Ширли Мерфи - The Flight Of The Fox

"I'd never talked to a person, Charlie. At home they told us—Mama said you should never, never talk to a person, that it was the worst thing you could do."

"Well I wouldn't have told anyone!"

"How was I to know? Anyone who would keep a person in a cage all the time."

"Oh, come on, you're the one who always wants to get back in the cage where the food is." (At that moment there was still a fig bar, two grapes, and the slept-on chocolate cake.)

"But you could have left the door open. I didn't like it much with the door closed." The lemming had raised up on his hind legs and was staring defiantly at Charlie.

"If I'd left the door open and you'd got out and Mrs. Critch had found you, you'd be a dead duck. A dead lemming. I kept you in there for your own good. I let you out at night, didn't I? I let you sleep with me."

Crispin ignored this. Still rearing, he had begun to chitter. His voice rose, his eyes flashed, and his teeth showed white and sharp. He looked nothing like the gentle, soft lemming of a moment before. When he began to jump up and down, Rory looked really amazed. "Excitable little fellow, ain't he?"

"He does that sometimes. One minute all sweetness, and the next minute a regular tantrum. He's bitten me twice."

"Maybe he belongs in a cage. Are they all like that?"

"I guess so. I read about them in a book. It said they go kind of crazy sometimes. So crazy they even drown themselves."

"Oh, come now, sonny! No animal's dumb enough to drown himself. A human, maybe. But not an animal."

"Lemmings do, though. Every few years, as soon as spring comes, they crawl up out of the snow where they've been sleeping and go stampeding off, thousands of them. They eat every blade of grass in their way, and nothing can stop them; they go right over houses, or right through them. They'd run over a man if he stood still. No one knows what makes them do it. When they get to the ocean they just keep going, straight in. They swim until they can't swim any more, then they drown." Charlie remembered how impolite it is to talk about someone in front of him and glanced at Crispin. But Crispin didn't seem to have heard. He was still chittering.

"They show up on the tundra so suddenly," Charlie continued, "that some people think they fall out of the sky. Or blow there on the wind. And some people think they're searching for the lost continent of Atlantis. They're really famous, but still no one knows why they drown themselves."

The kangaroo rat considered Crispin. "Is any of that stuff true, sonny?"

Crispin stopped chittering and gave Rory a beatific look. " I don't know. I never heard of Atlantis. And I never was up in the sky. Though I think about it sometimes," he said dreamily. He had forgotten his anger completely. "It was cold up in Canada. There was twelve feet of snow over our tunnel last winter. When spring came and the snow started to melt, oh my, we all just raced out." He sighed. "We did have a wonderful run, we ran for days. No one thought of stopping. I never meant to drown myself. When we came to the water we just all plunged in. I kept thinking the shore would come pretty soon, but it never did. Then everything went black."

"Then that is what happened to you," Charlie said. "I always wondered. See," he said to Rory, "my uncle never could figure out how he got down into southern Canada. But you didn't swim all that way," he said to the lemming. He lifted Crispin out of his cage. "You couldn't have swum that far south. And how did you keep from drowning, if everything went black?"

CHAPTER 7

charlie nudged Crispin. "How did you get so far south?" he repeated. "How did you get out of the ocean if everything went black?"

The lemming stared up at Charlie. "This old muskrat, he pulled me out, Charlie. He said he swam over a mile, dragging me to shore. He pumped the water out of me and took care of me. I stayed there a long time. Then when I felt better, I decided to travel. Muskrats live mostly on tules and cattails, and I was tired of that. I just kept going where it was warmest, I guess. I suppose I was going south. I didn't care much for the snow and ice, and I'd never seen the world. I'd spent all my life under that snow. I was tired of other lemmings, too. They're so excitable. There was a whole world out there, coming south. A whole world ..." The lemming went off dreaming again. Charlie and Rory looked at each other, and grinned. "A whole world . . ." The lemming repeated.

"But how come my uncle found you inside his tent?" Charlie insisted. "What were you doing in there?"

"Because of the cornbread and bacon," Crispin said longingly. "I could smell such a wonderful smell coming to me in the night where I was sleeping in a log. I just went out and followed it. I went in the tent where it was, and I ate and ate, and then I went to sleep. I woke up once because the man began to snore. I didn't know he was a man, he was just a big, snoring animal with clothes on. His snoring sounded like my cousins sleeping all around me, only louder. It was soothing, and I went back to sleep. Then when I woke up the next time, I was in a box with holes in it. I was on my way to you, Charlie." The lemming gave Charlie such a loving look that you'd never know he'd been rocking with rage only moments before. But then he seemed to recollect himself, and his expression became very sad. "And now—and now . . ." he said, a tear sliding down his furry cheek, "and now you're going to abandon me."

"But I . . ."

The lemming began crying pitifully. He hiccuped as he looked up at Charlie. "I liked it at your house, Charlie. I liked sleeping on your pillow and getting under the bed and pulling out the stuffing and chewing on your socks. And I liked all the things we did together, going in the garden when old hatchet face was gone, eating the petunias . . ."

" I didn't eat the petunias," Charlie said crossly. The lemming had made him feel just terrible. He stared at Rory hopelessly. He guessed he would be abandoning the lemming if he left him in the dump.

The kangaroo rat twitched a whisker and tried not to smile. He had begun to get a really stupendous idea. There was a long silence while the sun shone down on the rust and metal and new grass, while the starlings quarreled over garbage, and the summer breeze tickled the animals' fur. Rory studied Charlie appraisingly, and at last he smoothed his whiskers, cleared his throat, and said softly, "Maybe I could help you out, sonny."

Charlie stared at the kangaroo rat, at the purposeful expression in those dark eyes. Somehow, the animal's words made him uneasy. "How could you help me?" he said slowly.

Rory looked back, taking stock of the boy, and then he made his pitch. "I might," he said casually, "I might look out for the youngster—if you were to do me a favor in return."

The lemming sat quietly. He listened to Charlie and the kangaroo rat. They talked for a long time. He didn't understand all the words they used, words like propeller and points and speedskin, like spark plugs and screwdrivers, but he knew he was listening to his reprieve. He knew there would be someone to take care of him. He leaned back against the side of his cage with his belly exposed and chittered happily to himself.

CHAPTER 8

as the afternoon cooled and the sun dimmed, the young lemming climbed the trash mountain behind the Buick, then climbed up onto a rusted radiator right at the top. He was free. He stared out at the world and at the wide sky overhead, then down to where Rory was working on the plane. It was comforting to have Rory near, fiddling with a motor as he had seen Charlie do so many times—though he did miss Charlie.