Halfway to the pond, Rye halted. “You coming or not?” he called back, hoping he sounded cocky.
Thistle scampered to her brother’s side. The two checked back.
“Well?” Rye asked.
Curleydock crept forward.
The three mice inched to the water’s edge near where the three beavers were playing. The beavers paid them no attention.
“Go on, tell them what you think,” Curleydock said, giving Rye a nudge. “You know, the way Ragweed would.”
Feeling he could not back down, a jittery Rye cupped his front paws around his mouth to make himself heard. “Hey you!” he shouted.
The beavers halted their play and looked about with dripping muzzles. “Were you speaking to us?” one of them asked.
“You’re the ones who dammed our brook, aren’t you?”
The beavers exchanged looks. One of them paddled through the water until she was close to the mice.
Her orange front teeth were enormous. The three mice retreated a few steps.
“My name is Clara. Clara Canad. What’s yours?”
“Rye.”
“Something bothering you, Rye?”
Rye took a breath. “You beavers just barged into our neighborhood and . . . and . . . took over. Ruined the Brook! Ruined the land! Ruined our nest! You’re thoughtless and greedy.”
“Hey, fellah,” Clara retorted, “making a pond is progress.”
“Progress?” Rye cried. “Progress for you, maybe. What about the rest of us? Who invited you here, anyway?”
“No one invited us,” Clara replied. “Do you mice own this brook?”
“Well . . . no.”
“There a sign posted, Reserved for Mice Only?”
“No, but . . .”
“And it’s still a free country, isn’t it?”
“I suppose . . .”
“Well, then, don’t you think we’ve got the right to build our lodges here?”
“But it’s not right!” a confused Rye cried. “You destroyed our nest!”
“Hey, sorry to hear it,” Clara returned. “There’s always a price to pay for progress.”
“But who’s paying that price?” Rye screamed. “We are! The ones who live here. You just flood, flood, flood!”
“I’d be more than happy to talk to you in a civil way,” the beaver returned, “but if all you can do is rant and rave, I’d just as soon not listen.” She turned about, and as she drew away she lifted her tail and brought it down hard and flat upon the water, sending out a great spray that thoroughly soaked the mice.
Sopping wet, the mice ran off. But not before Thistle stopped and shouted back at the beavers. “You just wait till my brother Ragweed comes home,” she cried. “He’ll fix you!”
CHAPTER 6
Rye
THE POND-SIDE meeting with the beavers had infuriated and humiliated Rye. It wasn’t only the beavers that had upset him. It was all that talk about his brother Ragweed.
Rye loved his elder brother. A lot. Admired him. Looked up to him. But if Ragweed wasn’t teasing Rye, he was lecturing him, telling him the best way to do something, saying Rye was doing something wrong. Rye chafed under such treatment. Despised it.
So there were times Rye was quite sure he hated Ragweed, too. It seemed that no matter what he did, his whole family—mother, father, brothers, and sisters—was holding Ragweed up as the best. Rye was sure they were always comparing him to Ragweed. Unfavorably. As far as Rye was concerned, it wasn’t fair. “I’m not Ragweed,” he continually reminded them. “I’m me.”
It didn’t help that Rye and Ragweed looked so much alike. Though a few months younger than Ragweed, Rye was just as long and thin, and had the same sharp, penetrating gaze and noble nose. The way most knew how to tell the brothers apart was that small notch in Rye’s right ear.
But whereas Ragweed was blunt, even cocky, Rye was considered the more thoughtful mouse, something of a dreamer. “A romantic,” Clover said, with a wistful shake of her head.
Rye often wandered nearby meadows, where he liked to fling himself under a flower and daydream of romantic adventures.
When he returned—flower in paw—and was asked what he’d done, he’d reply, “Oh, nothing. Some thinking, I suppose.”
“But what were you thinking about?”
“Today? Oh, the sky, clouds, and . . . flowers.”
It was only when Ragweed left home that Rye came into his own. Now he was the eldest of the children at home. Now the younger ones looked up to him. Now his parents called upon him to do things. His opinion was asked. He was heard.
Yet, even as that happened, Rye feared things would remain that way only until Ragweed returned. Hadn’t Curleydock said as much when Rye tried to speak to the beavers?
Hardly a wonder then that, as far as Rye was concerned, there were moments he hoped Ragweed would not come home. Of course he wouldn’t say anything like that. The thought made him feel ashamed. It seemed unnatural, sinful.
So it was that after he shouted insults at the beavers and was splashed away for his efforts, Rye returned to the family’s new nest in a deep sulk. To make things worse, no one seemed to understand why he was sulking.
“What’s the matter with Rye?” one of his younger brothers asked Thistle.
“Just daydreaming.”
“He’s always daydreaming!”
Later that day Valerian called upon Rye to join him while he went to forage for food. A reluctant Rye heaved himself up and went along.
Father and son went out behind the boulder and took a path that led them to an old patch of sunflowers. The flowers had been planted years ago by humans—or so the mice believed—and sunflowers had grown upon that spot ever since. The great, round, yellow blossoms, like so many tethered suns, nodded and bobbed. Even better—as far as the mice were concerned—it was a fine place for sunflower-seed gathering.
Rye and Valerian had gathered a fair pile of seeds when Valerian asked, “What’s the problem, Rye? You’re acting kind of droopy.”
“Oh . . . never mind,” Rye mumbled.
“You sure?”
“Well . . . yes.” Rye, who always assumed no one would listen to him, found it hard to express himself. In that, he wished he were more like Ragweed. Ragweed always told everybody exactly what he was thinking.
Valerian sat down, leaned against a stump, put
