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Dear reader, have you ever had to leave your home, and even your family, not knowing when you would see them again? I hope that you have not, for it is a sad and frightening experience. Yet this was exactly what happened to Henry Mouse. And while Henry considered himself brave, and indeed never showed any fear anymore of the humans who lived outside the walls of his family’s townhouse, or of their automobiles and traps and housecats and the other dangers that the city held for an unwary mouse, he had never been to the countryside before. As his train pulled out of the station, he tried to think of it as the start of an adventure.
Henry’s parents, Mr. and Dr. Mouse, had sent him to stay with Dr. Mouse’s sister. Her husband had himself recently gone off to the war, leaving Aunt Mouse alone to care for their two children, Mipsy and Chirp – and for Henry, when he arrived.
You may well imagine how unsettled everyone’s tempers were at that time. Aunt Mouse had her paws full, of course. Mipsy and Chirp were not happy about having a new mouse come stay with them, even if it was their cousin who they had never met. To make matters worse, they mistook his reticence for condescension and thought he looked down his city nose at them, not considering his own difficulties and their likely effect on his demeanor. And I must be honest with you, dear reader: Henry did in fact find Aunt Mouse’s tree-stump home at the edge of a small farm to be dirty and cramped, and his cousins to be rustic and unsophisticated, not to mention young. Though he knew better than to say these things out loud, he could not entirely hide his feelings.
The long and the short of it is, Mipsy and Chirp did not make Henry feel welcome in the first few days after his arrival. And while Henry (who was used to the rough and tumble of his city school) bore their escalating pranks with stoicism, his aunt had higher expectations and lower patience. When the siblings swapped Henry’s salt for sugar at the dinner table, Aunt Mouse decided that enough was enough. She excused herself to Henry, grabbed both her children by their ears, and marched them to her own bedroom at the far end of the stump.
Perhaps you know what was about to happen to Mipsy and Chirp, but Henry did not. His parents had raised him with the most modern methods, and so it was only when he heard the sounds of swats and yelps and scolding and pleas coming from Aunt Mouse’s room that he understood the kind of punishment his cousins were receiving. Presently they emerged, red-eyed and sore-tailed, and made mumbling apologies before being sent to bed.
Some children may delight in seeing their tormentors brought low, but our friend Henry felt no such satisfaction that night. He worried that he would be subject to the same harsh treatment if he upset his aunt. He was also sure that his cousins would blame him for their misfortune, and wondered what revenge they might seek. The safest thing, Henry decided, would be to spend as little time as possible in the tree-stump house.
The following morning, he put his plan into action and set out to explore the countryside. Aunt Mouse gave him strict instructions to stay in the confines of the overgrown meadow, not sneaking toward the farmhouse with its terrible cat, nor straying into the deep and fox-filled woods.
At first the meadow was adventure enough, filled as it was with new sights and smells. He would return to the tree-stump house only as the sun began to set, to wash up and eat supper in uneasy peace with Mipsy and Chirp.
A single day feels longer to a mouse than it does to you, dear reader (unless you too are a mouse, in which case you know just how long a day feels). By the end of the second day of exploring, Henry was becoming bored with the meadow. Worse, perhaps, he was becoming homesick. He missed his parents, and he missed the comforting familiarity of his home and the city streets around it. The woods were wild and frightening, but from the farmhouse and its surrounding buildings wafted familiar smells: paint and soap and machine oil and above all baked goods, sweeter than the nuts and sour berries Aunt Mouse cooked with.
Aunt Mouse had warned him to avoid the farm, he reasoned, because as a country mouse she was unfamiliar with humans. Henry had lived his whole life alongside them, and so he did not hold them in the same awe and terror.
You will not be surprised, then, that the following morning saw Henry making his way down the hill, under the fence, between the garden vegetables, up the path, and finally through a hole in the wood and into the farmhouse.
You must not think that Henry was being reckless, by his own standards. He kept to the shadows and sniffed the wind, and ascertained that the farmer and his tractor were in the far field, and that the farmer’s wife was hanging the washing while her pie cooled. He even made sure the farm cat was asleep on a plush carpet before making his final dash toward his prize.
If you have spent time in both the city and the country, dear reader, perhaps you know how cats differ between those places. City cats, who Henry knew well, are often well-fed and lazy. They are likely to see mice as playmates or toys, and may be too tired to play with them even if given an opportunity. A farm cat is a different creature entirely. It may be a working animal solemnly guarding its domain, or it may be half-wild and required to hunt for its supper. Either way, it is a danger to a mouse.
Imagine, if you will, the skitter of Henry’s paws across the wood of the kitchen floor. Picture the cat’s ragged ear lifting, rotating, like a radar dish searching the skies for an enemy airplane. It stops. The ear alerts the nose, which opens the eyes, which wakes the cat.
Henry, for his part, forgot his caution as soon as he reached the pie. After days of cold nights and dry nuts, the warm sweetness offered a much-longed-for moment of bliss.
Alas, it was to be only a moment. Fortunately for him (and for us, dear reader, that our story does not come to an abrupt and sad end here), he heard the cat’s sharp claws tap on the wooden floor just in time. Henry ran, feeling foolish as well as scared, and made it back to the hole from which he had emerged.
In the safety of the walls, Henry quickly recovered. He had outrun cats before, and he was certain he would do so again. Running had not felt good on stomach full of pie, and so he let it settle before venturing back toward the stump house.
Perhaps you know another difference between city cats and country cats, dear reader, which Henry did not. The city cats Henry knew are generally confined indoors.
Henry was halfway down the path to the vegetable garden walking leisurely when he saw the cat sprinting toward him. All at once Henry ran as he had never run before, and with no hole in sight he had no choice but to keep running.
Fortunately, the thicket of the garden allowed him to dodge and weave, quickly changing direction under the cover of a wide leaf or a tangle of stems. At last, worried he could run no more, he found a small burrow that perhaps had been made by a previous fugitive and dove in ahead of a swiped paw.
Too late, Henry realized there was no other way out of the burrow. The cat, for its part, made its throaty, clicking growl at the entrance and settled down to commence a siege.
By sunset, when Henry had not returned, Aunt Mouse began to worry in earnest. She had a great many worries in those days, though she did her best to hide most of them from the children. At first she thought that Mipsy and Chirp might have done Henry some mischief and questioned them sharply, but she quickly saw that they knew no more than she did. Chirp, for his part, bravely offered to go search for his cousin in the night, and his mother forbade it. There was nothing to be done but wait. Eventually they ate their dinner just the three of them, though it had gotten cold.
Henry awoke in the dark, not remembering having fallen asleep. He sniffed the musty burrow air and sniffed again, moving paw-length by paw-length toward the narrow opening until he was certain the cat had given up and gone elsewhere.
Another difference between the city and the country, which you may know and Henry was just now finding out, is that night in the country is dark in the way the city never is. On this particular night there was not even a full moon to take the place of a streetlight. If before Henry had run faster than he ever had, now he moved slower than ever, straining his eyes and his nose to navigate and freezing at every rustle of wind through the leaves.
Eventually he made his way back to the tree-stump house. Chirp had fallen asleep on the sofa. Mipsy was straining to stay awake with a book in her lap. Aunt Mouse sat ramrod straight, the click of her knitting needles the only sound in the room until the door opened, at which point they too went silent.
Mipsy was the first to jump up and embrace her cousin. Aunt Mouse stood slowly, then quickly ran her paws along Henry’s ears, face and body, making sure all of him was accounted for. Chirp opened his eyes long enough to smile and sigh before falling back into a more restful sleep.
Then Aunt Mouse demanded a full accounting. Henry, too relieved and tired to even consider any dishonesty, did as she asked.
You may think that Henry’s ordeal was harrowing enough to be its own punishment. Surely he would not dare to disobey his aunt again, after having seen the danger disobedience put him in. But Aunt Mouse would not agree with you. She saw how even as Henry told his story, a gleam appeared in his eye. She heard as he started to recast the day in his mind as a grand adventure. She saw, also, how Mipsy leaned in close to listen, and looked at her cousin with newfound respect. And she knew it would not do to let the day end with no consequence but the memory of fear.
And so, as Henry finished his tale, Aunt Mouse fixed a firm expression on her face. She reminded him that he had defied her rules, lenient as they had been. She told him that such defiance would not go unpunished. And then she took his arm and marched him toward her room.
Dear reader, you have certainly read descriptions of spankings before. Perhaps you have even experienced them yourself. You do not need me to provide you with every detail of this one. Let us grant Henry Mouse and his aunt their privacy as they go about the unpleasant task of punishment, which is painful to the giver as well as to the receiver, each in their own way.
But if you had the large ears of a young mouse, and if you were inclined to use them to eavesdrop from the parlor when you were supposed to be going to bed, here is what you would have heard. First would come the rumble of the lecture. Then you would have heard the swish of chastisement, again and again, with no whimpers or yelps where you might expect them. Then all at once, like a dam breaking, you would have heard sobs, welling from somewhere deep within where they had been held at bay for days (and remember, dear reader, days for mice are longer than for a human). Perhaps you would know that those sounds are not for you to hear. And perhaps then you would do as I had asked, and finally slink off to bed.
In the days that followed, a remarkable change began to happen. Mipsy and Chirp began to take a liking to Henry. Perhaps they were impressed by his adventure, or perhaps they felt a new kinship now that he had been punished as they had been. Henry too had a newfound respect for his cousins, and though he didn’t say this aloud either it could not help but show. The three started to ramble together around the meadow, though Aunt Mouse wouldn’t let them get quite as far as before. She had enough worries, after all.
I won’t tell you that the three young mice always obeyed their mother and aunt to the letter, for that would be a lie. Nor will I tell you that they never quarreled again, in the long summer before Henry was able to return home. Sometimes their naughtiness went unnoticed, and other times they were caught and punished. But they never faced danger the way Henry did on that one long day, and for that we can all be grateful.