Young Fredle - Louise Yates [17]
Once he’d caught his breath, Fredle asked, “Is that compost behind the fence?”
Bardo shook his head. “It’s the garden. You know, vegetables?” He didn’t even give Fredle a chance to say Of course I know vegetables before he went on, “Beans, peppers, tomatoes, lettuces—sometimes if you dig you find a potato. Potatoes are the best. Or carrots, carrots are good, too, you have to dig for carrots, too. Missus comes here, in the daytime, and so do the barn cats, sometimes, so it’s not good for foraging.”
Then how did Bardo know so much about it? Fredle wondered, but what he asked was, “What about at night?” He asked that even though he wasn’t sure he’d dare to make the long journey at night, if there would be owls coming out of the air at him as well as ground-level hunters.
“Raccoons,” Bardo answered. His voice grew serious and his feet shifted uneasily, as if just saying that word made him anxious. “No mouse in his right mind gets close to a raccoon. They’re wild, unpredictable. Dangerous, the way—You never know what they might do, they might do anything. Keep clear of raccoons, Fredle.”
“Where’s your nest?” Fredle asked. “Here in the garden?”
“Ha-ha. No, we’re woodshed mice. Over that way,” Bardo said, without indicating which way he was speaking of. “Past the chicken pen. There’s a snake—Snakes live on mice, look out for snakes, Fredle. They’re all over that woodshed. You have to know their habits to keep safe from them.”
“What are chickens?” asked Fredle.
“Chickens are nothing to do with you. Compost is to do with you. That’s if you’re still hungry?”
“Then what’s compost?” Fredle asked.
Bardo didn’t answer. He just turned to scurry along beside the fence, running from the cover of one post after the other, until the fence came to a wide hill that smelled of rotting things and turned off in another direction. Bardo stopped at that corner and announced, “This is compost.”
It was brown like dirt, but it wasn’t really dirt, and there were green and white and dark gray and orange things scattered around all through it. Compost smelled like food. A black animal—not a mouse, or a cat, or a dog, or a human—was hopping up the side of the compost on two thin legs, poking into it with a sharp snout and saying something in a loud, ugly voice.
“That’s a crow,” Bardo said. “Remember I told you I’d show you a crow? It’s a bird. See the feathers?”
Fredle had no idea if he was seeing feathers or not.
“Watch, I’ll show you fly.”
Bardo screeched, a high, sharp sound as if his back had just been pierced by a cat’s claws. The crow grew wider and wider as it spread out two fat flat arms, and then it jumped up into the air and stayed there, stayed up in the air with no ground under its feet. Moving its arms it went up into the air, higher and higher, and then it was out of sight.
“Flying is what birds do instead of running,” Bardo told Fredle.
“Oh,” said Fredle. “Oh.” He’d never even imagined anything like this.
“Pay attention to the compost, Fredle,” Bardo said now. “Compost is what’s important here.”
“Do we eat it?” asked Fredle, too amazed by the sight of that bird, that crow, to be irritated by Bardo’s bossiness.
“Not exactly,” Bardo laughed. “We forage in it. There’s always something here, like, an apple peel or core.” Bardo stuck his nose into the dirt and pulled out a dark gray, sweet-smelling thing. “Apple peel. Go ahead, take a bite. Just one, and not a big one.”
Fredle did. He’d never tasted this before, and it was a little chewy, but it was certainly food. It had a quiet sweetness, too, and he hoped Bardo would offer him another bite.
“Or banana peels or lettuce or—almost anything,” Bardo told him. “If you come foraging every day, you’ll find all kinds of different things to eat. And now that the weather’s getting warm, they’ll feed the dogs outside, right by your lattice, so you’ll get some kibbles, too, because those dogs are messy eaters.”
Fredle was tired of Bardo being the one who knew things, so he didn’t ask about kibbles. Besides, he thought he could guess