PeeWee's Tale

  This book is for

  a teller of tales & good friend,

  Barbara Ann Porte

  —J.H.

  Text © 2000 Johanna Hurwitz

  Illustrations © 2000 Patience Brewster

  All rights reserved.

  The illustrations in this book were rendered in pencil.

  Type set in 16-point Centaur MT.

  ISBN 978-1-4521-3798-8 (epub, mobi)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hurwitz, Johanna.

  Peewee’s tale/Johanna Hurwitz; illustrated by Patience Brewster.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When his owner’s parents let him go in Central Park, a young guinea pig learns to survive in the natural world with the help of a “park-wise” squirrel while trying to find his way back home.

  ISBN: 978-1-58717-111-6

  [1. Guinea pigs—Fiction. 2. Squirrels—Fiction. 3. Central Park (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction]

  I. Brewster, Patience, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.H9574Ph 2000 [Fic]—dc20 00-26177

  Chronicle Books LLC

  680 Second Street, San Francisco, CA 94107

  www.chroniclekids.com

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Birthday Present 1

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the Dark 11

  CHAPTER THREE

  A New World 22

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Lessons from Lexi 32

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Picnic in the Park 39

  CHAPTER SIX

  Words with a Warning 47

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I Meet a Group of Children 53

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Water from Above 59

  CHAPTER NINE

  Water Down Below 67

  CHAPTER TEN

  Life in the Park 80

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Robbie 90

  About the Author and Illustrator 104

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Birthday Present

  I was born in a cage in Casey’s Pet Shop. Though my eyes were open, I can’t remember my first hours or days. But soon I became aware of the wonderful smell of my mother and four siblings. We huddled together for warmth and comfort. I drank my mother’s milk and scratched my tiny paws on the floor of the cage.

  One by one, my brothers and sisters left home to be adopted by humans. And by the time I was a few months old, I had a new home too. On May 2, I became the birthday present for a nine-year-old boy named Robbie Fischler. It didn’t take long for me to discover that he’d been hoping for a dog.

  “What’s this peewee thing, Uncle Arthur?” he asked as he was handed my cage, which was tied with a red bow that was larger than me.

  “Haven’t you ever seen one, Robbie? It’s a guinea pig,” Uncle Arthur told him.

  I stood up straight and proud as I looked at Robbie through the mesh wire of the cage.

  “Guinea pigs are members of the rodent family, like mice,” my new owner was told.

  “Oh, Arthur! How could you bring such a disgusting creature into this apartment?” a woman complained loudly.

  “Now, Barbara . . . Robbie is my only nephew and it’s time he had a pet of his own to take care of.”

  “I wish it was a puppy,” Robbie said gently. “I don’t think guinea pigs can do anything.”

  I ran around inside my cage trying to act like a puppy. I’d seen many at Casey’s Pet Shop. I couldn’t bark or wag my tail, but I tried to look cute and friendly.

  “Your parents would have had a fit if I had walked in here with a dog,” Uncle Arthur explained. “Beside, a guinea pig is so much easier to care for. It’ll help you develop a sense of responsibility for when you do get a dog.”

  “We have no plans of getting him a dog,” Robbie’s mother said. “Arthur, you should have asked me before you brought this rodent here.”

  Robbie opened the cage and put his hand inside to pick me up. Mrs. Fischler screamed and backed away as her son stroked my fur. I rubbed against Robbie the way I’d noticed cats doing in the pet shop. Maybe that would make my new owner happy.

  It seemed to work.

  “He’s awfully cute,” Robbie admitted, looking at my dark brown fur, which has streaks of reddish brown here and there. I also have a reddish-brown strip down the center of my face.

  Robbie smiled. “I really, really like him. Thanks a lot, Uncle Arthur. I’ll pretend he’s a dog.”

  “And I’ll pretend he isn’t here,” Robbie’s mother said, shuddering.

  When Robbie’s father came home, I was shown proudly to him. “I’m going to call him PeeWee,” Robbie announced. “Because he’s so small.”

  “Hi, PeeWee,” Mr. Fischler said to me.

  “Why couldn’t Arthur have given him some goldfish?” Mrs. Fischler asked her husband. “Instead he gave Robbie a rodent.”

  “Don’t worry,” Robbie’s dad said. “He’s in a cage. He won’t bother you.”

  “But Arthur knows how I hate mice,” Mrs. Fischler said. “I’ve hated them ever since we were children.”

  “PeeWee’s not a mouse,” Robbie reminded his mother.

  “Come on. Let’s get ready,” Robbie’s father said, trying to distract his wife. “Remember, we’re taking Robbie out to dinner and to a movie to celebrate his birthday.”

  In a little while I was alone in my cage in Robbie’s bedroom. Unlike the pet shop, there were no other cages or animals around. But still, there was plenty for me to see. There were brightly colored curtains on the windows, a bed with a matching spread, and shelves filled with toys and books. I decided that Robbie’s mother couldn’t be all bad if she’d fixed up her son’s room and given him so many toys.

  My new cage was smaller than the one in which I lived at Casey’s Pet shop, but at least I didn’t have to share it with any other guinea pigs. Just like before, the bottom of my cage was covered with scraps of paper. It would be Robbie’s job to remove the scraps from time to time as they became dirty and wet. He would have to replace them with other scraps.

  Back at Casey’s, I had first noticed that there were markings on the papers. They were all different, black and strange. I looked at them closely.

  When my mother saw my interest, she explained them to me. “Those are the letters of the alphabet,” she had told me. “There are twenty-six big and twenty six small ones. Together the letters join to make words that humans can understand. They call it reading.”

  “How do you know about them?” I asked her.

  That was when I learned that she had been born in a cage inside a schoolroom. “It was filled with boys and girls who were being taught the letters,” she said. “I learned the entire alphabet faster than most of the children,” she added proudly.

  After that, I began to study the bits of paper. My brothers and sister thought that I was weird to want to look at those scraps.

  “They don’t taste good,” said one brother.

  “You can’t climb on them,” said one of my sisters.

  I didn’t care what my brothers and sisters said. Every day, after I finished eating, I shifted through the paper bits. My mother taught me how to recognize the straight and curved lines that made up the letters. It wasn’t easy, but after a while, I could tell them apart.

  Soon I, like my mother, could read all the letters on the scraps, I read them aloud. Ne and May and TI.

  “But what does it mean?” I asked my mother. “What’s the point of learning these letters if they don’t say something that makes sense?”

  “Don’t forget you’re reading scraps,” my mother reminded me. “The children in the schoolroom had books with whole pages of letters that told them fine stories. They didn’t have the little bits and pieces that we have
here.”

  I had looked down at the floor of the cage. Perhaps if I pushed the pieces together, I could create a whole page that would tell a story too. But it never worked. All I could read were more scraps that said Opr and Yor and Majo.

  Now in my new cage in Robbie Fischler’s bedroom, I studied the scraps again. The pieces of paper in my new cage were just as small and meaningless as they had been in my old one though. If only they were larger! Still, seeing the books on the shelf in the room gave me hope. Perhaps I would finally have a chance to see one of them open with a complete page in front of me. Then I could read a story.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the Dark

  It didn’t take me long to adjust to my new home. One cage is pretty much like another: four sides, a water supply, an exercise wheel. But belonging to Robbie was much more fun than living in the pet store. Because he really wanted a dog, Robbie treated me as if I were one. He didn’t make me stay inside my cage. Instead, he often let me out to explore his bedroom. At first, I was a little timid. But soon I learned to run under his bed; I hid inside his bedroom slippers; I walked around inside the dark closet where his clothing hung.

  Maybe it was because he didn’t have any brothers or sisters, but Robbie talked to me a lot. Sometimes he held me up to the window. I could see the street below with the cars going along. And in the distance, I noticed a large area of green. “That’s the park where I go and play with my friends,” Robbie explained to me. What was the park like? I wondered. But my world inside Robbie’s apartment was big enough to keep me busy.

  One day Robbie’s mother walked into his bedroom. Robbie was sitting on his bed and I was on his lap while he gently combed my fur.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Mrs. Fischler yelled.

  “I’m combing PeeWee’s hair. You’re always telling me to comb mine,” Robbie explained.

  “Throw that comb into the garbage at once,” his mother told him. “I don’t want it to go anywhere near your head ever again. I’ll get you a new comb, but it’s just for you—not that rodent.”

  “If you’re getting me a new comb, I can save this one for PeeWee,” Robbie suggested.

  “No! I don’t like you handling him so much. And I never want to see him on your bed either. Put him back in his cage where he belongs.”

  That was bad, but worse was to come. One day when Robbie let me out of my cage, I went into the hallway outside his bedroom. Just at that moment, Mrs. Fischler came walking by. She took one look at me and let out a deafening shriek.

  “Help!” she screamed so loudly that she frightened me. I ran around in a circle looking desperately for a place to hide.

  Robbie came running.

  In her panic, Mrs. Fischler had jumped up on a nearby chair.

  “What is that creature doing out here?” she shouted.

  “PeeWee was just taking a little walk,” said Robbie, picking me up.

  “Lock him inside his cage immediately!” his mother called to Robbie “And keep him in it.”

  So Robbie took me back into his room and placed me inside my cage.

  “Isn’t she silly?” Robbie whispered to me. “How could anyone be afraid of you, PeeWee?”

  Even though I wasn’t hungry, I nibbled on one of the dry pellets that were the major part of my diet. Eating, drinking, and running on the exercise wheel were the only activities that I had. Of course, I still occasionally studied the letters on the scraps of paper on the floor of my cage. Even though they made no sense, I wanted to keep my ability to read.

  So life at the Fischlers’ continued, and I was careful not to leave Robbie’s bedroom. I didn’t want to frighten his mother, and I really didn’t want her to frighten me.

  One evening when Robbie had a sleepover date at the home of one of his classmates, Mrs. Fischler came into his bedroom. Mr. Fischler was with her.

  Lying quietly in the corner of my cage, I listened to Robbie’s parents speaking together.

  “Barbara, I don’t like this at all,” Mr. Fischler said to his wife. “He’s going to be very upset when he comes home.”

  “Robbie didn’t even want a guinea pig,” Mrs. Fischler responded. “If my brother hadn’t given it to him for his birthday, we wouldn’t have this problem. But I can’t go about my own home in fear that this thing is going to get out.”

  “What does it matter if he does? This poor guinea pig can’t possibly hurt you.”

  “You don’t understand,” Mrs. Fischler said. “I keep imagining this rodent in every corner. I can’t relax. I even wake at night thinking of him crawling around. We’ll just tell Robbie that he got out of the cage and got lost. He’ll feel bad for a day or two, but he’ll get over it. And I’ll make it up to him in some way.”

  “What you want to do is probably illegal,” Mr. Fischler said.

  I stood up in my cage. What were the Fischlers going to do? I wished Robbie was there to protect me.

  Mr. Fischler opened my cage and took me out. “He is a handsome fellow,” he said to his wife as he stroked my fur. “I’m only going along with this because I’m concerned about what the guinea pig is doing to your blood pressure.”

  I looked at Robbie’s mother. What was blood pressure? I wondered. Mrs. Fischler nodded her head. “Go on already. Put him in the box and get him out of here,” she said.

  Robbie’s father put me inside a small box. At once, the lid was placed on top of it and it became too dark for me to see anything.

  “I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” I heard Mr. Fischler say.

  After that, there were no more words. But the box jiggled up and down, and I guessed that Mr. Fischler was carrying me someplace. I ran around in the small space trying to find a way out. What was happening to me? I was sure it couldn’t be good.

  After a while, the motion of the box stopped. The lid was removed. Although it was only dimly lit, I could see the face of Robbie’s father looking down at me.

  “Well, good luck, PeeWee,” he said, stroking my fur gently. “It’s not your fault that you were born a guinea pig.”

  Then he took me from the box and placed me down on the floor. If felt damp and prickly, not at all like the paper-covered floor of either of my cages or the soft carpeting at Robbie’s home.

  In the dim light, I could see the shoes and legs of Mr. Fischler begin to move away from me. I ran after him as fast as I could. But my legs are so very small and my feet are even smaller. Mr. Fischler got farther and farther away, and soon I knew it was hopeless. I couldn’t possibly catch up with him. I could hardly breathe from all my running, and my mouth was dry with thirst.

  When I finally started moving again, one of my paws stepped into something wet. I turned around and discovered a puddle of water. Nothing ever tasted so good as that cool liquid on my tongue.

  Now I wasn’t thirsty, but I was very, very tired. I was too tired to be afraid, too tired to wonder where I was. All I wanted was to curl up and take a nap. When I awoke, I would think about how I could find Robbie.

  Near where I was standing, there was a small cage. I circled around and saw that it had only three walls. Still, I felt I would be safer inside it than out. In all my life, I’d never slept outside of a cage.

  Inside, the cage had an unusual smell. I licked a small part of it and discovered a fine salty taste. So I licked one whole wall before I feel asleep.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A New World

  I woke with a thud. Suddenly, I found myself rolling round and round. It took me a moment to realize that I was not inside the wheel or even inside my usual cage. I was someplace else.

  Finally, my new home rolled to a halt. After my heart stopped thudding, I cautiously stepped outside. It was not longer dark like the night before, and I could see many strange sights.

  Color was all around me, more beautiful than the curtains and bedspread in Robbie’s room. I marveled at brilliant yellow and a hundred shades of green, I could hear many birds singing, and their songs were sweeter than tho
se of the birds I’d known in the pet shop. Moving forward, I sniffed at the ground. This place smelled pretty wonderful, too!

  I ran to a nearby puddle and took a long drink. On my way, I noticed that the ground seemed to be in two parts. Some was covered with something hard, and the rest was softer and had plants growing from it. I nibbled one of the plants and discovered that the taste was much, much better than my old pellets.

  “Who in the world are you?” a voice asked.

  Startled, I looked around but I could see no one.

  “Up here,” said the voice. “In the tree.”

  I raised my head and noticed a tall structure, even taller than Robbie’s father or his uncle Arthur. At first I thought this tall thing was speaking to me. But then I noticed a small creature sitting on one of the many arms.

  I had never seen such an animal before. He was close to my size and he was a dull gray color, except for his chest, which was white. He came closer to me with amazing speed.

  That’s when I became aware of the most incredible thing about him: his tail. My tail is a small useless stub, but his was long and full and waved back and forth as he moved. I had seen dog and cat tails in the pet shop, but none that were as magnificent as the one this creature had.

  “I’m PeeWee,” I told him when he landed on the ground beside me. “I’m a guinea pig. What are you?”

  I’m a squirrel,” the creature said proudly as he scratched himself with one of his rear legs, “My name is Lexington. But you can call me Lexi.”

  “Where are we?” I asked my new friend.

  “We’re near Seventy-third Street in the borough of Manhattan, which is in New York City,” Lexi told me. “And I was named after one of its avenues. I have brothers named Amsterdam, Columbus, and Madison.”

  “I belong to a boy named Robbie,” I explained to Lexi. “But I don’t know where his is.”