Young Fredle - Louise Yates [16]
Fredle didn’t move. Bardo didn’t move.
“I can smell you.”
The mice were silent.
Sadie said, “I can smell you,” in case she hadn’t been heard the first time. She waited some more, snuffled some more, and then asked, “Who’s there?” She waited and waited.
Fredle finally answered her, in a faint, whispery voice, as small as an ant’s, “Nobody.”
“Oh,” Sadie said, disappointed. “But I thought—” Then the snout was gone and the empty opening once again filled with light.
The two mice waited for a long time, silent, patient, the way mice do, making sure that all danger has passed. At last, Bardo broke the silence. “That was pretty stupid.”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“She’ll figure it out before long.”
“Then we’d better get going,” Fredle announced. This time, he led the way out through the lattice wall. Once outside, however, his confidence left him and he let Bardo re-take the lead.
Keeping close to whatever wall was there, the lattice first and then a solid green wall that turned two sharp corners, they came to another lattice, a duplicate of Fredle’s. “Those were steps back there,” Bardo told Fredle. “Humans use those steps for going into and out of the house, and so do the dogs. And the house cat does, too, sometimes. You never know when the house cat might show up.”
This lattice wall, like his own, had stalks of cut grass spread out in front of it. “Is this where you have your nest?” Fredle asked.
“What would our nest be good for here? No, our nest is way far away. You don’t know but it’s a dangerous trip I take to come find you. It’s dangerous everywhere out here so do me a favor and get moving, Fredle. Maybe inside things are different, but outside we don’t hang around out in the open.” Bardo hurried on ahead. “You have to know where the compost is if you don’t want to starve. Because I certainly don’t plan to spend the rest of my life bringing you food.”
Fredle ran after him.
When they arrived at the end of that second section of lattice wall, Bardo crouched up against a huge, high, green plastic container. “These hold trash,” he told Fredle. “There are two of them, impossible to chew through—although sometimes the raccoons knock them over, they know how to do that, they’re raccoons—and some food’s left for us. But garbage cans make good cover. Knowing where there’s good cover is important, outside.”
“Inside, too,” Fredle told him. Bardo might think that house mice had it easy, but Fredle knew better.
Bardo stared across more cut grass, ears cocked forward. “The barn cats, in daytime—” he said, but didn’t finish that thought. “Although daytime is safer than nighttime out here,” he advised Fredle, without taking his watchful gaze from what lay ahead. “Looks like rain,” he said mysteriously.
Fredle also looked around. The grass lay like a floor, green, drying to pale brown. In the distance before him a different kind of lattice wall rose up, shiny thin lines of wall with tall, thick posts every now and then along its length; Fredle could see right through this wall to brown soil where little green things stood in rows. The air hung heavy and gray above everything. There were no white streaks across it, there was no sun shining even though it wasn’t night, there was no blue ceiling. Bardo glanced up briefly and said, warningly, “Clouds covering the sky, and it smells like rain coming. Let’s get going.”
Sky, Fredle noted to himself. Clouds.
“Head for that fence, Fredle. This is the real dangerous part of the trip. Although, you’re so much bigger and fatter than I am, I’m not too worried. If one of the barn cats is out hunting, he’ll go for you.”
Before Fredle could take in what he was being told, Bardo had dashed off into the cut grass and was running away.
Fredle ran after him, across the grass and then over a wide strip of dirt—rough terrain, where he stumbled and scrambled down and then up over the rises—to more cut grass until finally they came to a halt, breathless, behind one of the posts.
“Cover,” panted Bardo. “There are