Young Fredle - Louise Yates [18]
Bardo pointed with his nose to a place farther up the compost. “Look, over there? See it? There’s an orange peel. You should go get it.”
Fredle went off, and climbed up through the soft dirt to nose out a stiff piece of orange peel and pull it after him back to where he had left Bardo chewing on the apple.
But Bardo was no longer there.
6
Alone
It took a while for Fredle to figure it out—and then he knew: Bardo had run off. Run off where Fredle didn’t know, but run off why he was afraid he could guess. What if Bardo’s go-between job was really a keep-away job? Or even a push-out job? When he understood that Bardo had intended to abandon him there on the compost pile, Fredle could only feel the not-all-rightness of everything.
He hunched down just where he was, on the compost pile, in broad daylight, unable to move his feet. Where did he have to go to, anyway, if he could find his feet and make them run somewhere? He didn’t even want to eat, although he could smell how good that orange peel would taste. It was eating that had gotten him where he was, out here in the open, lost, alone, afraid. It was wanting to eat something because it smelled so good, and also following another mouse’s tail, that’s what had done it to him. He’d followed Axle and he’d followed Bardo, and look where that had got him. He wished … He wished he’d never gone looking for that good thing on the pantry shelf. He wished … He wished he could go back to before he smelled it, back to when everything was comfortable and familiar and safe, and he wasn’t alone and sick at heart.
How long he huddled unhappily there on the compost, Fredle didn’t know or care. He crouched on the moist, dark brown hill, the chunk of orange peel uneaten between his front paws. He kept his eyes tightly closed and his ears flat against his skull, then he let his ears perk up and opened his eyes, so that he first heard and then saw all the space around him, stretching out beside him over the garden, stretching out before him into that broad expanse of cut grass until the house ended it.
There was no place to hide in cut grass.
Fredle thought maybe he should dig himself a little hole in the compost, which was soft enough for a nest. If he had a nest here, the compost would be his territory and he would never have to go out alone into those empty spaces in search of food.
But Bardo said that the raccoons came foraging in the compost at night. Bardo said no mouse in his right mind went anywhere near a raccoon. On the other hand, if Fredle dug himself a little nest in the compost, and if he made it deep enough to hide himself in, and if some other mice came to forage, Fredle could sneak after them to discover where their nest was, and he might then be able to make himself another little nest near to them and at least be close to company. Even if he would still be absolutely alone.
Really, what he needed was to find a way back into the house. If he could just get back inside … As he imagined the journey across the kitchen floor and up through the wall, then the surprise of his father and mother, Grandfather, and especially Kidle when he crept over the rim of their nest, Fredle found himself chewing on the orange rind. With food in his stomach, he found his thoughts becoming quieter, more useful, and he decided that the compost pile would not be a good place to live. It was too far from the house and too exposed to predators. It was surrounded by open spaces.
As soon as he thought of those spaces, Fredle could feel fear begin to swell up inside of him again, starting in his belly and growing bigger and darker and—
So he made himself think about other things. About what he would ask Bardo, if he ever saw that mouse again. If Bardo ever came back, Fredle wouldn’t ask what that mouse had been thinking of, leaving Fredle on the compost pile like that. Instead, he’d ask if there was any way into the house. He’d ask if any other mice lived nearby, and where they were. He would