The Amazing Adventures of Freddie Whitemouse by Elizabeth Jane Howard Page B

tasted horrible; various relatives had hauled him out by his tail) and soon found that he was out of
his depth but it didn’t matter because he was swimming! It was a lovely feeling; he swam across the pool and back several times until he almost began to feel cold. So he waded out and shook
himself so that sparks of water shot out of his fur; the air was so hot that it seemed to dry him in minutes. But the swim had made him hungrier than ever, and as he padded off into the jungle the
sudden thought of cheese overwhelmed him. You didn’t have to hunt for cheese, it didn’t run away from you when it saw you coming, it just lay there while you munched it up.
    On the other hand, he realised wearily, jungles did not seem to have cheese in them. You needed people for cheese, and the jungle seemed pretty short of them. Perhaps I should explain here that
if you are thinking of a jungle as a dense dark green place full of ferns and creepers and tall trees, you are thinking of rainforest, which is quite a different thing.
    The jungle that Freddie found himself in was dry, because it hadn’t rained for months, and was full of small shrubs and trees of varying sizes, with some open glades and a great deal of
dry tall grass and sometimes large grey rocks. The glades, he discovered, were where the deer grazed: he came across two small herds of these, but they fled the moment he got near them. To begin
with he chased them, but all that did was make him tired and even more in need of food.
    But Freddie was not stupid. In a few hours he had learned to move soundlessly through the grass, to wait much longer before he started the chase, and, most important of all, that even when the
deer did not see or hear him, they ran away if they smelled him, but if he got into a position where he could smell them it was much easier (hunters call this ‘getting downwind’, but
Freddie didn’t know that, never having met any). He certainly was not stupid, but all the unsuccessful chases had made him much weaker.
Next time
, he said to himself,
I’ve
got to catch one. It might be my last chance
.
    Eventually, in the early evening, he came across some deer who, though grazing, seemed also on the move, and he quickly guessed that they were making their way to the drinking place at the
river. So he went ahead of them and chose a really good position beside some rocks only a few yards from where the deer would have to come. His striped fur blended in with the tall yellowy grass,
so well that you or I would never have known he was there unless we happened to catch sight of his stern yellow eyes that were fixed upon the single point where, because of the rocks opposite, the
deer would have to come in a single file to reach the pool. He could hear them coming now, their feet making small crackling noises in the dry undergrowth. He let three go past him and then he
sprang.
    He went straight for his victim’s throat, and almost before he brought the deer down, it stopped struggling and the others all fled. He dragged his prey to a shady spot under a tree and
settled down to a feast. His sharp claws and his very rough tongue meant that he could get at all the bits he found that as a tiger he liked most. He purred as he ate (he had the most enormous purr
that sounded almost like an engine). After an hour of feasting he could eat no more, so he dragged the remains of the carcass to a place between two rocks. He was full to the brim of deer and
extremely sleepy. He climbed onto the lowest branch of a tree, draped himself gracefully along it and fell into a deep, contented sleep.
    He woke suddenly; it was a starless night, the sky was as dark and dense as black velvet and the moon was veiled in cloud. What woke him was the sounds that seemed to be coming from the rocks
where he had hidden the remains of his kill. Someone had found it – it sounded like more than one someone – and was making a series of high-pitched growls, punctuated by little