Young Fredle - Louise Yates [1]
CRACK!
The kitchen mice froze, and listened. After a few long seconds, they all dashed back to the small hole in one of the pantry doors, shoving and crowding one another to get to a place where the cat—alerted by the sound they all knew was a trap, closing—could not get at them. Only when he was safe on the pantry floor, behind the closed doors, did Fredle step aside and let the rest of the kitchen mice pass him by. He was waiting for Grandfather, who was old and slow. When Grandfather squeezed through the hole, the two of them climbed up between the walls together.
At their nest, the mice counted themselves—“Mother?” “Grandfather?” “Kortle?” “Kidle?” and on through all fifteen of them—and were breathing a collective sigh of relief when Uncle Dakle came peeping over the rim. “Is she here?” he asked. “Our Axle, is she with your Fredle?”
Went, they all thought, but nobody said it out loud. Right away they started to forget Axle. Fredle, although he knew it was against the rules, silently recalled everything he could about his cousin, the quick sound of her nails on the floorboards, the gleam of her white teeth when she yawned at one of Grandfather’s stories, the proud lift of her tail. “Why—” he started to ask, because now he was wondering why they had to forget, as if a went mouse had never lived with them, but he was silenced by an odd sound, and there was something he smelled.…
Everybody froze, as mice do when they are afraid, waiting motionless and, they hoped, invisible. Everybody listened. Was it a mouse sound they were hearing? It couldn’t be a cat, could it? Something was scratching lightly along the floorboards. Was that breathing? What could smell like that? What if the cat had found a way in between the walls?
“Fredle.”
The voice was just a thin sound in the darkness, like wood creaking.
“Fredle?”
“Axle!” He scrambled up onto the rim of the nest.
“Stay where you are, Fredle,” his mother said. “You don’t know—”
But Fredle was already gone. He landed softly on the wide board on which their nests rested.
“Axle,” Uncle Dakle asked. “Is that you?”
“Yes but I only want Fredle,” came Axle’s voice, still weak. “Go home and tell them I’m safe.”
When Fredle got to Axle, she was huddled behind one of the thick pieces of wood that rose up into the darkness overhead, backed up against the lath-and-plaster wall. As soon as he got close, he asked, “Is that blood? Is that what blood smells like?”
“Dumb question,” Axle said.
Without hesitating, as if he already knew what to do, Fredle started to lick at her wounded right ear. “What happened?” he asked.
“You and your questions,” she said. Her voice was still pitched low, almost breathless. “With all this blood, if they see me they’ll push me out to went.”
Fredle knew she was right. A mouse who was wounded or sick, or too old or too weak to forage, was pushed out onto the pantry floor during the day and left there, never seen again, went. Nobody knew if the humans did it or the cat did it or something else, something unimaginable. They only knew that that was the way of mice, the way that protected their nests from harm and kept the healthy ones safe. He had to lean close to hear Axle say, “I’m pretty sure this will heal.”
“Why are you still whispering?” he asked.
Axle didn’t answer. She had fainted.
Fredle