Young Fredle by Cynthia Voigt Read Free Book Online Page A

impossible to chew through—although sometimes the raccoons knock them over, they know how to do that, they’re raccoons—and some food’s left for us. But garbage cans make good cover. Knowing where there’s good cover is important, outside.”
    “Inside, too,” Fredle told him. Bardo might think that house mice had it easy, but Fredle knew better.
    Bardo stared across more cut grass, ears cocked forward. “The barn cats, in daytime—” he said, but didn’t finish that thought. “Although daytime is safer than nighttime out here,” he advised Fredle, without taking his watchful gaze from what lay ahead. “Looks like rain,” he said mysteriously.
    Fredle also looked around. The grass lay like a floor, green,drying to pale brown. In the distance before him a different kind of lattice wall rose up, shiny thin lines of wall with tall, thick posts every now and then along its length; Fredle could see right through this wall to brown soil where little green things stood in rows. The air hung heavy and gray above everything. There were no white streaks across it, there was no sun shining even though it wasn’t night, there was no blue ceiling. Bardo glanced up briefly and said, warningly, “Clouds covering the sky, and it smells like rain coming. Let’s get going.”
    Sky
, Fredle noted to himself.
Clouds
.
    “Head for that fence, Fredle. This is the real dangerous part of the trip. Although, you’re so much bigger and fatter than I am, I’m not too worried. If one of the barn cats is out hunting, he’ll go for you.”
    Before Fredle could take in what he was being told, Bardo had dashed off into the cut grass and was running away.
    Fredle ran after him, across the grass and then over a wide strip of dirt—rough terrain, where he stumbled and scrambled down and then up over the rises—to more cut grass until finally they came to a halt, breathless, behind one of the posts.
    “Cover,” panted Bardo. “There are posts all along this fence. They make good cover.”
    Once he’d caught his breath, Fredle asked, “Is that compost behind the fence?”
    Bardo shook his head. “It’s the garden. You know, vegetables?” He didn’t even give Fredle a chance to say
Of course I know vegetables
before he went on, “Beans, peppers, tomatoes, lettuces—sometimes if you dig you find a potato. Potatoes are the best. Or carrots, carrots are good, too, you have to dig forcarrots, too. Missus comes here, in the daytime, and so do the barn cats, sometimes, so it’s not good for foraging.”
    Then how did Bardo know so much about it? Fredle wondered, but what he asked was, “What about at night?” He asked that even though he wasn’t sure he’d dare to make the long journey at night, if there would be owls coming out of the air at him as well as ground-level hunters.
    “Raccoons,” Bardo answered. His voice grew serious and his feet shifted uneasily, as if just saying that word made him anxious. “No mouse in his right mind gets close to a raccoon. They’re wild, unpredictable. Dangerous, the way—You never know what they might do, they might do anything. Keep clear of raccoons, Fredle.”
    “Where’s your nest?” Fredle asked. “Here in the garden?”
    “Ha-ha. No, we’re woodshed mice. Over that way,” Bardo said, without indicating which way he was speaking of. “Past the chicken pen. There’s a snake—Snakes live on mice, look out for snakes, Fredle. They’re all over that woodshed. You have to know their habits to keep safe from them.”
    “What are chickens?” asked Fredle.
    “Chickens are nothing to do with you. Compost is to do with you. That’s if you’re still hungry?”
    “Then what’s compost?” Fredle asked.
    Bardo didn’t answer. He just turned to scurry along beside the fence, running from the cover of one post after the other, until the fence came to a wide hill that smelled of rotting things and turned off in another direction. Bardo stopped at that corner and announced,