The part of the train that sat before Ragweed was a boxcar. “Great Western Trail” was written large on its dull red sides of corrugated steel. The name charmed Ragweed, speaking to him of great adventures. Even better, the door was open.
Full of the desire to explore, Ragweed scurried into the gully. Approaching the tracks, he found a low coupling hose hanging between two boxcars. He leaped on the coupling, climbed up it, then ran along a rain gutter on the side of the car. Within moments he was inside.
The boxcar appeared to be empty. Then Ragweed spied a split sack labeled “Oats” in a corner. Though he did not exactly know what oats were, he knew good food when he smelled it. Besides, he was hungry. The day had been exciting but long.
“This is the life,” he murmured as he pushed his nose into the oats and began to munch. He was still gorging himself when the train gave a sudden lurch.
“Hey! What’s happening?” Ragweed cried and rushed to the open door. To his amazement the boxcar was moving. At first it did not go very fast. Within moments, however, it was rattling along at speeds far greater than Ragweed ever could have imagined.
With a sense of shock Ragweed realized that his woodland home was very quickly fading away. His heart experienced a painful squeeze. Not only was he now truly going to see the world, there was no turning back.
The young mouse, in a voice that managed to combine joy and sorrow, cried, “City, here I come!”
CHAPTER 3
Silversides
SILVERSIDES WAS NOT JUST another white cat. She was a very angry cat. According to her, the world had become a terrible place, and the cause of it all was mice.
A large cat, Silversides was seven years old, in the very prime of life. Her eyes were yellow, her fur white as snow. Around her neck was a pink polyvinyl collar studded with sparkling diamond-like sequins. Dangling from this collar was her city license—“Amperville 30”—a tag she wore with pride. Low numbers were prized among Amperville’s many cats.
Silversides lived in the home into which she had been carried as an eight-week-old kitten. Most recently her private place was a rug behind a growling basement furnace. The house humans came by this warm, quiet spot only rarely, which meant that these days Silversides was alone most of the time. This did not please her.
Though Silversides had raised twelve kittens during her mothering years, she had done it by herself. It had not been easy tending her litters. It required continual struggle to teach the kittens to grow into decent hardworking, right-thinking cats. As far as she was concerned, she had succeeded. Now they were grown and gone, having chosen homes of their own. There were even grand-kittens.
Though Silversides saw these youngsters only occasionally—on midnight strolls, while she was patrolling her territory or hunting in the park—she fretted about them all the time. Life in the city of Amperville was not what it once had been.
When Silversides had been young, Amperville had been prosperous, clean, and wholesome. Mice were relatively few. Now—she had no idea why—the humans who bore the prime responsibility for keeping things up no longer cared much about Amperville. The community was rundown. The worst result was that the city had become infested by mice. Moreover, these mice were very different from those of previous generations.
In the good old days—according to Silversides—house mice knew their place and numbers. Timid and respectful, these mice lived, with gratitude, on crumbs. They entered houses furtively, and then only through back doors or cracks in foundations.
Only rarely did these mice make themselves noticeable. To do otherwise was to put their lives at risk, as both cats and mice understood.
When the occasional rebellious house mouse got uppity, Amperville cats knew exactly what to do with them. The upstart mouse would be caught and . . . dealt with. No fuss. No muss. Nothing needed to be said.
But nowadays Amperville mice had not just increased in number, they had become brazen. They acted as if they actually had a right to be in Amperville, going so far as to claim part of town—a section by the railroad that humans had abandoned—as their own. Mouse Town, they called it. They had their own mayor, schools, clubs.
Though Silversides tried at first to ignore these new mice, every one of them was a personal insult, an unending irritation, a reminder that things were not as they should be.
Then two things of great importance happened.
The girl who lived in Silversides’s house brought home a white-furred, pink-eyed mouse and kept it in her room. She called this mouse Blinker. The mouse’s very name—sickeningly cute—irritated Silversides enormously. That she and this mouse were the same color only served to inflame the cat even more.
There had been a time when Silversides had slept on the girl’s pillow. If she wasn’t sleeping on the pillow, she was on the rug at the foot of the girl’s bed. Now the girl lavished all her affection on the mouse. She fondled him, kissed him, carried him around, gave Blinker the complete freedom of her room. Worst of all, the girl told Silversides that she was no longer welcome there. The rug had been removed to the basement.
Insulted and humiliated, Silversides hid behind the furnace for days on end. There she brooded and sulked, deeply depressed, preferring the darkness of the cellar and the smelly litter box to any kind of social life, indoors or out.
Only now and again did Silversides venture forth. When she did, it was to visit her grown-up kittens and grand-kittens. It was just such a visit that brought about a second crisis, one that changed the course of Silversides’s life.
Jasper was a particular favorite grand-kitten of Silversides’s. He was an affectionate coal-black creature with blue eyes and a splash of white upon his chest.
One day Silversides came to visit Jasper only
