Young Fredle - Louise Yates [59]
As soon as they were back by the water heater, Fredle was barraged with questions that gave him no time to think about anything other than what the mice wanted to know. The questions came in no order. There were just a lot of voices, asking him about outside, and what compost was, how a lattice could protect a nest. They didn’t believe him about raptors, he could tell, and he didn’t try to convince them. They had heard of snakes, but not raccoons. They wondered why the cat that he said lived in the kitchen was to be seen outside—
“His name is Patches,” Fredle told them.
“Cats have names? What do they need with names?”
“Everything has a name,” Fredle announced, adding, so as not to sound so bossy, “in my experience.”
Was the kitchen cat also a predator? they asked. Was it crowded on their wooden board behind the pantry wall? How did you ever relax, out in the wild, never knowing if you were going to be hot or cold, or even wet? “It’s always dry, here,” they explained. “It’s always this same temperature. That’s another reason the cellar’s the best place for a mouse.”
“Not always dry. Sometimes water leaks in through the walls and there are puddles.”
“Well, almost always.”
They couldn’t imagine birds flying through the air. They couldn’t imagine the sky or clouds or rain, compost or flowers or birds.
“Are birds like flies? We’ve seen flies. Only big, really big? Birds that big would be loud as Missus’s machines.”
“You have to let Fredle play with us now. We’ve waited for a long time,” the mouselets told their parents.
So Fredle played Follow-the-Leader (Fredle), after which there was a game of Hide-and-Seek (Fredle was It), then Tickle-and-Run-Fast, and finally Three Blind Mice (Fredle, Ellnu, and a high-spirited young mouse named Linu, who was particularly clever about nosing out the mouselets even with her eyes tightly closed). There was much squealing and laughing and excitement, all night long.
Afterward, when the mouselets were tired out, the families sat around in groups, talking. They reviewed what Fredle had told them, and decided, “It’s a terrible place, outside.”
“Actually,” Fredle said, “it isn’t, it’s—”
“Makes you appreciate your own home, doesn’t it?”
Then they talked much more about the question of whether carrots were sweeter than apples, and about the difference in taste between a new young potato and an older, riper one, and tried to describe to Fredle how to combine different foods in his mouth—apples and onions, potatoes and onions—the possibilities were endless, they said. If you chewed slowly, tasting with full attention, you would find that each food had a new, and wonderful, flavor.
It was a long, lazy night out on the cellar floor. The different families mingled in groups that occasionally changed, the young sometimes staying close to their parents or grandparents, sometimes going off to be with others their own age. If you were thirsty, you went over to the big machine to drink from the pipes. If you were hungry, you made the quick trip up to the baskets and chose what you wanted to eat. Eventually, the dark air grew lighter and the mice began to yawn and go their separate ways to their own nests, for a good day’s sleep. For the second time, Fredle went with Tarnu and Ellnu and their mouselets to the nest behind the big, ill-smelling oil tank.
Tarnu apologized. “There are some bad smells down here. Over by the machines it’s soap, which I personally think is much worse. Oil isn’t so bad, once you get used to it.”
Fredle could think of no reason to try to convince Tarnu that the fresh air outside was preferable, or the warm, food-flavored kitchen air. He had never seen mice like this, unworried, unafraid, contented. These mice were happy, he realized. They lived every night of