Young Fredle - Louise Yates [55]
Coming closer, he began to hear something. Voices, he thought, and maybe even mouse voices. But it couldn’t be, and especially it couldn’t be the voices of many mouselets, which was what it really sounded like. One of the first things a mouselet learned was to be silent, no matter what was making him unhappy, no matter how hungry or frightened or even excited he might feel. Any sound could attract the cat. These mouselet voices—and every now and then Fredle also heard an adult—were so abnormal it made him nervous. He tried to remember everything he had ever heard about the cellar mice.
They had to live on soap and string, he remembered, but that was all he knew. If they ate soap and string, they were probably as scrawny as any field mouse; probably he could escape easily from any one of them, although probably also he could fight his way free. He’d learned how to fight from watching the raccoons.
When he arrived at the window-shaped opening, which went through a thick stone-and-mortar wall just like the foundation, Fredle stopped, to get his bearings and to figure out what awaited him up ahead. He crept cautiously across the wall. The voices grew louder, clearer. They were not angry voices, and neither were they unhappy, and especially they weren’t fearful.
“My turn now!”
“Roar, roar, I’m the cat!”
“Me, chase me!”
“I’m getting ready to spring! Freeze, mouselet!”
“You can’t scare me, Mr. Cat.”
“It’s not her turn, it’s mine!”
When kitchen mouselets played, they played in whispers, but if they had played out loud it might have sounded like this.
Fredle crept farther forward. He leaned out into the empty air, to smell, to hear, and even to see whatever there was to be seen. Then, unable to see anything yet, he leaned farther out.
He just had time to smell something—food?—before he tumbled down, off the stone-and-mortar wall, and fell into empty air.
There was nothing to grab on to, but luckily he thumped to a stop almost immediately and lay there, the breath knocked out of him.
He had landed on something hard, and smooth, and round. When he landed on it, it shifted underneath him and, instinctively, still struggling for breath, still recovering from the shock of his fall, he dug every one of his sharp little nails into it.
It was soft inside, and it smelled … like food, smelled almost like ramps, smelled so good he couldn’t think of anything else and he certainly didn’t notice that all the voices had been stilled by the sound of his fall.
Then he did notice it and grew worried. He saw that wherever it was he had fallen had high walls circling up all around him. He was on top of a mound of these round things—onions! He recognized them now. All around him rose a dark, curved wall, much higher, and much, much wider, than the sides of the ice cream container had been. He would never be able to climb up and out, although he was going to have to try.
He heard faint, faint sounds, the sounds of mice moving quietly, not far away. After that, silence fell again.
Could he go down rather than up? Fredle wondered. Could he make his way through these piled-up onions without getting trapped among them?
And what were all these onions doing here, anyway? Probably it was something that had to do with the humans. After all, it was their cellar, so anything in it would be something they put there.
Fredle decided that he would try moving down to escape, since he couldn’t move up. He crawled over to the edge of the pile and discovered that the whatever-it-was was not made of thick, impenetrable plastic like the garbage containers, or of paper like the ice cream container, but of something between straw and wood, by the smell of it. If he had to, he knew, he could chew through wood or straw. However, before he tried eating his way out, he began to squeeze and squirm between the onions, moving toward the bottom of the pile. He wouldn