The Hedgehog of Oz Read online

  Wait. A power line. The fire-wire!

  “Tuffy! Do you live in the city?” Marcel asked excitedly.

  “Yup. I live in the city—near the eat-box. People don’t like it when Tuffys eat from their eat-boxes. They catch you in their snap-traps and throw you in their honkers and bring you to the mean-trees.”

  Marcel could picture it now. Tuffy’s family lived in a tree in the city. They ate out of… not refrigerators—that would be too hard to get to. Maybe… garbage cans? Yes! That was it! Garbage cans. Or dumpsters! And someone set a trap and caught Tuffy in it and put him in a honker—a car or a truck?—and brought him to the mean-trees. The forest!

  Marcel sat back, exhausted but relieved. He felt certain he’d figured it all out.

  Tuffy looked up at him from his little crook in the roots and patted him. “Are you going to help Tuffy get home to his half-a-tree?”

  It dawned on Marcel then. The little raccoon really was lost. Really lost.

  Those city streets could be tricky, he knew. Without a clue like the theater’s popcorn scent or a trail of some kind, those streets could spin you right around. Street after street, building after building, they blended together.

  From his seat in Dorothy’s bicycle basket, Marcel had never paid much attention. He’d just closed his eyes and let the wind breeze through his quills.

  Faster, Marcel? Dorothy would say. Want to be the first hedgehog to fly?

  Flying hedgehogs didn’t need directions.

  They raised their arms and soared.

  He’d never paid attention, because he’d never imagined one day he’d be sloshing through those same gutters and sleeping under newspapers. Never imagined he’d be calling her name, trying to find her, hoping the bird was wrong and that even if you leave the nest, there’s still a way to get home.

  “You will help Tuffy?” the raccoon asked again.

  Marcel looked at him and worked up a brave face. The raccoon didn’t know how next to impossible his ask was.

  And Marcel wasn’t going to be the one to tell him.

  They’d just have to try.

  “Sure, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m on my way to the city too,” Marcel said. “We’ll… we’ll find your family. We, um, just need to get through the rest of the woods first.” He nodded in the direction of the deepest, darkest part of the woods, where the hemlocks crouched together and the pines were so deeply green they looked almost black. “Ingot says it’s that way.”

  Tuffy’s eyes popped wide, and he began to shiver. “Oh no. The mean-trees—”

  “But that’s the way,” reassured Marcel. “I’ll be with you. So will Scamp and Ingot.”

  The raccoon still trembled.

  “What are you so scared about?” Marcel asked.

  Tuffy ducked his head a little. He looked around nervously. He barely made a sound as he said, “Snatchers.”

  “Snatchers?”

  Tuffy raised his arms and flapped. Twice. Then he looked at his hands and his little nails—and plunged them into his furry belly like claws.

  Tuffy whispered, “Near the mean-trees. Tuffy was looking for an eat-box. Tuffy saw them.” His eyes grew wide. “The snatchers. They were snatching up a chipper. They were taking him.” Tuffy grabbed hold of Marcel’s hand. “Tuffy doesn’t want to go back to the mean-trees. Tuffy… he’s too scared.”

  And who could blame him.

  For the next hour, Marcel worked to calm the raccoon. He told him stories. Wonderful stories. About the theater, the hens, anything that might make him smile, and waited for the raccoon to drift off to sleep.

  But later, alone with his thoughts, Marcel had to admit he agreed with Tuffy. The mean-trees seemed like a place they’d want to avoid the next day. A place they might never come out of if they ventured inside…

  Trees like a dark sea…

  A sea a ship could lose itself upon.

  He was up all night just thinking about it.

  CHAPTER 12 Pick a Star

  THERE ARE SUNRISES THAT MAKE all others pale in comparison. The next day’s was just such a one. It came on blue and sparkling orange wings, and if you only looked to the horizon, the world seemed very alive, full of promise—like anything at all was possible.

  Except getting a cowardly raccoon to move.

  Though the group rose early, much of the morning was spent trying to convince Tuffy to make the trek through the deep woods.

  Marcel coaxed and cajoled.

  Scamp suggested bopping him over the head.

  Toto was no help, as wiggling isn’t exactly a call to courage.

  In the end, it was Ingot who convinced the raccoon to leave. “I been through this wood now a thousand times, and never once did I do it without being afraid. But I know the way. I know how to get you there safe. Besides, you got a mushroom medal. Sometimes you just do things and you do them scared, and that’s that.”

  It did the trick. (Marcel spotted Tuffy stroking his mushroom medal lovingly.)

  After filling their sacks with the leftover acorns from breakfast, the travelers set out, Ingot in the lead. Tuffy ran up and grabbed hold of the old squirrel’s hand, and Ingot made to wrench it away. But the raccoon’s grip was firm. Tuffy gazed at Ingot with awed admiration.

  “You, uh, got quite a grip there, kid,” said Ingot. He looked to the others; his dark eyes seemed to plead with them.

  “I’m not holding his hand,” said Scamp. “He’d probably eat it or something.”

  Marcel pointed to Toto, strapped to his chest, and shrugged.

  “Everyone’s so anxious to get where they’re going but can’t lift a finger for the old squirrel over here,” Ingot growled. “S’pose I’ll be making you all dinner and tucking you in tonight too.” He turned and pulled Tuffy after him, grumbling as he went. “Don’t know how I got myself wrapped up in all this. I’m too old! Should’ve barred that tractor door.”

  The mean-trees, Marcel guessed, were a dense patch of ancient spruces, hemlocks, and firs gnarled with years and heavy with moss. The air here had a nip to it, and the light was dim. Thin wisps of fog curled between thick trunks of cedar and disappeared into forest deeper still. All was bleak evergreen, grim browns, and blackest black.

  There was a hush to the forest. The trees, packed tight like matchsticks, seemed to steal even the slightest noise. Sound was swallowed up by their roots, bark, and branches, and the travelers hesitated to add even a whisper. When they did, it was mostly Ingot who said something like, “Watch the root here,” or, “There’s a slippery patch there.” Even Scamp kept her comments bottled up, busying herself with collecting wild mushrooms for dinner and scanning the trees with beady eyes for signs of trouble.

  A few times Marcel thought he heard whispers. He couldn’t make out any clear words—only what sounded like governor, governor. But as he’d seen no trace of bird or butterfly, rabbit or rodent around these parts, he told himself it was only the sound of their feet in the peat moss.

  (It made him feel a little better.)

  When they got to an area where every tree looked the same and the canopy of pine fringe blocked out all but the weakest light, Ingot ran up one of the trees to get a better look.

  “We’ll get to the grove by nightfall, but just,” he said when he came back down a minute later. He handed them ferns to cover themselves, to blend in. “Get a spring in your step now. And look lively. There’s mischief about.”

  The day wore on. The air grew frostier.

  “Smells like snow,” Scamp murmured to herself. “Harvest’s almost over.”

  Marcel thought again about what Scamp was missing back in Mousekinland. He turned to question her about this, but the look in Scamp’s eye when she realized he’d heard her made him snap his mouth shut. He scrambled to catch up to Ingot, who was pulling Tuffy behind him.

  But as they picked their way through the trees, Marcel’s mind was stuck on Mousekinland. The hurried scrambling and storing of food. The percussive building—carts and mou
se houses, the roofs of storage sheds and pantry doors—and the muffled digging of tunnels. The whole town had seemed frantic in their preparations. Had Marcel pulled Scamp away just when they needed her most? She’d tried to convince him it wasn’t such a big deal, but he wondered. She’d been gone for days now.

  Marcel stumbled over a twig and reached out to steady himself on the trunk of a fir. As he did, his eyes snagged on something off in the wood.

  Two yellow balls appeared to glow in some bramble twenty yards away.

  Were they flames? Were they eyes? Marcel grabbed his glasses off his nose, rubbed them against his belly, and popped them back on.

  He saw nothing but the black maw of the forest.

  Marcel blinked. He cleaned his spectacles again. He tried squinting.

  There was nothing. Nothing at all.

  He considered mentioning it, but then thought better of it. Tuffy had done well today (after they finally got him moving, that is). True, Ingot had complained once or five times about the raccoon trailing him with his eyes pinched shut, slow as a snail, but Tuffy had followed.

  Still, those two perfectly round torches—were they eyes?

  Surely it was only a trick of the light.

  * * *

  “Thought you said we’d get there by nightfall.”

  Scamp had lagged behind the others for the last hour. Impatient with how long the ordeal was taking, she kept stopping to chew a dagger out of a nice piece of wood she’d found.

  “I said I thought we’d get there by dark,” Ingot grunted over his shoulder. “There was no telling I’d be dragging a raccoon the whole way and waiting for the rest of you to catch up.” He ducked under a low-hanging branch and had to wait for Tuffy to climb through. “We’re lucky the moon’s out tonight. Least we got a lantern to see by.”

  Ingot had broken his cardinal rule. No traveling by night in the forest. But when they hadn’t gotten to his desired stopping place by nightfall, he’d left them near a stump with orders to cover Tuffy’s ears while he scrambled off to spout owl calls into the dark. When his calls went unreturned, he’d deemed it safe to keep going.

  Beyond the treetops, the moon hung like a silver coin in the sky. On the forest floor, against the bark of the trees, and bouncing off the damp sheen of every rock, the light landed in tiny spatters. It was as if the stars had fallen into the western woods and hadn’t yet flickered out.

  And it made Marcel think of Dorothy.

  He hadn’t thought about Dorothy’s stars in a long time. He hadn’t let himself.

  But once upon a time, on an unremarkable street…

  Where birds twittered in birdbaths, hounds brayed behind windows, where neighbors rocked on porch swings cradling steaming cups of tea…

  Inside a cheery clapboard house with a tall maple and a tire swing and a flap on the front door just the perfect size for a hedgehog…

  In a cozy third-floor bedroom strung with fairy lights, paper lanterns, homemade garlands, and a few dirty socks…

  There was a hidden universe of stars.

  Every night, after Dorothy finished her homework or settled her bookmark in the pages of a book, she’d pull the plug to the fairy lights, snap off the lamp next to her bed, and in the space of three seconds—the time it took for Marcel’s eyes to adjust—the room was plunged into outer space.

  Hundreds of glowing bits of greenish light held fast to the ceiling in whips and whorls. They trailed down the walls, hunkered in corners, dotted the bookshelf, dresser, and chair. The gleam of a nebula clung to the closet door. Even the windows held traces of starlight.

  Pick one, Marcel, Dorothy would say. Pick a star.

  But there, from his cage, Marcel wouldn’t—not yet. He’d wait for Dorothy to raise a freckled arm and point to some corner of the ceiling.

  There, she’d say. That one’s mine.

  It was a different star every night. And once Marcel laid eyes on Dorothy’s star, then and only then, would he choose his own. Not too close, but never too far. A star that could reach out and touch hers if only it tried. That would be Marcel’s pick of the night. That would be his wishing star.

  Because even in the heavens he never wanted to be more than a hairbreadth away from her. All he’d ever wanted was to be always by Dorothy’s side.

  Ingot piped up from the front of the group. “We’re close now. I can smell the fruit trees.”

  “Huh?” Marcel heard Scamp say from pretty far behind.

  They wound through a low channel of rock and ferns, and after finding a foothold, they climbed the mud-slick ridge back into the trees. The spaces between pine and fir widened, and the sky opened up in lacy patches overhead. Ahead, moonlight shone into a clearing just beyond a rim of hemlock.

  Tuffy shivered and slowed his pace. Ingot turned and pulled, but now the raccoon wouldn’t budge.

  “What now? We made it through the thickest part of the woods—your mean-trees or whatever you call ’em. What’s the matter now?” asked Ingot.

  Tuffy threw his paws up over his masked eyes. “Those were not the mean-trees,” he whispered, uncovering an eye and pointing to a group of squat trees in the clearing. “Those are the mean-trees. The scream-birds hide in the mean-trees! They watch with their yellow eyes. They are watching for the chippers and hoppers and Tuffys to eat their sweet-balls. Then they are screaming, and the mean-trees are throwing their sweet-balls at you, and the snatchers—”

  “What’s a snatcher?” puffed Scamp, finally catching up. “What’s he talking about?”

  “Keep going,” Marcel told Tuffy. “Tell them about the snatchers.”

  “The snatchers are waiting.” Tuffy’s whisper was as small as could be. “To snatch the chippers away.”

  Scamp was aghast. “What do you mean? What’s he mean?” She turned to Ingot and Marcel. “He said something about yellow eyes. Didn’t he say something about yellow eyes?”

  “The snatchers,” said a frowning Ingot in a low voice.

  Scamp had a strained look, like she was trying to piece things together. Instinctively, she reached for a weapon. “My sling-shooter!”

  Scamp whirled around, groping at her belt and scanning the ground. “My sling-shooter’s gone!”

  “Probably set it down one of the hundred times you stopped to whittle that dagger of yours,” said Ingot.

  “We have to go back! I need my sling-shooter!”

  Marcel, knowing just how helpful Scamp’s sling-shooter could be, was about to agree, but Ingot was firm. “We’re not traveling back, and that’s final. You could’ve set it down hours ago! You don’t even have”—he looked at Scamp’s poorly chewed dagger—“you’ve got barely anything to protect yourself.”

  Scamp swallowed a sob. Her eyes brimmed with tears.

  The squirrel was right, of course, but Scamp without her sling-shooter was like a bird without wings, a spider without legs, a hedgehog without eyeglasses. It wouldn’t have surprised Marcel at all if she’d been born with it, cocked and ready to shoot.

  Ingot gave Scamp an apologetic look before turning back to Tuffy. “Now, what the hayseed are sweet-balls?”

  “Something you can eat, I guess,” said Marcel. He thought a moment. “Didn’t you say something a little while ago about fruit trees?”

  “Fruit trees?” Scamp croaked. “Where?”

  “Ahead,” said Ingot. “The orchard next to the farmhouse.”

  “We’re saved!” Scamp screeched. And she took off running.

  “Scamp!” Ingot yelled after her. “Get back here! We can’t be sure the field’s safe!”

  But Scamp was already past the stand of hemlock and racing into the glade beyond.

  Ingot chased after her. Marcel grabbed Tuffy’s hand, and they trailed as fast as they could until they reached the edge of the clearing.

  Moonlight spilled like a white sheet over the open, overgrown grass, the crumbling outline of a long-abandoned stone farmhouse, and a small grove of apple trees. Everything was bleached and sparkling
under a thick coat of frost.

  Marcel unstrapped Toto from the leaf-sack on his chest and handed the cocoon to Ingot. He didn’t like the thought of Scamp alone and unarmed out there. Not one single bit. “I’ll go after her,” he whispered to the others.

  Marcel shook as he crept out into the grass, scanning the sky, the field, the trees for possible danger. He walked faster. He broke into a run.

  To the right a large group of seagulls roosted, asleep in the matted grass, a strange sight this deep in the forest. A rabbit, under the apple trees, dined quietly on the dropped fruit. Ahead, Scamp barreled toward the roofless farmhouse and the grass that had grown up around it like a fur rug.

  As Marcel got closer, there seemed to be an assortment of items strewn about the house. A glass canning jar. An old soup pot. Wooden fruit crates and oil cans, holes poked in the sides and curtains fluttering in the breeze.

  Curtains?

  Windows and walkways. Doors and a great dining table. Marcel recognized it immediately.

  A mouse village.

  Between the stones of the foundation, the round entrances of a hundred tiny homes dotted the surface. A line of metal watering cans, each with the rusted-out hole of a door, squatted next to the remains of a wood pile with its own collection of little houses—homes that, from what Marcel could tell, sat abandoned. It was like another version of Mousekinland, a broken-down version, lifeless as the stones themselves.

  High above, a twist of grass hung eerily from one of the house’s eaves, and Marcel shivered.

  Scamp picked her way through the tossed-about remains of the village, frost crunching under her feet. Near a broken waterspout in the house’s crumbling foundation, she disappeared through a hole, and Marcel squeezed in after her. He soon found himself on a tilting stair landing, overlooking an open basement.

  No roof covered the house, and much of the first floor had rotted away and lay open to the elements, the starry sky. Below, more of the mouse village lay thrown about, much of it floating on the ice of a shallow pool covering the cellar ground. Moonlight reflected off the surface.

  Scamp scrambled down an overgrown grapevine to the bottom. Marcel could hear her banging and clanging below and marveled at how much noise one small mouse could make.