Young Fredle - Louise Yates [22]
They were brown field mice and they were running toward the chicken pen, all together, from the direction opposite Fredle’s lookout behind the fence post. They had been waiting together for Missus to feed the chickens, just the way a family of house mice gathered behind the hole in the pantry door, waiting to go out into the nighttime kitchen. As Fredle watched them, a dark puddle of bad, jealous, sad feelings rose up inside him.
It was loneliness, the bad feeling. Loneliness was back and worse than ever, with the sight of this family of field mice foraging together. Fredle knew better than to try to go out and join them. They might be scrawny brown field mice but they were still mice. Mice don’t share and they don’t like strangers and they don’t like changes.
Slowly, Fredle returned to his own solitary nest, so unhappy that he didn’t even try to be careful to stay under cover or race across open spaces. Loneliness wrapped itself up close and cold around Fredle. What could he do but go to sleep?
When Fredle next awoke, it was night and he was thirsty. For a while, he waited behind his lattice wall, watching and listening for possible danger; then he scrambled through an opening down onto the dark, grassy ground. There, he forgot all about being thirsty, because sharp and bright in the black air those lights were shining again. What they might be, he didn’t know, but there they were, hanging in the air, motionless, twinkling. Beautiful.
Somehow, looking up at those brightnesses, Fredle felt less alone. Why should that be? he wondered. He knew perfectly well that he was still one small mouse, far from his family and his own nest, alone outside. He knew there was no other mouse nearby to warn him, to flee from danger beside him, to help him keep safe. Fredle knew all that, but he still felt the loneliness drawing back, until it was as distant as those brightnesses. He breathed in deeply and kept on looking up.
He looked and looked. He couldn’t stop looking. They were so strange and lovely, those white, sparkling brightnesses with blackness all around them. He wanted never to stop looking at them, as long as they were there in the air to be seen. He thought that, like loneliness, they were sometimes present and sometimes not.
That thought distracted him, and he stared into the closer darkness. A second ago he had felt happily alone but now he felt sadly alone. Loneliness, he thought, came and went, kept changing. Or maybe it was him that kept changing?
But mice didn’t change. They didn’t change territory and they didn’t change food and they didn’t change feelings. Mice stayed the same—same nests, same days asleep, and same nights foraging for the same food. Change made things different and that could be dangerous, so mice didn’t tolerate it. What was Fredle supposed to do about all this changing that was being forced on him?
He guessed that all he could do was enjoy the good things and endure the bad things. He guessed that was all any mouse could do. And since the brightnesses were very good things, Fredle stayed where he was, staring up into the dark air, where they glittered and glimmered.
7
Neldo
Fredle spent the next days and nights thinking, wondering, foraging in the compost, and sleeping. Sometimes the brightnesses appeared in the night sky and sometimes they did not. Sometimes a single, much larger brightness floated up among them. As night after night went by, he discovered that there were several of these larger things, in several curving shapes and sizes, even one so large and round and white that its light cast shadows like the sun in daylight.
One daytime he was awakened from a light sleep by a snuffling sound, close by, separated from him only by the thin lattice wall. He froze in his nest.
“I smell you.”
It was Sadie’s voice.
“I’m a good smeller. I’m the nanny and if there’s one of those lights moving around on the floor I’m the dancing dog. What are you?”
Fredle stayed