Freddy Goes to the North Pole

by Walter R. Brooks

  A buzz of excitement went up from the animals and they crowded closer to listen. Mrs. Wiggins was sobbing softly. “My poor sister,” she gulped.

  “You needn’t be alarmed, madam,” said Ferdinand impatiently. “Your sister is quite safe. Whether you will ever see her again, however, is another matter. To continue: we had plenty to eat, and our fur coats and the tent kept us warm. But as we drifted, day after day, the iceberg slowly melted and large chunks split off and fell into the water. It was only a matter of time when there would no longer be room for us all to stand on it. As the only member of the party who could fly, I had gone on a number of scouting expeditions to see if we could get help. But although a number of animals were willing to do anything they could, there was really nothing they could do. A school of whales came by one day, and they all put their heads against the berg and tried to push it towards land, but it was so slippery that they kept slipping off and bumping into one another, and finally they gave up.

  “On one of my flights I had seen that we were approaching land, and I figured that we should pass within half a mile of it in about two days. We had decided that our only chance of escape was for the animals to try to swim that half-mile to shore. There was little hope of their reaching it, for even Freddy, who, as you know, is a champion swimmer and has won several prizes, could not hope to stay long afloat in that icy water. But there was no other way, and we had made up our minds to it, when on the very morning we had fixed for the attempt, on coming out of the ice cave in which we had been camping, we saw that a ship had come alongside the berg, and the sailors were climbing up its steep sides. They had seen the phaeton, which stood outside the cave on a ledge, and had come to find out how it got there.

  “The sailors were greatly surprised to find a cow and a cat and a dog and a pig and a horse and a crow on an iceberg in the open sea, and they took us all on board and made quite a fuss over us. They were particularly delighted with Mrs. Wogus, for the only milk they had had for the past six months had been condensed milk out of a can. Just before we all went aboard, Freddy took me aside. ‘Don’t let them catch you, Ferdinand,’ he said. ‘These sailors won’t let us go if they can help it, but there’s still hope while you’re free.’ So I flew up on top of the berg where they couldn’t reach me. I stayed round for two days, and I must say those sailors treated the animals like kings and queens. They took turns riding Hank round the deck, and they made leather collars for Jinx and Robert, and they were so pleased with Mrs. Wogus that they gave her a cabin all to herself with lace curtains at the windows, and the captain took off his hat to her whenever she came on deck. They treated Freddy well, too, but I didn’t just like the greedy way some of them looked at him, and once when Freddy went by, I saw the mate nudge the captain in the ribs, and heard him say: ‘A nice dish of pig’s knuckles and sauerkraut now, eh, Mr. Hooker?’ And the captain said: ‘Chops, Mr. Pomeroy; chops is my choice—with a bit of apple.’ And they both licked their lips and grinned.

  “Well, that can’t be helped, and what’s happened now, nobody knows. For my part, I think they were just fooling and said those things because they wanted to see Freddy get pale. Pigs look so funny when they are scared. But, to make a long story short, on the third day Freddy said to me: ‘You’d better go now. I’ve found out that this ship is a whaling ship, but they’ve had a bad year and haven’t caught a single whale, so they’ve decided to take a vacation from whaling and see if they can’t find Santa Claus’s house. You know he lives up round the north pole somewhere. They’re going to sail north as far as they can, and then when they get stuck in the ice, they’ll go on foot. You’d better fly home as fast as you can and bring help for us.’ Then he said good-bye to me. ‘You may never see me again, Ferdinand,’ he said mournfully. ‘These sailors are nice and friendly to me, but they’re big fat men, all pork-eaters—I can tell a pork-eater just by the way he looks at me, so greedy it makes me fairly blush sometimes—and what’s friendship to a hungry man?’ ‘Oh, cheer up,’ I said. ‘A little pig like you wouldn’t make more’n a breakfast for the cabin boy. They’ll try to fatten you up first, and if you’re careful of your diet and watch the calories and keep off starchy foods, you’ll stay thin, and I’ll round up some of your friends and have them back here to rescue you before anything serious happens.’ Well, that didn’t seem to comfort him much, for Freddy likes to eat almost better than he likes to make up poetry, but we said good-bye and I started flying home. I’d have been here long before this, for I was flying day and night, if I hadn’t run into a telegraph wire on the fourth night and broken my wing. It’s mending all right and I’ll be able to fly in another week, but meanwhile I’ve had to walk.

  “And now I’ve talked enough. I call for volunteers to rescue our friends and neighbours from captivity in the Far North. Who’ll go?”

  CHAPTER V

  THE RESCUE PARTY

  Of course all the animals wanted to go, but Ferdinand wouldn’t stand for any nonsense, and he lined them up and very soon had picked five and dismissed the others. Those he had chosen grouped themselves round him, looking very important. There were Mrs. Wiggins, and Jack, the big black dog, and a wise old grey horse who lived over near Centerboro and had once been in a circus. He was Hank’s uncle, and everybody called him Uncle William. And there was a porcupine named Cecil, who lived back in the woods and was very slow and lazy and rather stupid, but Ferdinand thought he would be a good one to have along, since a porcupine can go anywhere and no other animal will molest him. And lastly there was a close friend of Ferdinand’s, a wicked-looking billy-goat (his name really was Bill), whom none of the animals liked because he was so malicious and bad-tempered. The only nice thing about him was that he was so fond of Ferdinand. They used to spend hours together down in the far pasture, their heads together, and the other animals, hearing the crow’s harsh laughter and the goat’s wicked giggle, used to wonder what mischief they were hatching. But, whatever it was, none of them ever found out.

  At Mrs. Wiggins’s request, Charles and Henrietta were allowed to join the party, although Ferdinand grumbled that he didn’t see what they wanted to take a lot of poultry along for. But when the four mice who had been on the first trip to Florida came boldly forward and said they were going too, he burst into harsh laughter. “Mice!” he exclaimed. “Who ever heard of mice on an arctic expedition? What good could you do, I’d like to know? Could you fight a walrus or lick a polar bear? Listen to this, Bill. Look what wants to join the rescue party. Why, you can’t hardly see ’em!”

  Now nothing makes a mouse madder than to be made fun of on account of his size, and when Eek and Quik and Eeny and Cousin Augustus heard the loud laughter of Bill and Ferdinand and the suppressed snickers of the other animals, they were wild with rage. “What could we do, eh?” shouted Eeny, and his voice was about as loud as the whistle on a peanut stand. “We’ll show you what! You big black imitation of a stuffed mantelpiece ornament! Come on, boys! “And with that he and Eek made a rush for the crow, while Quik and Cousin Augustus dashed at Bill and, swarming up his legs before he could shake them off, ran up along his back and began chewing at his ears. Ferdinand tried to hold off the mice by jabbing at them with his beak, but they managed to keep behind him and dash in and nip his ankles whenever they saw an opening, until he cawed with pain. Meanwhile Bill was shaking his head and dancing and bucking frantically to get rid of the other two mice, but they just dug their sharp little teeth in deeper and hung on.

  “Stop!” yelled Ferdinand. “Oh—ouch! Stop it, I say! I take it all back; you’re worse’n lions and tigers. I’ll let you go if you’ll—ow yow!—if you’ll only quit!”

  So Eek and Eeny quit and sat down on the door-sill and didn’t say anything at all, which was very sensible of them, because it is very silly, when you’ve won an argument, to keep on arguing. And the other two mice jumped off Bill’s back and sat down beside them, and then Ferdinand made a speech. It was rather a good speech, but it was also rather too long, as most
speeches are, so it is not set down here. He told the animals that he was going to be captain of the expedition, since he had had some arctic experience and knew what roads they would have to travel, and he said that any animal who wasn’t willing to agree to take orders from him had better drop out right now at the start. He said that it was a long, hard, perilous trip they were starting on, as he knew personally, and that he expected every animal to do his duty. And when the speech was over, the mice climbed aboard Mrs. Wiggins, and Charles and Henrietta climbed aboard Uncle William, and Ferdinand perched on one of Bill’s horns, and the party set out amid the prolonged cheering of the stay-at-homes.

  For the first few days they travelled steadily northward through a pleasant farming country. The people here had become accustomed to seeing a great many animals on the roads and paid little attention to them. But as they got farther north, and the farms began to give way to woodland, the people were more curious about them, and they had one or two narrow escapes from being captured, so they did most of their travelling by night. They had a good deal of trouble with Cecil. Porcupines can’t walk very fast, and Cecil was always lagging behind and making them wait for him. They tried having him ride on Uncle William’s back, but they only tried it once, for his quills were as sharp as needles, and every time he moved, a dozen or so of them would stick into Uncle William. He was awfully sorry and apologetic about it, but, as Uncle William said, apologies make poor poultices. So after that Cecil walked again, and the others just had to put up with his slowness.

  As they went on, the woods grew thicker and wilder, and the roads grew narrower and ruttier, and the houses fewer and farther between. By the end of the first week Ferdinand’s wing was all right again, so that he could fly on ahead and spy out the land, and this enabled them to take a good many short cuts. One night they crossed the Saint Lawrence River by a long bridge, and then they were in Canada. They had some trouble crossing the bridge because customs men lie in wait at each end and make travellers pay a tax on certain articles. These articles that can’t be brought into a country without paying are called dutiable. Of course the animals didn’t have any luggage with them, but the Canadian customs man thought some of the animals themselves were dutiable, so he held them up. “Let’s see,” he said. “Milk and feathers and beef and hides—I dunno but there’s a duty on all of ’em.” And he took out a little book and licked his thumb and began looking through the pages to see if he could find out what the duty would be on Mrs. Wiggins and Charles and Henrietta. Things looked bad for a minute, but Ferdinand whispered in the goat’s ear and then flew straight at the man and knocked the book out of his hand. The latter stooped to pick it up, and as he did so, Bill put his head down and charged at him. The goat’s hard head with the strong curving horns hit the seat of the customs man’s trousers with a smack and shot him into the ditch at the side of the road, and before he had even begun to pick himself up, the animals had galloped off into the night.

  Soon after this the roads disappeared altogether and they plodded along through the deep forest. The woods animals were very kind to them and showed them paths and gave them directions how to avoid swamps and lakes. Sometimes a deer would guide them for a day or more over the forest trails, just for the sake of hearing a little gossip about what was going on in the outside world. Deer lead very secluded lives, and although they are curious, they are too timid ever to venture into the more cultivated regions where important things are going on. A quite small bit of gossip will last a deer for a month, and he’ll tell it over and over to all his friends, and they hurry to tell it to their friends, until it is known all over the north country. But they are very honest animals and never gossip maliciously.

  One afternoon the animals came out of the gloomy forest on to the shore of a shining lake. At their feet—which were hot and dusty, for they had walked fast and far—a beach of fine white sand sloped down into the cool water. With a whoop they dashed down and were soon splashing and shouting and playing the kind of tricks on each other that are lots of fun when you play them on someone else, but not so funny when they’re played on you. Even the mice found a little pool between two stones, about half an inch deep, where Eeny, who had taken lessons in swimming from Freddy, showed them how to swim the breast stroke. But of course mice never make good swimmers.

  Mrs. Wiggins wasn’t a very good swimmer either. She had practised a good deal in the pond at home, and maybe she would have learned, but she was so clumsy in the water and looked so frightened that the other animals all laughed at her, and then she would begin to laugh at herself and would swallow water and choke and have to be towed ashore practically helpless. Today she was just paddling round when Bill decided that it would be fun to duck her. He climbed up on her back in the water, and down she went. When she came up, she looked so bewildered that they all went into fits of laughter, and Bill did it again. Then he did it again. Then Mrs. Wiggins waded ashore and sat down in the sand. “I like a joke as well as the next one,” she said, “but enough’s enough.”

  The late afternoon sun wasn’t very hot and she felt a little chilly, so she decided to take a walk along the shore to get warm. When she got down to the end of the beach, she went round a point, and there on the other side was another little beach, and behind it a tumbledown house in a clearing. Corn was growing in the clearing, and Mrs. Wiggins was very fond of corn. There were no people in sight, and the house looked deserted, but “It’s better to be safe than sorry,” said Mrs. Wiggins to herself, and so she crouched down and tried to sneak up through the underbrush as she had seen Jinx do when he was stalking a bird. She wasn’t very good at it. She made an awful lot of noise, and she must have looked very funny. But it didn’t matter, for there wasn’t anyone to hear her; and pretty soon she was in among the corn and munching the ears with her big teeth.

  When she had eaten a peck or two, she thought she’d explore a little. “Funny,” she said—she had a great habit of talking to herself when she was alone—“funny there’s no one around. The house looks lived in. There’s a wash-tub outside, and that ax can’t have been there long—it isn’t rusty. Folks must be away.” She walked round the house at some distance, then she walked round it a little closer, then she walked up to the kitchen window and looked in—and got the surprise of her life. For there was a little girl with a very dirty face sitting in the middle of the floor and crying. Her dress was ragged, and her tears had washed little white streaks through the grime on her cheeks, making her face look even dirtier than it was, which was almost impossible. But what surprised and horrified Mrs. Wiggins was to see that there was a long rope in the kitchen, and one end of it was around the little girl’s waist, and the other was tied to a pipe under the kitchen sink.

  “Good gracious sakes alive!” Mrs. Wiggins exclaimed (very strong language for a cow). “Who on earth has tied that poor child up like that? Perhaps an ogre has captured her and is fattening her up to eat.” For Mrs. Wiggins, though only a cow, knew about ogres. There were stories about them in Grimm’s Fairy-tales, which was one of the nicest books in Freddy’s library, and Freddy had often read them aloud to the animals during the long winter evenings in the warm cowbarn.

  But it couldn’t be that. The little girl was too thin. Anyway, the first thing to do was to rescue her. And so Mrs. Wiggins tapped gently on the glass with the tip of her left horn.

  The little girl sobbed twice, gulped, sniffed, and looked up. Mrs. Wiggins was not handsome, and the window was so dirty and had so many cracks in it that from the inside of the room she looked like a funny picture of a cow that somebody had partly erased with a very smeary eraser; but her eyes were so big and brown and kind and sympathetic that the little girl wasn’t afraid at all, and she jumped up and ran as close to the window as the rope would let her, which was about two feet, and said: “Hello, cow! What’s your name? Have you come to take us away?”

  Mrs. Wiggins nodded her head and then, without waiting to hear what the little girl was saying, went round to the kitc
hen door and put her head against it and gave it a big push, and the door fell in with a bang and Mrs. Wiggins walked over it into the kitchen. But when she got in, she found that she couldn’t do anything. She took the rope in her teeth and pulled, but it wouldn’t break, and she tried to break the pipe that it was tied to with her horns, but she couldn’t get at it properly, and all the while the little girl was jumping up and down in her excitement, laughing and crying, and saying: “Oh, hurry, hurry! They’ll be back pretty soon, and they won’t let you take us away. Please hurry!”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Wiggins to herself, “we’re not getting anywhere this way. Not anywhere at all!” She thought a minute; then she went to the door and gave three long moos. This was the signal the animals had agreed on as a call for help. And, sure enough, in less than three minutes Jack and Bill and Uncle William and Charles and Henrietta came tearing across the clearing. The mice were on Bill’s back, and Cecil was coming along behind as fast as he could. And Ferdinand was flying in circles overhead and acting as scout.

  They all crowded into the kitchen, and while the other animals sat round and made sympathetic noises at the little girl, who was a little overpowered by seeing so many of them all at once, the mice got to work on the rope and in a few minutes had gnawed it apart. Then the little girl threw her arms around Mrs. Wiggins’s neck and kissed her, which affected the cow so much that she cried. And then they went outside, where Ferdinand was on guard.