Young Fredle - Louise Yates [72]
“Axle,” he pleaded. “You’ll like it. And besides, you could always come back here if you don’t.”
“I am quite happy here, now, where I am. Being grown-up.”
“That’s not the only way to be grown-up. I know one other and there are probably more than just those two.”
“It’s the only way I want to know, Fredle. So you can forget about dragging me around behind your wild ideas and I’m sorry that you can’t see what’s best for you.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Fredle said, but he didn’t mean at all the same thing as Axle.
After that, he climbed down the walls into the kitchen. He didn’t worry about foraging, because he knew that once he got to the cellar there would be plenty of food for everyone. And now that he thought of those baskets of food, he realized that with a nest behind the lattice, he could make piles of food, too, like the humans did, stores for the cold winter Neldo and Bardo had spoken of. Mice could carry food in their mouths, just like raccoons did, and pile up enough to feed them for a long time. He and the others might even move to the cellar when winter came, because if you could go from one nest to another, you could go from one to another to another. As he had said to Linu, If you know the way to get there, then you also know the way back.
Maybe Linu would want to come outside with him, and he and Neldo could show her flowers and squirrels and stars.
“Hello, Grandfather,” he said as the old mouse came up to join him, with Kidle and four mouselets close behind.
“Here we are, then, young Fredle,” Grandfather said. “What’s next?”
Fredle told them, “We’ll go down to the cellar, which isn’t easy but we can do it, and then, after we have as much as we want to eat”—he could promise them that—“then we’ll go up the cellar wall and across the dirt to outside.”
“Will there be a moon?” Grandfather wondered.
“I don’t know. It certainly could happen that one of the moons will be out in the sky.”
“What’s a moon?” asked Kidle.
“Or stars,” Fredle said, remembering. “And stars.”
“What’s the sky?” asked Doddle.
“You’ll see,” Fredle told them. “You have no idea how much there is to see, and probably neither do I.” He laughed with gladness, “Woo-Hah.”
Later, much later, when things had turned out—sometimes as he’d planned, sometimes not as well as he’d wanted, and sometimes better than he’d hoped—Fredle told it like one of Grandfather’s stories. He enjoyed it a great deal more in the telling than he had in the living of it, or so he sometimes thought. And why should that be? he wondered, as he began, “When I was young, it was between the walls—inside—that was home.”
As Fredle unfolded the story, there were certain points at which he was often interrupted: “But, Father, if she was too frightened to forage, why didn’t your mother just eat from the stores?” “Aunt Linu, is that our same Sadie?” “Raccoons, Fredle? Did you hear that, Neldo? Fredle escaped from raccoons!” “What’s a stove, Uncle Fredle?” “Did your grandfather get to see the moons? He did, didn’t he?”
“I could never do what you did,” they said, to which Fredle responded, “You’d be surprised at what you can do, if you need to, if you have to, if you really want to.” However, there was always at least one of the mouselets who maintained, “I could, I could do it,” and to him or her Fredle always said, “I know you could. I hope I’m around to see that.”
And finally, after many seasons there came a mouselet who looked off up into the star-filled sky with dreaming eyes and repeated the word “Lake. Lake. Wouldn’t you like to see a lake, Grandfather?”
Cynthia Voigt is the award-winning author of many books for young readers. Her accolades include a Newbery Medal for Dicey’s Song (Book 2 in the Tillerman cycle), a Newbery Honor for A Solitary Blue (Book 3 in the Tillerman cycle), and the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Outstanding Literature for Young Adults. She is also the author of