Free Young Fredle by Cynthia Voigt Page B

asked, “Aren’t you going to finish the story? About how you escaped?”
    “If I have to,” Fredle answered grumpily, and so he did, which, strangely, cheered him up.
    When he’d finished, Neldo remarked, “Missus saved your life. Do you think she meant to?”
    “Why would she want to do that?”
    “Nobody saves mice,” Neldo agreed. “In the woodshed, if you’re too old, you’re left—we push that mouse out, we have to. Or if he’s sick? That mouse gets pushed out into the open space in front of the woodpile. For the snake.”
    Then Neldo stopped talking.
    Fredle told her, “When we push ours out, they just disappear. I think, maybe, the cat?”
    “If there’s a cat in the house there’s no maybe about it.”
    “I guess every mouse has to went, sooner or later,” Fredle said, sounding to his own ears a lot like Grandfather. “It’s the rule.”
    “I’m hoping for later,” Neldo said. “
Much
later. What do you think happened to Axle? I bet she’d like me.”
    Fredle shook his head; he had no idea what might have happened to Axle, although he guessed she hadn’t found her way outside. He told Neldo, “I need to find a way back in.”
    “Why?”
    “It’s home. It’s where my family is.”
    “I wish you could come live with us,” Neldo said, but they both knew that wasn’t possible. That was not the way mice did things.
    “I wish I could find a way back,” Fredle countered.
    Neldo thought about that for a while. “We’ll find one,” she decided.
    “I already looked. There wasn’t any.”
    “You’ve been all the way around to the front of the house?”
    “What do you mean, the front of the house?” asked Fredle.
    “The house has four sides and this is only one of them, but—Fredle?—I’m hungry. Let’s forage,” Neldo said, and she jumped up. “They’ll start to wonder where I am and come looking and I don’t want them to find me here.”

8
Around Front
    Neldo set right to work helping Fredle look for a way back inside. The next midday, Fredle was at the compost pile taking bites out of an apple core and deciding if there was any way he could dig a hole large enough for a long crust of bread, or if he had to chew it into smaller sections, which would be easier to hide. He had decided to try digging one big hole and was working his paws hard, his nose buried in the soft compost, when he felt something damp and rather cold jabbed into his rib cage.
    He froze, nose in the compost.
    “What’s
wrong
with you, Fredle?”
    It was Neldo’s voice.
    “You’re supposed to run.
Run first, look later
, that’s the rule, that’s the way mice save themselves. Is it different for housemice? But what are you doing, foraging now? Don’t you know this is the time Snake and Fox come out from the barn?”
    “Snake and Fox?”
    “After they have a morning’s sleep, after the night’s hunting,” Neldo said.
    “A snake and a fox together?”
    “No, of course not. Don’t you know anything? I’m talking about Snake the cat, not Snake the snake. And Fox the cat, who isn’t a fox, either. Besides, foxes almost never go after mice. They like chickens, and eggs, and rabbits. They like their food bigger, except for eggs. But everything eats eggs, even humans. So maybe it’s eggs that are the bottom of the food chain?”
    “Bardo said this was the best time.”
    “Don’t blame Bardo. He has to do what’s best for his family. It’s not as if he
wants
you went. In fact, I think he likes you, or anyway he admires you, or at least he doesn’t understand you. Come on.”
    Before Fredle could ask her what she meant by that, she had run off. Fredle followed her along the garden fence, scurrying from post to post, across the rutted dirt road until they were safe behind the garbage cans. Once he’d learned how much danger he’d been in, Fredle had run faster and more nervously than usual, so it took him a minute to catch his breath, but when he did he asked Neldo, “Then what