Young Fredle - Louise Yates [54]
The voice came from above him. “Slowly, slowly—a smart little mousie it is. That it is.”
Fredle froze. He looked up.
The snake hung down from a ceiling beam, swaying in the shadows like the branch of one of the apple trees when a wind pulled at it. A tongue darted in and out of the snake’s mouth. Its golden eyes shone.
“Lucky little mousie, too.”
Fredle inched backward.
“Why lucky? Because I just finished eating. Maybe you knew my supper? Although I didn’t catch the name.” There was a hissing sound. Was that snake laughter? “I just caught the mousie.”
Fredle inched another two steps back toward the wall. He couldn’t look away from the glistening hooded eyes.
“Maybe,” the snake said, as if the idea had just struck it, “it’s just smart? If this little mousie had tried to run, I’d have had to catch it, and crush it. Any black rat snake knows that rule. If it runs, you catch it, you crush it, you eat it if you’re hungry. That’s our way.”
The snake swayed above and Fredle inched below. “Do you have instinct, too, little mousie?” the snake asked.
But Fredle had backed away out of sight and retreated around the corner of the woodshed. He stayed there, pressed up against the wall, until the shivers stopped running back and forth across his shoulders. He had a new respect for Neldo and Bardo. He didn’t think he could manage to live so close to that long, black, hissing thing.
After that, and giving the open front of the woodshed a wide berth, Fredle moved without thinking, moved fast so as to be out of sight before the cats emerged from wherever they had fled to when the roaring machine entered the barn. This time he didn’t look around to see whatever there was to be seen, and, hungry as he was, he didn’t even want to stop in the grass by the chicken pen to see if the woodshed mice had missed any kernels of corn. He would much rather be hungry and thirsty than crushed in the coils of a snake or trapped under the claws of a cat. It wasn’t until he had huddled up against the protection of a garden fence post that he allowed himself to think ahead, and even then he thought no farther ahead than his passage across the dirt road to the garbage cans.
He planned to be far away from those garbage cans and the compost before dark. It was unlikely that the raccoons would have returned from the lake, and its fish, so soon, but as Fredle had learned, unlikely was very different from sure and certain. For a mouse it was, anyway. So when he had rested enough to make another all-out run, Fredle just dashed off. He thought he could hear the dogs, barking, but not clearly enough to know what they were saying. He might have heard his name being called, but he wasn’t about to be diverted. He ran at top speed, using all the strength and energy he had left.
Behind the big green containers he stopped again, to rest, but as soon as he could he crept around them to get to the foundation and its protecting bushes. He felt a strong urge to go in the opposite direction, that way—to return to his lattice wall and the solitary nest behind it—but he resisted, making himself turn this way. He followed the foundation, scrambling over the roots of the bushes and through their thick, tangled branches, until he came to the remembered window, with its cracked frame. Without a second’s hesitation, he squeezed through and dropped down onto the dirt, where at last he could stop running.
Fredle was back inside.
16
In the Cellar
It was as he remembered it, a soft dirt floor and in the distance a faint glimmer of gray light. For a long time, Fredle sat where he was, glad to have made it, glad to feel the dry ground under him, glad to feel a ceiling even closer overhead than the ceiling over his territory under the porch, mostly just glad to have gotten safely back inside. After that long time, he began to make his way toward the light.
This was nothing like sun-filled daylight, or even the cold brightness of the moon. In fact, it was the dim kind of light he remembered from home. As he crossed the packed