Young Fredle - Louise Yates [31]
“What’s a cellar?” asked Neldo.
As he studied the wood around the window, which struck him as a likely place for mouse-sized cracks to appear, Fredle told her about the way the inside of the house was built, one floor on top of the other, all of it resting on the cellar. “I’ve never actually been to the cellar.”
“Then how do you know it’s there?” asked Neldo.
“I don’t,” Fredle admitted. “But I think it is. Because the walls keep going on down,” he explained. “The walls don’t stop at the floor, inside.”
They found no cracks, no openings into inside. Fredle looked through the window but could see only darkness. As they came to the end of the wooden window frame, he asked, “Are there any more of these?”
“I don’t know.” Then Neldo said, “But, Fredle? I’ve been thinking. If you go back inside you won’t see me anymore.”
“That would be the plan,” Fredle told her, but right away he had second thoughts, because he did enjoy her company. “You know,” he said, “if I can get back in, then I can come out again, too.”
“Would you do that?” asked Neldo.
“Probably not.” Fredle hadn’t realized that. He asked Neldo, “Would you like to come inside with me?”
“Nunh-uh.” She was vehement. “I couldn’t live anywhere as dangerous as inside. Everybody says house mice have it easy but I don’t believe that.”
“Neldo,” he reminded her, “you live in the same woodshed as a snake.”
“But we know the snake. We know his habits, and besides, the snake only eats one mouse at a time. Never more than one. He’s not like the cats.”
“I guess no mouse has an easy life.” This was what Fredle was coming to understand, that no mouse has it easy, despite whatever other mice might think and say.
By then, the two mice had come up to another small, low window, equally dark, equally well-sealed-off as far as Fredle could see, and it was time to turn back, he knew, time to return to their own side of the house. He was looking forward to seeing those flowers again. He always looked forward to seeing the flowers. The stars, too; he always looked forward to seeing the stars floating in the dark night air, and he enjoyed watching the wandering moons as they came and went, their gleaming whiteness, their various shapes and sizes, each one different from the others. It wasn’t only Neldo he wouldn’t see again when he found a way to get back inside, he realized.
That night, as he sat looking up at the sky, contentedly alone and admiring, Fredle noticed a darkness—like a cloud but not at all like a cloud—in the air above him, a darkness closer than the stars and moons.
Without hesitation, as if he had been born and bred outside, Fredle ran, and—as if he had somehow made a mental note of this without even paying attention, like a genuine field mouse—he ran to the steps, not to his lattice wall. The steps were the nearest shelter.
A dark shape fell out of the air, wings spread wide, toward the spot where he had been standing until just two seconds ago. There was a rushing sound, like wind, and a short, irritated squawk, and then the darkness rose upward again.
Fredle watched it go off. He was just as frightened as he should have been, which was very frightened indeed. Maybe it was an owl, maybe a hawk, maybe an eagle. It could have been anything that hunted by night, but he knew that if he hadn’t been looking up at the stars, he’d never have seen it in time.
After that, he was careful to always occupy a different position for his skygazing. Raptors, he guessed, like mice, were creatures of habit. That bird must have seen him there more than once before it decided to attack. Fredle could have stopped going out into the night, but he wasn’t about to not look at the stars, and the moons. He understood now that once he found his way back inside, he’d never see them again.
Not many days after that, Bardo and Neldo and Fredle were all foraging together on the compost. Fredle was thinking that later, after a short rest, he would head off along the foundation in a new direction. Not knowing what he might find there, hoping that he might come upon a way in, gave him a bright