Young Fredle - Louise Yates [2]
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Home was a wide nest behind the second shelf of the kitchen pantry. Home was made of scraps of soft cotton T-shirts and thick terry-cloth washcloths, woven through with long, cool strips of a silk blouse that, if they hadn’t been mice and colorblind to red, they would have known was a cheerful cranberry color, not the dark gray they saw. Their nest was big enough for the whole family, and so comfortable that as soon as you scrambled up over its rim at the end of a long night’s foraging, all you wanted to do was curl up and go to sleep. There were two such nests at a distance from one another along this shelf between the pantry wall and the dining room wall, and one or two more could be squeezed in, if necessary. Axle’s family had the first one. The nest at the far end, the nest that was wider and softer and safer, tucked way back into a corner, belonged to Fredle’s family.
At night their shelf was quiet, but during the day the mice were sometimes disturbed by activity in the kitchen. Sounds were muffled by the walls but loud enough, with thumps and clatterings, with opening and closing of the pantry doors, and with various voices. Whenever he could, Fredle woke up and listened.
Three of the voices belonged to the humans: Mister and Missus, who spoke words, and the baby, who only wailed before falling abruptly silent. Sometimes two more sharp voices, which the mice knew belonged to dogs, barked.
“We’re right here! Me and Missus and the baby!” one dog would bark. “Hello, Mister! Hello, Angus!”
“You don’t have to step on me,” the Angus dog would bark.
At the same time, Missus would be saying, “Hello, lunch is on” or “How did the afternoon go?” and Mister would say, “Settle down, you two. Sit. Good dogs. How’s the baby been?” and “An angel,” Missus would say, or “A horror.”
“Everybody’s home!” the Sadie dog would bark.
“Missus is almost always home and the baby stays with her, so you don’t have to make such a big deal out of it,” the Angus dog would answer impatiently.
“Everybody’s home today. It’s never been today before,” Sadie would bark, but more quietly.
The humans and the dogs made noise when they were in the kitchen. The cat, on the other hand, made no sound at all, which was one reason it was so dangerous. The other reasons were its sharp claws and teeth, not to mention its skill at using those weapons to went mice. Moreover, although the humans and the dogs lived somewhere else at night, the cat wandered around in the darkness. As soon as he was old enough to crawl out of the nest, Fredle had been warned about the cat. His grandfather had told him how the cat never tired, never lost patience, could sit motionless for hours with only its long tail moving. The cat pounced, Grandfather said, and a mouse went. Axle said she wasn’t afraid of any old cat and she boasted that she would make fun of its long, fat tail and squished-in face, if it ever came her way. This made her parents anxious and Fredle’s father cross, while Fredle’s mother said she didn’t want to hear anything like that from any child of hers. But Fredle thought Axle might just do it and he wished he had been born brave like his cousin.
The night after her misadventure, when they gathered together at the end of their shelf between the walls before going down to the kitchen, there was Axle, “as fat and sassy as ever,” Father grumbled. Fredle was smart enough to wait until everyone had scattered all over the kitchen before joining up with his cousin. She had left a chunk of her right ear behind in the trap. She told Fredle how it happened: “I thought I had the move down. In and out, whip-whap, I’ve done it lots before. That trap was fast.”
“You were faster,” Fredle pointed out.
Father, who had overheard all this, said, “Not fast enough. I hope you’ve learned your lesson, young Axle. You certainly paid dearly enough for it.”
“Who cares about an ear?” asked Fredle, who envied Axle’s battle scar.
“You’ll see,”