PeeWee and Plush by Johanna Hurwitz

CHAPTER ONE
Here Is Plush

    My name is PeeWee and I’m a guinea pig. In my life I’ve had three homes, two friends, and one wish.
    My first home was the cage in Casey’s Pet Shop, where I was born in a small but cozy cage. One by one, my four brothers and sisters were adopted by happy, eager children. My turn came too. At my second home, I was the pet of a boy named Robbie Fischler.But one evening I was taken from him and set loose in Central Park. At first it seemed I might not survive at all. For all its beauty and space, the park is full of unexpected dangers for a guinea pig. But gradually I learned how to manage.
    Now I live in my third home. It’s a hole in the base of a tree. Sometimes it’s damp and sometimes it’s dusty. But this new home of mine is the best of all, because I’ve come to love the park and the freedom I have here.
    One of my friends is Lexington, a clever and helpful squirrel, who taught me how to find food, shelter, and safety. He’s shared his advice and his meals with me and has entertained me with his acrobatic tricks and wise sayings. Lexington told me to call him
Lexi
for short. But I hope to call him that not for short, but for a long, long time.

    My other friend was a kind and gentle human being who came to the park because he was lost. My human friend guessed that one guinea pig needs another, just as an eye needs an eyelid and a tongue needs a mouth. So before he left, he brought another guinea pig to the park. It was love at first sight for me. From the moment I saw her, I was struck by Plush’s golden brown coat and dark eyes. She was beautiful!

    And what’s my only wish? I want a family. I watch Lexi as he leaps across the grass or through the trees. Everywhere he’s greeted by dozens of cousins, scores of brothers and sisters, and hundreds of aunts and uncles. He pretends that he doesn’t care about them. “Squirrels aren’t interested in family,” he insists. “What good are all those relatives?
Only a nut can fill you up
.” He doesn’t seem to take into account that many of the nuts he digs up were buried in the ground by some of those very relatives he thinks are of no importance.
    Now that Plush is here in the park with me, my wish can become a reality. In another moon, I’ll be six months old. Although a human is still an infant at that age, guinea pigs grow very quickly. A six-month-oldguinea pig is an adult. I’m hopeful that before the summer is out, Plush might be interested in starting a family of our own. We’ll start small, but who knows? Perhaps someday there will be as many guinea pigs running through the park as there are squirrels.
    We may not be able to climb trees. We don’t have strong claws and teeth sharp enough to defend ourselves from enemies. But the first guinea pigs weren’t born in cages. They lived outdoors in nature. And it can happen again. Maybe Plush and I will begin the rise of a new era in guinea pig history!

    I’ll never forget that first evening when Plushcuddled up inside my tree hole home. Lexi had presented us with a soft woolen scarf that had lined his nest. Now it was on the floor of my home. Plush pulled it around herself to protect her from the hole’s damp chill. I’d become used to it, but it was good that Plush had this extra comfort on her first night in new surroundings.
    â€œThere’s so much to see and do here,” I whispered to her. “Tomorrow I’ll show you a whole new world.”
    â€œIt seems so big. Too big,” said Plush softly.
    I knew how she felt. It wasn’t so long ago when the vastness of the park overwhelmed me too. But now I felt perfectly at home here, and I would do all I could to help her learn to love this new place too. “Don’tworry. I’ll make sure nothing bad happens to you,” I promised her.
    Together we listened to the sounds of the park at night: the leaves above us