Young Fredle (2 page)

At night their shelf was quiet, but during the day the mice were sometimes disturbed by activity in the kitchen. Sounds were muffled by the walls but loud enough, with thumps and clatterings, with opening and closing of the pantry doors, and with various voices. Whenever he could, Fredle woke up and listened.

Three of the voices belonged to the humans: Mister and Missus, who spoke words, and the baby, who only wailed before falling abruptly silent. Sometimes two more sharp voices, which the mice knew belonged to dogs, barked.

“We’re right here! Me and Missus and the baby!” one dog would bark. “Hello, Mister! Hello, Angus!”

“You don’t have to step on me,” the Angus dog would bark.

At the same time, Missus would be saying, “Hello, lunch is on” or “How did the afternoon go?” and Mister would say, “Settle down, you two. Sit. Good dogs. How’s the baby been?” and “An angel,” Missus would say, or “A horror.”

“Everybody’s home!” the Sadie dog would bark.

“Missus is almost always home and the baby stays with her, so you don’t have to make such a big deal out of it,” the Angus dog would answer impatiently.

“Everybody’s home
today
. It’s never been today before,” Sadie would bark, but more quietly.

The humans and the dogs made noise when they were in the kitchen. The cat, on the other hand, made no sound at all, which was one reason it was so dangerous. The other reasons were its sharp claws and teeth, not to mention its skill at using those weapons to went mice. Moreover, although the humans and the dogs lived somewhere else at night, the cat wandered around in the darkness. As soon as he was old enough to crawl out of the nest, Fredle had been warned about the cat. His grandfather had told him how the cat never tired, never lost patience, could sit motionless for hours with only its long tail moving. The cat pounced, Grandfather said, and a mouse went. Axle said she wasn’t afraid of any old cat and she boasted that she would make fun of its long, fat tail and squished-in face, if it ever came her way. This made her parents anxious and Fredle’s father cross, while Fredle’s mother said she didn’t want to hear anything like that from any child of hers. But Fredle thought Axle might just do it and he wished he had been born brave like his cousin.

The night after her misadventure, when they gathered
together at the end of their shelf between the walls before going down to the kitchen, there was Axle, “as fat and sassy as ever,” Father grumbled. Fredle was smart enough to wait until everyone had scattered all over the kitchen before joining up with his cousin. She had left a chunk of her right ear behind in the trap. She told Fredle how it happened: “I thought I had the move down. In and out,
whip-whap
, I’ve done it lots before. That trap was
fast.
”

“You were faster,” Fredle pointed out.

Father, who had overheard all this, said, “Not fast enough. I hope you’ve learned your lesson, young Axle. You certainly paid dearly enough for it.”

“Who cares about an ear?” asked Fredle, who envied Axle’s battle scar.

“You’ll see,” Father promised, and went off to find Mother, who wanted him to stick close to her and the mouselets when she was foraging.

“There’s what’s left of a potato chunk over here,” Fredle offered. “If you want it.”

Axle did, and she bit right into it.

“Do you think humans like having us here to clean up the crumbs?” Fredle asked.

“Well, if it wasn’t for us, ants would be all over the kitchen, that’s for sure,” Axle said.

“But then, why have a cat? Why set traps?”

“You’re not asking me to figure out humans, are you, little cousin?”

“But why else would the dogs leave us those brown things to eat?”

“Nobody gives away food,” Axle told him. “Even I know that rule.”

“And why else—?”

“Sometimes I agree with your parents,” Axle said, finishing off the potato. “You ask too many questions and I’m tired of them. Go bother your grandfather.”

Grandfather and Fredle often lingered on the pantry floor after the others had scrambled up between the walls. They lingered to talk, and also because Grandfather had grown slow, and he didn’t want to hold the others back. Grandfather told Fredle everything he remembered about the long-ago days on the Old Davis Place. “The dogs are new. Not as new as the baby, but I remember when there were no dogs,” Grandfather said. “I remember when there were
two
cats, but no traps. Foraging was easier then, without traps.”

“Axle can snatch food from traps,” Fredle said.

“Your cousin wants to be different.”

Fredle knew that, and he admired it.

“It will lead her into trouble,” Grandfather warned. “Or worse.”

“What’s worse?” Fredle wondered.

“I just hope you won’t let it lead
you
,” Grandfather said. “But we’ve been talking here too long and your mother will be getting all het up. It’s time to get back up home, young Fredle.”

At their own nest, Mother
was
awake and worrying. “Where
were
you?”

“You knew we were in the pantry,” Grandfather told her as they climbed in over the rim.

“What if Fredle took it into his head to run back into the kitchen? Or followed that cousin of his off somewhere? He’s too curious and you can’t deny it.”

That, Fredle knew, was true. He asked questions and listened to the answers and remembered what he had been told. He enjoyed being curious.

“You know what humans say,” his mother said, “and I’ve heard them saying it with my own ears, especially Missus, and more than once.
Curiosity killed the cat
. Just think about that for one minute, Fredle. Think about what a terrible monster curiosity must be, if it can kill a cat. I don’t know about you, but it frightens me just to say the word.”

“Now, Mother,” Father said in his soothing voice. “You don’t have to worry about that right now. Everyone’s home safe, so we can sleep.”

Fredle was curious about curiosity, and he
did
wonder if mice weren’t right to be afraid of it. A couple of nights later, as they waited in the pantry to make the climb back up between the walls, he asked his grandfather, “Do I ask too many questions?”

“Not for me,” Grandfather said. “But you don’t want to be a bad example to Kidle.”

“How could I do that?” asked Fredle.

“By always asking questions. By following Axle around the way you do. By worrying your mother.”

“Mother worries about everything, not just me.”

Grandfather sighed. He knew.

“She even worries about what’s only old stories,” Fredle said. “About cellar mice, because they’re so rough and rude in the stories. She worries that they’re so big and strong, and what if they try to move up into the kitchen? Or attic mice, chewing on paper and cloth up in the cold—what if they start starving and come to take our food? She even worries about outside. Nobody’s ever seen outside, nobody even knows if it’s really true.”

“Does it matter if a story is true?” Grandfather asked.

“Yes!” cried Fredle. “It does! It’s hard to understand something if you can’t even tell if it’s false or true.”

“There’s only so much a mouse can hope to know, young Fredle,” Grandfather advised. “Live longer and you’ll learn that. If you’re a mouse, you have to accept the way things are.”

He was thinking about Grandmother, Fredle knew.

“We all warned her,” Grandfather said. “
Bacon
, we told her,
and cheese and peanut butter. That’s how humans bait their traps
. Those things might taste good but they lead straight to went. She couldn’t have foraged with one leg like that, ruined. We had to push her out, didn’t we?”

“What
is
went?” Fredle asked then. Went was the scariest
thing any mouse could do, and the scariest word any mouse spoke or heard, and he had no idea what it was.

Grandfather shook his head. “That’s something no mouse has ever known.” He sighed again and said, “Time to go on up home.”

But Fredle said, “Axle isn’t afraid of went. She says so.”

“Do I need to remind you that your cousin has only half of a right ear?” asked Grandfather, stern now. “Axle talks foolishness.”

Fredle disagreed. “Axle’s braver than anyone. Why do mice want all other mice to be so frightened? And all the time?”

“For safety,” Grandfather explained. “Without safety, a mouse doesn’t have anything. He might as well just run out into the kitchen and went right away and get it over with, because he’s bound to went very soon anyway, without safety.
Keep safe
is the number one rule. Your cousin seems to think that rules don’t apply to her.”

“Do all the rules apply to all the mice all the time?” Fredle wondered. After all, Axle
had
gotten better, despite the terrible wound to her ear. They hadn’t had to push
her
out.

“You’ll see, I promise you, you’ll see. When Axle has a nest of her own and a family of her own, she’ll stop all this running about, taking foolish risks, worrying everybody. She’ll settle down. So will you, young Fredle, and when that time comes—for which, I can tell you, we will all be very grateful—you two can still go out foraging together, just like you do now, and when you’re waiting with your own families by this very same hole for it to be safe to go out into the kitchen, you’ll
tell stories about all the wild and foolish things Axle did when she was too young to know better. Believe me, young Fredle,” Grandfather promised, “both of you will grow up and know better.”

And that is probably just what would have happened, had it not been for the Peppermint Pattie.

2
The Peppermint Pattie

It was Fredle who smelled it but it was Axle who led the way up to the highest pantry shelf. They had just emerged onto the pantry floor when Fredle lifted his nose and sniffed. “Smell that? What do you think it is?”

“Let’s find out,” Axle answered.

And so he followed her back through the pantry wall, keeping close as she climbed, up past the board their nests rested on, digging his nails deep into the soft, prickly insulation so as not to fall. High above the nests, they found an opening that led them through the wall again and out onto a high pantry shelf. There the smell was stronger. It was no surprise that at the very end, behind stacks of bowls and plates, hidden just as Fredle’s nest was hidden away, lay the source of the smell.

Fredle had never smelled anything like it before, but anything that smelled like that
had
to be good, better than anything else. It wasn’t bacon or cheese or peanut butter, he knew, and it was a thick, flat, round shape, so he was confident that it wasn’t a trap.

Axle started right in, chewing through the wrapping, but Fredle walked around it, curious about what it was, enjoying the heavy, sweet smell.

“You could help,” Axle complained.

“I found it, didn’t I? I’d say that’s pretty helpful.”

“
I
found it,” she corrected, spitting out a mouthful of wrapping. When it was just the two of them, foraging together, they didn’t bother about the wrapping rule. Mice were supposed to swallow the wrappings they had to chew through to get to food. As long as mice swallowed the wrappings, the humans wouldn’t suspect.