a little girl with a very dirty face sitting in the middle of the floor and crying. Her dress was ragged, and her tears had washed little white streaks through the grime on her cheeks, making her face look even dirtier than it was, which was almost impossible. But what surprised and horrified Mrs. Wiggins was to see that there was a long rope in the kitchen, and one end of it was around the little girl's waist, and the other was tied to a pipe under the kitchen sink.

“Good gracious sakes alive!” Mrs. Wiggins exclaimed (very strong language for a cow). “Who on
earth
has tied that poor child up like that? Perhaps an ogre has captured her and is fattening her up to eat.” For Mrs. Wiggins, though only a cow, knew about ogres. There were stories about them in Grimm's
Fairy-tales
, which was one of the nicest books in Freddy's library, and Freddy had often read them aloud to the animals during the long winter evenings in the warm cowbarn.

But it couldn't be that. The little girl was too thin. Anyway, the first thing to do was to rescue her. And so Mrs. Wiggins tapped gently on the glass with the tip of her left horn.

The little girl sobbed twice, gulped, sniffed, and looked up. Mrs. Wiggins was not handsome, and the window was so dirty and had so many cracks in it that from the inside of the room she looked like a funny picture of a cow that somebody had partly erased with a very smeary eraser; but her eyes were so big and brown and kind and sympathetic that the little girl wasn't afraid at all, and she jumped up and ran as close to the window as the rope would let her, which was about two feet, and said: “Hello, cow! What's your name? Have you come to take us away?”

Mrs. Wiggins nodded her head and then, without waiting to hear what the little girl was saying, went round to the kitchen door and put her head against it and gave it a big push, and the door fell in with a bang and Mrs. Wiggins walked over it into the kitchen. But when she got in, she found that she couldn't do anything. She took the rope in her teeth and pulled, but it wouldn't break, and she tried to break the pipe that it was tied to with her horns, but she couldn't get at it properly, and all the while the little girl was jumping up and down in her excitement, laughing and crying, and saying: “Oh, hurry, hurry! They'll be back pretty soon, and they won't let you take us away. Please hurry!”

“Well,” said Mrs. Wiggins to herself, “we're not getting anywhere this way. Not anywhere at
all!”
She thought a minute; then she went to the door and gave three long moos. This was the signal the animals had agreed on as a call for help. And, sure enough, in less than three minutes Jack and Bill and Uncle William and Charles and Henrietta came tearing across the clearing. The mice were on Bill's back, and Cecil was coming along behind as fast as he could. And Ferdinand was flying in circles overhead and acting as scout.

They all crowded into the kitchen, and while the other animals sat round and made sympathetic noises at the little girl, who was a little overpowered by seeing so many of them all at once, the mice got to work on the rope and in a few minutes had gnawed it apart. Then the little girl threw her arms around Mrs. Wiggins's neck and kissed her, which affected the cow so much that she cried. And then they went outside, where Ferdinand was on guard.

“There's a man and a woman coming across the lake in a boat,” said the crow. “The man's got a gun. We've got to get out of here
quick!
”

“We're not going without that child,” said Mrs. Wiggins stoutly. “She can't stay here, to be mistreated by those scoundrels. Tying her up like that! And you ought to see the bruises on her arms where they've struck her.”

“Well, go get her, then,” said Ferdinand irritably—for the little girl had stayed in the house—“Though what you want with her on a rescue party I don't know. She'll just be a hindrance.”

“We've just rescued
her,
” said Uncle William. “We can't leave her to be beaten and tied up and mistreated any more. I agree with Mrs. Wiggins.”

“Well, we can't rescue everybody in the north woods,” said the crow, “or we'll never find our friends. But have it your own way. Only hurry.”

So Mrs. Wiggins went into the house again. The little girl was not in the kitchen, but there were voices upstairs, and, listening, she heard a boy's voice say: “That's all foolishness. A cow couldn't come in the house and—” “But she did,” the little girl interrupted. “She brought some mice and they chewed the rope apart, and they're coming to get you loose too, and then we'll go into the woods with them and live on berries and nuts and never be tied up any more.”

“Good gracious me!” said Mrs. Wiggins to herself. “There's another of them! What ever will Ferdinand say to that! Well, it can't be helped. He's only a crow, anyway.” And she went through into the front hall and started up the stairs.

The stairs were very narrow, so that she almost got stuck where they turned going up, and they creaked and cracked ominously, but she climbed on and presently found herself in a room with a big bay window, and in it were the little girl and a boy a few years older, who was tied up with a long rope to the foot of the bed.

Mrs. Wiggins didn't waste time. She grabbed the rope with her teeth and pulled, and the bed—which was a very handsome old colonial piece, but rather rickety—fell apart with a clatter. The little girl wanted to hug her again, but all the animals downstairs were shouting: “Hurry! Hurry!” so she pushed them through the door and, as they hurried downstairs, started to follow them. Half-way down she stuck. She pushed and heaved and panted and grunted, but only succeeded in wedging herself more firmly between wall and banisters. All the other animals had left and run off into the woods with the children to hide from the man and woman, who had pulled their boat up on the beach and were coming towards the house. Only Ferdinand had remained behind, and he was hopping about at the foot of the stairs, almost wild with exasperation, and cawing angrily at her: “Shove, can't you? Oh, I might have known it! I might have known better than to bring a cow on this expedition! Darn you, why don't you shove?”