Young Fredle by Cynthia Voigt Read Free Book Online Page B

“This is compost.”
    It was brown like dirt, but it wasn’t really dirt, and therewere green and white and dark gray and orange things scattered around all through it. Compost smelled like food. A black animal—not a mouse, or a cat, or a dog, or a human—was hopping up the side of the compost on two thin legs, poking into it with a sharp snout and saying something in a loud, ugly voice.
    “That’s a crow,” Bardo said. “Remember I told you I’d show you a crow? It’s a bird. See the feathers?”
    Fredle had no idea if he was seeing feathers or not.
    “Watch, I’ll show you
fly.
”
    Bardo screeched, a high, sharp sound as if his back had just been pierced by a cat’s claws. The crow grew wider and wider as it spread out two fat flat arms, and then it jumped up into the air and stayed there, stayed up in the air with no ground under its feet. Moving its arms it went up into the air, higher and higher, and then it was out of sight.
    “Flying is what birds do instead of running,” Bardo told Fredle.
    “Oh,” said Fredle. “Oh.” He’d never even
imagined
anything like this.
    “Pay attention to the compost, Fredle,” Bardo said now. “Compost is what’s important here.”
    “Do we eat it?” asked Fredle, too amazed by the sight of that bird, that crow, to be irritated by Bardo’s bossiness.
    “Not exactly,” Bardo laughed. “We forage in it. There’s always something here, like, an apple peel or core.” Bardo stuck his nose into the dirt and pulled out a dark gray, sweet-smelling thing. “Apple peel. Go ahead, take a bite. Just one, and not a big one.”
    Fredle did. He’d never tasted this before, and it was a little chewy, but it was certainly food. It had a quiet sweetness, too, and he hoped Bardo would offer him another bite.
    “Or banana peels or lettuce or—almost anything,” Bardo told him. “If you come foraging every day, you’ll find all kinds of different things to eat. And now that the weather’s getting warm, they’ll feed the dogs outside, right by your lattice, so you’ll get some kibbles, too, because those dogs are messy eaters.”
    Fredle was tired of Bardo being the one who knew things, so he didn’t ask about kibbles. Besides, he thought he could guess now exactly what it was: the brown things the dogs ate, and the cat, too. He didn’t need to ask.
    Bardo pointed with his nose to a place farther up the compost. “Look, over there? See it? There’s an orange peel. You should go get it.”
    Fredle went off, and climbed up through the soft dirt to nose out a stiff piece of orange peel and pull it after him back to where he had left Bardo chewing on the apple.
    But Bardo was no longer there.

6
Alone
    It took a while for Fredle to figure it out—and then he knew: Bardo had run off. Run off
where
Fredle didn’t know, but run off
why
he was afraid he could guess. What if Bardo’s go-between job was really a keep-away job? Or even a push-out job? When he understood that Bardo had intended to abandon him there on the compost pile, Fredle could only feel the not-all-rightness of everything.
    He hunched down just where he was, on the compost pile, in broad daylight, unable to move his feet. Where did he have to go to, anyway, if he
could
find his feet and make them run somewhere? He didn’t even want to eat, although he could smell how good that orange peel would taste. It was eating that had gotten him where he was, out here in the open, lost, alone, afraid. It was wanting to eat something because itsmelled so good, and also following another mouse’s tail, that’s what had done it to him. He’d followed Axle and he’d followed Bardo, and look where that had got him. He wished … He wished he’d never gone looking for that good thing on the pantry shelf. He wished … He wished he could go back to before he smelled it, back to when everything was comfortable and familiar and safe, and he wasn’t alone and sick at heart.
    How long he huddled unhappily there