by Mary Sheeran
I am not supposed to tell anyone this story, but I will tell it to you. You look honest. I am very good at telling about people.
This happened a long time ago, and so I think it is safe to tell now. I am very old and don’t hunt banditos much anymore, and I also understand something about your language. It takes a long time for you to understand things. It is not your fault. It is just the way you are. I will try to tell this story in a way that you will understand.
Not very long after I was born, I went exploring. My brothers and sisters and I roamed the tall grass of this wonderful place and then we roamed about inside. We lived in something called a pantry, and for a while, in something really small called a box. I was the first to get out of the box. Mother said she had to grab my neck and pull me back, and that if she turned to lick one of us, I would have disappeared when she turned around again!
We lived in such a big place! How could I not want to explore? But there were dangers! Big creatures running around and nearly squashing me! You would think they could smell me, at least! But they went barging through without paying the least attention. No wonder they got into trouble all the time. My mother said they were the humans. She said that I could learn to ignore them, and I did. But, she said, sometimes they are worth all the trouble they make.
For a while I would go a little ways from the box and then go back. My brothers and sisters did not explore as much and would never go as far as I would. Well, if you don’t set your sights high, you will never see anything, I say. All right, I liked to play out doors with my brothers, but I had other work to do. Every night, I would decide to explore farther.
Our mother said that we were lucky: that we lived in a very fine and very big house owned by humans, and that we had a very important job. We were to hunt down banditos who lived behind the walls and who were brown creatures that were very tiny and caused great destruction and alarm among the people. I vowed to catch any and all banditos in the house!
It turns out that the humans in our house were very nice. They would pick me up and pet me and talk to me. I could not understand them. At first, I was afraid of them. But now I realize that the humans do not have keen senses of smell or hearing and that they depend very much on the animals to make it through a day. They can build these big houses, but they need even little animals like me to protect them from banditos.
And so, I would explore every day because I wanted to find any banditos! I went inside the house and outside. I never gave up. There was so much! It was exhausting.
I loved the big room where the people would sit and eat and talk. I learned to know who they were. The very tall man could cross the room very fast, and sometimes his feet would barely miss me. But he always saw me, picked me up in his big hands, and brought me back to the pantry, all the while talking to me in a very nice sounding voice and stroking my fur gently. My, I was high! And he moved so fast! I peered out of his arm and knew what a bird felt like. How wonderful to move like that! I liked this so much that I kept going back to this room, and he would always make his happy sound and take me back home to the pantry. I never got tired of this game, and he seemed to enjoy it, too.
I must say that humans are smart enough to have lots of things to play with. The best plaything in that room was this big big box. It took some effort to climb up on top of it, but I figured out how to do it, and then once you made it to the top, you could hop down to a floor that moved and made noise! I could not get over this – what fun to walk on a moving, noisy floor!
I became so good at this that I would be able to go at night and climb onto the box and walk around on it. This caused a lot of commotion, and someone would always pick me up and take me home to my box.
My mother told me that I should stay near the kitchen to catch banditos. But don’t you think that to catch banditos, you should make sure they are far far away?
I thought so.
I would climb up and up a very big floor. My mother called it the stairs. As in, "If you go near those stairs again—" What could be there? I went up and up and up – it took me a long time to do that. My brothers and sisters said that if I went up, I would never come down again. But I made it! I was so exhausted that I needed a quiet spot to sleep. Something was hanging down off a big square box on the floor, and it looked soft, so I managed to pull it down. I was one tired kitty.
I woke up to voices. I was about to snarl when the nice man with the big walk and his friend moved very quickly through the room and made a door open. Of course, I was curious, so I followed them. The door shut behind me, and I jumped. Luckily, my tail did not catch on the door.
The nice big man was taking off his outer layer (why can humans take their layers off? It is unfair.) and putting on another one that looked darker. He covered his eyes, too, and then, looking down, he saw me.
"Look, Bernardo, we have a spy," he said. He picked me up and I licked his face. He made his happy sound, which is very loud, and he carried me down some stairs and put me down on the floor. "Take him to the kitchen, Bernardo, and make sure he doesn’t talk!" At least, that is what I think he said.
Well, I did talk. I told my mother what happened. She listened and she said, "I knew that he was the fox."
Fox? The nice big man was a fox?
She tried to explain to me that this fox was good and tried to help people, who it seems, being humans, need help an awful lot. She said I must never tell anyone, not even an ant, and certainly not a bandito. The fox fights banditos, too. I felt very proud that I saw the man fox. I will be a very great fighter of banditos, I decided, and keep the honor of this house.
I did, too. I started to find a lot of banditos, and I was very good at hunting them. I was the first of my litter to find a bandito, yes! Even the humans said I was best. I hoped that someday the fox man would let me hunt big banditos! Sometimes, I would sniff his scent behind the walls, but I could never find him. I knew that at those times, he was fighting banditos. If only he would let me help!
