Young Fredle - Louise Yates [27]
“Yes, you do,” Neldo reminded him cheerfully. “You know you do, and I can show you where our nest is, too, and where the barn is, because you never want to go anywhere near the barn. Once the snake has eaten he stays full for a long time, but the barn cats never stop hunting even if they’re not hungry. So we’ll start off heading toward the barn.”
If Neldo wasn’t going to be a grump, he wouldn’t be one, either, Fredle decided. “The inside cat is like that, too,” he told her. “It just likes catching mice.”
Side by side they darted back across the grass and the rough dirt up to the shelter of one of the garden fence posts. There, they had to catch their breath and couldn’t speak for a long while. Then Neldo said, “I want to show you,” and they went along the garden fence heading away from the compost pile, until they came to the final post. “Look,” Neldo said.
Fredle saw the chickens in their pen, with their own little house, which, since he was colorblind to red, he saw as dark gray. “Why should I look at chickens?” he asked, to show Neldo that he knew chickens when he saw them.
She wasn’t a bit upset about that, or surprised. It was as if she thought he already knew everything. “No, look past the chicken pen.”
Fredle did as he was told and he saw a large mass in the distance, dark gray, the same color as the chickens’ house, but huge. This was probably the same dark mass that he saw when he went out to look at the night sky. “What is that?”
“A chicken pen,” Neldo told him, “but I said look beyond.”
“I am. There’s something big, big as the house—”
“Actually, it’s bigger.”
“With a little white wall on one side—”
“That’s our woodshed wall.”
“What is it?”
“That’s the barn. The cats like to lie in the sun in front of the barn.”
Fredle didn’t see anything that looked like a cat. “What’s a barn for?” he asked, studying the flat-faced building, bigger than the house and as dark as the clouds that carried rain.
“It’s where Snake the cat and Fox the cat live, and Mister keeps his tractor in there and his lawn mower and his chain saw, all the machines that cut things down or dig them up. The cows go in there at night, and in winter Mister and Missus keep the sheep behind it. Rats live in the barn, and there are families of mice, too, barn mice. They live on the oats and hay and other feed Mister keeps in there.”
“Field mice live in the barn? They live with cats and rats?”
“And the dogs in summer. In summer the dogs like to sleep in the barn.”
“Don’t field mice have any sense of survival?” Fredle asked. “Your family lives near a snake, they live near rats and cats. Why don’t field mice live in fields?”
“Live out in fields? In the wild?” Neldo shook her head. “That would be crazy. But I don’t know why you’re acting so superior. You house mice live with a cat, and traps, and it was eating something bad for you that almost got you went, eating something bad that you found inside, where you’re claiming it’s so much safer.”
“But we know when it’s safe inside, we know what’s safe—mostly. Most of us are safe most of the time.” It sounded like they were having a contest. Were he and Neldo competing to see who had the safest territory? Who cared? he wondered, and, What difference did it make?
Neldo apparently felt the same. “You’ve seen where we live, now, and the barn, so let’s go,” she said. “Didn’t you want to explore around the front of the house?”
By the time they had