Young Fredle - Louise Yates [4]
“We all warned her,” Grandfather said. “Bacon, we told her, and cheese and peanut butter. That’s how humans bait their traps. Those things might taste good but they lead straight to went. She couldn’t have foraged with one leg like that, ruined. We had to push her out, didn’t we?”
“What is went?” Fredle asked then. Went was the scariest thing any mouse could do, and the scariest word any mouse spoke or heard, and he had no idea what it was.
Grandfather shook his head. “That’s something no mouse has ever known.” He sighed again and said, “Time to go on up home.”
But Fredle said, “Axle isn’t afraid of went. She says so.”
“Do I need to remind you that your cousin has only half of a right ear?” asked Grandfather, stern now. “Axle talks foolishness.”
Fredle disagreed. “Axle’s braver than anyone. Why do mice want all other mice to be so frightened? And all the time?”
“For safety,” Grandfather explained. “Without safety, a mouse doesn’t have anything. He might as well just run out into the kitchen and went right away and get it over with, because he’s bound to went very soon anyway, without safety. Keep safe is the number one rule. Your cousin seems to think that rules don’t apply to her.”
“Do all the rules apply to all the mice all the time?” Fredle wondered. After all, Axle had gotten better, despite the terrible wound to her ear. They hadn’t had to push her out.
“You’ll see, I promise you, you’ll see. When Axle has a nest of her own and a family of her own, she’ll stop all this running about, taking foolish risks, worrying everybody. She’ll settle down. So will you, young Fredle, and when that time comes—for which, I can tell you, we will all be very grateful—you two can still go out foraging together, just like you do now, and when you’re waiting with your own families by this very same hole for it to be safe to go out into the kitchen, you’ll tell stories about all the wild and foolish things Axle did when she was too young to know better. Believe me, young Fredle,” Grandfather promised, “both of you will grow up and know better.”
And that is probably just what would have happened, had it not been for the Peppermint Pattie.
2
The Peppermint Pattie
It was Fredle who smelled it but it was Axle who led the way up to the highest pantry shelf. They had just emerged onto the pantry floor when Fredle lifted his nose and sniffed. “Smell that? What do you think it is?”
“Let’s find out,” Axle answered.
And so he followed her back through the pantry wall, keeping close as she climbed, up past the board their nests rested on, digging his nails deep into the soft, prickly insulation so as not to fall. High above the nests, they found an opening that led them through the wall again and out onto a high pantry shelf. There the smell was stronger. It was no surprise that at the very end, behind stacks of bowls and plates, hidden just as Fredle’s nest was hidden away, lay the source of the smell.
Fredle had never smelled anything like it before, but anything that smelled like that had to be good, better than anything else. It wasn’t bacon or cheese or peanut butter, he knew, and it was a thick, flat, round shape, so he was confident that it wasn’t a trap.
Axle started right in, chewing through the wrapping, but Fredle walked around it, curious about what it was, enjoying the heavy, sweet smell.
“You could help,” Axle complained.
“I found it, didn’t I? I’d say that’s pretty helpful.”
“I found it,” she corrected, spitting out a mouthful of wrapping. When it was just the two of them, foraging together, they didn’t bother about the wrapping rule. Mice were supposed to swallow the wrappings they had to chew through to get to food. As long as mice swallowed the wrappings, the humans wouldn’t suspect.
“I smelled it, I meant,” he said, but he settled down across from his cousin to chew his way into whatever it was that smelled so good, smelled better than anything he had ever smelled before in his whole short life, smelled—somehow, despite the rich sweetness—as fresh and clear as a drop of water.
They got