Young Fredle - Louise Yates [30]
“Yes I do,” Sadie protested. “Just not when you’re wrong.” She turned back to Fredle. “What is your name, or don’t mice have names?”
“We do,” Fredle told her, adding, “Fredle.”
“Hello, Fredle,” Sadie said. “Do you want to play? You can run and we can all hunt you.”
“Not in Missus’s flowers,” Angus warned Sadie. “You know the rules, not in the flowers.”
Fredle was going to have to explain things to this Sadie dog, who didn’t seem to know who was who in the food chain. “You’re too big for me to play with. It wouldn’t be fun for either one of us.” Fredle was thinking that it especially wouldn’t be any fun for him, trying to survive hunting games with giants, and one of them a cat.
“Oh.” Sadie was disappointed, but she accepted his decision. She lowered her head to the ground, her black nose pointing toward him. “I guess so. We have a baby.”
“I know,” he said. “Can I go now?”
“If you have to,” Sadie said.
Fredle looked at Patches. The yellow eyes stared back at him.
Fredle waited.
“Oh, all right,” Patches said.
“You wouldn’t eat one of my other friends, would you, Patches?” Sadie was asking the cat as Fredle broke into a full scurry. He tucked himself into the corner where the steps met the foundation stones, and huddled there, shivering.
After a while, he heard the dogs go away. After another while, he heard the sound of the cat padding back up the steps. Only then did Neldo creep out from among the flowers to join him in his corner. For a long time, all they could do was look at one another, amazed that they were both alive.
Finally Neldo asked, “How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Get away from the cat.”
“I didn’t. You heard what happened, you saw. Sadie saved me.”
“She knows who you are. How did you get to know a dog? I wondered why you didn’t run, the way mice are supposed to, but that explains it. I guess things really are different inside.”
“You ran away,” Fredle remembered now. “You didn’t even warn me.”
“That’s what mice are supposed to do, run. First you run and then—if you make it—you hide. What’s to talk about?”
“I didn’t say talk, I said warn. You didn’t even poke me.”
“It wouldn’t have done any good,” Neldo told him. She didn’t sound a bit sorry. “You were frozen there, not moving a whisker, like a went mouse. I’d just have been eaten, too.”
Fredle had been thinking, while his shivering slowed down to the occasional shudder. “I was lucky.”
“Well,” said Neldo, “you seem to be a pretty lucky mouse in general. The dog saves you from the cat. Missus carries you outside when your family tries to went you. If that’s not luck, what is it?”
Fredle couldn’t disagree, but he still minded the way Neldo had just bolted off, without even giving him a warning nudge, so he kept up the quarrel. “Didn’t I just say that?”
9
Helping Sadie
Over the next days, Fredle explored the front of the house, and then he went to the side beyond that, which had neither porch nor steps nor flowers, although there were green bushes growing close to the foundation where a mouse could hide. Often Neldo was with him, and then he learned about trees, and the long-haired, mouselike creatures called squirrels, who ran up and down the trunks, faster than anything Fredle had ever seen. Just as often, however, he went on his own. Alone or in Neldo’s company, he took time to admire the flowers. Going along the foundation one day, the two mice came to something new and different, something not stones and mortar, and not wood, either, although the glass center had wood all around it.
“It’s a window.” Neldo anticipated his next question. “I don’t know what they’re for or what this smooth part is. Windows are something humans have.”
“It’s glass,” Fredle told her.
“Glass?”
“It’s hard and you can see through it. Mister and Missus could see the grass through these windows. They could go down into the cellar and look at the grass,” Fredle said, “and the trees, too.” If he’d been a human, he’d have put a window where he could see the flowers through