Young Fredle - Louise Yates [38]
He didn’t know how long he had to live, either, and about that he had no way to even guess. All he could do was wait, and so he did.
Finally the container stopped moving. It dropped down onto the ground, and then Fredle could look up. When he did, he saw a large, hairy face with a short, pointed snout and bright little black eyes gleaming out of a wide black stripe.
The head was so big that he couldn’t see its ears. He could see the whiteness of teeth, as the mouth opened. “Whazzis?” it asked in the nasal voice Fredle had heard earlier. The eyes stared down at Fredle. “C’mere, Rad. C’mere and look what I’ve caught.”
That face withdrew and another, identical to the first, took its place. “Tell me it’s not a mouse,” a different voice said. “You caught us a mouse, Cap’n. Rimble, you ever seen a mouse close to? You wanna take a look? You ever tasted fresh mouse?”
What was probably a third face appeared, although it could have been either of the first two. Fredle couldn’t tell them apart. “Good work, Cap’n,” it said.
“That’s why I’m the boss,” said the first voice, Cap’n.
“Pity I’m not hungry,” said the second, Rad.
“I’m hungry,” said a fourth, and was immediately answered by the others: “Doesn’t count, Rec.” “You’re always hungry, Woo-Hah.”
Even if he couldn’t see them, Fredle could hear them, but he couldn’t have spoken, even if they had asked him to. He had forgotten every word he ever knew.
“So you all say, but what I say is, you never know where your next meal is coming from,” Rec answered.
“How long’s it been since we got ice cream?” asked the third voice, Rimble’s, Fredle guessed. “And now we’ve got ice cream plus a mouse. I’ve said it before and I say it again, there’s nobody like the Cap’n. Here’s to Cap’n Rilf, hurrah!” he said. “Smartest raccoon on both sides of the mountain!”
At least, Fredle thought, he’d been right about them being raccoons.
“The mouse is just luck,” Rilf admitted.
“I hate not to be hungry when there’s mouse on the menu,” Rad said. “And a house mouse, by the size of him.”
“We all know that after this they’ll be extra careful about the tops on the garbage cans for a while,” Rec observed, “so we better fill ourselves up while we can. The garden’s just being planted, the dogs are outside more, and finding food’s not going to get any easier.”
“Yeah, but we’ll be heading off to the lake, now it’s getting warm again, right, Cap’n?” asked Rad. “It’s not long now and there’s plenty to eat there. Remember fish?”
“I haven’t noticed that it’s ever easy finding food,” Rimble pointed out. “Here or there, it’s hard work.”
“This mouse is mine,” Rilf announced.
“If you say so,” they answered reluctantly.
“It’s mine and we don’t eat it until I say so. Got it?”
“Yessir, Cap’n,” they answered, and one of them knocked the container over on its side, then picked it up from the bottom, and Fredle tumbled out into the raccoon-filled night.
Crouching as close as he could get to the ground—as if that would make him less visible—Fredle looked up at four hairy faces, each one with a black band around two bright black eyes. Four narrow snouts pointed down at him, four mouths and four sets of sharp, gleaming teeth.
Fear returned, as strong as before. Fredle huddled on the ground, shivering with terror and wet with ice cream.
The mouths all came at him at the same time. They opened wide, four bright white tooth-filled circles. Then four tongues came out to lick at Fredle, licking all over him, his head and back, stomach, paws. They knocked him around with their big, rough tongues, and rolled him over. They didn’t say a word until they had licked him clean. Then one of them picked up the container in his paws and stuck his nose into that for a little while, before passing it on to the raccoon next to him and turning his attention back to Fredle.
They were big, these raccoons. Not as big as the dogs, but to Fredle they looked huge, and he knew that compared to him, they were huge.
“I’m Rilf,” said the raccoon who had just passed the ice cream carton along. “It’s Captain Rilf to you, mouse.”
The others