Young Fredle - Louise Yates [10]
With an empty stomach, too, Fredle realized. But he had no idea where to find food. He could eat those stalks, he knew, but somehow, now, they didn’t appeal to him, not the way they had before. They were a kind of food that only tasted right when you were sick, he thought, and then he wondered, Would food that tasted good when you felt bad automatically taste bad when you felt good again?
As he wondered about these things, Fredle was walking along behind the white wall, his nose to the ground, foraging. He foraged without finding anything until his way was blocked by another wall, also made of wood, but without any holes in it. So he turned around and foraged back the way he had come.
He came to the place where he had slept, just a shallow hollow place. He foraged on past it, still following the white wall.
Nothing and nothing and nothing to eat. There was only the soft floor. He knew that he was going to have to go beyond the white wall again, because now he was getting thirsty, too. At least the bright light had left the air. Fredle felt more comfortable coming out from behind the protection of his wall into darkness, where he could see perfectly well but not himself be easily seen, if there was anything out there to see him.
Was anything alive out there? Fredle hesitated behind his wall, growing more and more frightened. Was there anything waiting out there to went him? A cat, or, worse than a cat? What could it be that was worse than a cat? Then Fredle thought of a new worry. Was there anything to eat out there, and if there was, how would he ever find it? Axle, he knew—and it made him jealous—would just scramble up through one of the holes in the white wall and find out.
Up he scrambled.
On his feet, outside, he hid in among the tall stalks, and listened. The dim air was filled with sounds, none of which he recognized. Moreover, the air outside had changed color and in the distance it now looked a dark gray-blue. What had happened to all that light? But he didn’t smell any food and he couldn’t tell if the sounds he was hearing—voices? movement? whisperings?—were close or far away.
Fredle felt outside stretching off in front of him. The empty vastness of it made him want to turn and scramble back into his—What was it? You couldn’t call it a nest. A nest was lined with soft cloths, it was warm; many mice lived together in a nest. What Fredle had was nothing more than a cradle, but it was still the safest place he knew, and part of him wanted to run back to it.
Except he was so hungry. Fredle gave up and chewed away at one of the stalks, and then he ate another, until his stomach felt full enough. It didn’t feel really full, but he was no longer thirsty and he needed to get back behind the wall, to be out of the dangerous outside with all of its strange sounds and all of its emptiness.
Huddled back next to the white wall in the shallow little place that at least smelled familiar, at least smelled like him, Fredle wished that Axle had been pushed out with him, and then he wished that he had gone off with her—wherever it was she had gone off to—and then he wished that they had never found that good thing, because that was the beginning of all this badness. Fredle wished and wished and wished, but all the wishing didn’t make any difference.
In fact, the wishing made him feel hopeless and hungry and sad, and those feelings mixed in together to make a feeling so bad that he didn’t want to be having it. So he went to sleep, even though it wasn’t his usual time. He curled up, closed his eyes, and marched himself off, as if sleep were an actual place, like home, like the kitchen—a place a mouse could go to.
4
The Unknown and the Unexpected
For the second time, Fredle was woken up by noise from beyond his white wall, and when he looked out one of the holes he could see that it was daytime again. The air was so bright that Fredle had to blink away tears, to see.
The dark shapes he saw moving against the light made barking sounds, so he could recognize them as the dogs, Angus and Sadie. He hadn’t known that