Young Fredle - Louise Yates [42]
With his eyes open, he saw that Rilf also had open eyes and was watching him. “You were right the first time,” he said, his voice low and growly. “That was the direction to go in, away from the wall, downhill. But you’re smart to come back. It’s too far for a mouse to go on his own, through the wild. You’d never have made it.”
The eyes closed again. “Go to sleep, mouse.”
In his state of hunger and thirst, despair and exhaustion, what else could Fredle do?
12
Living with Raccoons
A thump on the rump jolted Fredle awake. Rilf loomed over him, big and bright-eyed. “Up and at ’em, young Fredle. Thirsty?” he asked. “Hungry?”
Fredle nodded. His mouth was, in fact, too dry for speaking out of, but at least he was no longer exhausted. After all the time he’d lived outside, he was accustomed to sleeping in bits and patches, day or night, so he had had a refreshing rest.
Rilf lowered his snout to the ground beside Fredle. “Climb up, get behind an ear, and hold tight. And I mean tight. I’m not sure I’d hear you cry for help if you bounced off, and I know you’re too light for me to feel. As long as you don’t dig those nails into my ear, of course.” He lifted his nose off the ground, considering. “I wouldn’t try digging nails into me, if I were you.”
Fredle clambered onto the nose and ran up between the raccoon’s eyes to take shelter behind one bristly round ear. When he had a good hold, with all four paws, he asked, “What makes you think I’m so young?”
“Woo-Hah” was the only answer he got. With a ground-eating, loping run, Rilf headed off.
He went that way along the stone wall and when the break came, he turned onto the rutted road that sloped downward. After a while, he left the road and crossed a wide, overgrown field in those same long strides. At last he stopped and lowered his head.
Fredle had been trying to simultaneously hold on—but not with his nails—and remember the route, while all the time bouncing around on the raccoon’s hard head, in danger of falling off at any moment. The sudden stop surprised him.
“Come on, Fredle.” Rilf hurried him along. “Get down.”
Fredle crawled shakily onto the ground, where the grass grew tall. “Where—” he started to ask, but he knew. Among all the other smells, he recognized the answer to his question: Water. Rilf had already buried his snout in water that was passing between two low banks right in front of them, rushing by—from where Fredle had no idea, and neither did he know where it was going. Although, just before he took his first taste, he almost remembered something. But then he had a mouth full of cold liquid, and was swallowing it, and he only thought about how good it was to drink.
After a while, he lifted his nose out of the water. “Thank you, Captain Rilf.”
“Don’t call me that, mouse. I’m not your captain. You’re not one of the Rowdy Boys and you never will be.”
“But—You said—Last night …”
“Yes?” Rilf growled.
“Sorry about that,” Fredle said. This wasn’t a quarrel he wanted to have. “It’s just—I feel much better. I was thirsty.”
“Plain Rilf will do, between a mouse and a raccoon.”
Fredle nodded and said no more. He didn’t need to understand raccoons. He just needed to get away from them.
As the light faded out of the air, Rilf turned his attention to a tall plant. He scratched at the base with his strong paws and then pulled something up out of the earth, letting it fall onto the ground. “You take this one, I’ll get more.”
Fredle looked at the thing. Its end was whitish and not large; its long leaves were green. He smelled it and it smelled like dirt, but something else, too. “What is it?”
“Try it, it’s food. It’s not poisonous. Well, not to raccoons, at least. We’re about