The Privateer Mouse

This is Part Three of a Four Part series (The Red Map of Captain Gato, The Marooned Cat, The Privateer Mouse, The Long Lost Shark)

A little girl needs to keep her eyes on a very special map, and a cat makes it difficult.

Once there was a little girl who lived on an island in the shape of a circle with a lagoon in the center. She lived deep in the island, in a little wooden bungalow on stilts, with her blind grandmother.

Her father lived there too, but he had left a few months ago on a mysterious journey.

The last thing her father said to her was: “Don’t forget to feed the cat.”

This was strange because they didn’t have a cat. She thought it was some old proverb that she would have to think deeply about to understand.

The other strange thing was that he and her grandmother exchanged words just before he left as well. He handed her a folded parchment, and she handed him a necklace with a small vial on it the size of a marble, with a cat’s eye engraved on the front and a small bag with small objects in it.

He left, the little girl cried and the grandmother comforted her.

Their little house was very well lit during the day, with the curtains drawn and the sun shining through, but dark and quiet and only candle lit at night.

One night, after maybe 70 or so days after her father had left, the island alarms went off. Well, they weren’t exactly alarms, although they worked like alarms.

See, there was a shark in the lagoon, and when the shark noticed intruders, it became frenzied, since nothing much traveled through the lagoon. When the shark became frenzied, the local mosquitoes would swarm, hoping for a blood meal. Once the mosquitoes swarmed, the native animals would complain and start to move so the mosquitoes wouldn’t have a place to land.

Once the native animals began complaining and running around the cabin. The little girl and her grandmother knew someone, or something, was visiting.

Sometimes it was a lost seal that had made it into the lagoon, or the shark accidentally ran ashore trying to beach itself, but every once in a while, it was human visitors.

Grandmother heard the voices first. She quickly stood up, went to her drawer in the small Spanish writing desk, and felt around for a tiny little vial. There were no engravings on this one.

“Darling,” she said to the girl. “Touch this to your tongue.”

The girl trusted her grandmother with all her heart, and didn’t hesitate. As she touched the opening of the vial to her tongue, she was instantly turned into a tiny little brown mouse.

A tiny brown mouse emerged from a pile of little girl’s clothes on the floor.

“Do not be afraid,” said the grandmother. “If they’re here for the map, hop onto the hem of one of the men and go with them. Don’t let the map out of your sight.”

The grandmother sat down in her rocking chair facing the front door.

Five men rushed in the house with a bang. They turned over tables and broke things. They were yelling and making all sorts of ruckus. The Grandmother quieted them by telling them they were rude to knock over all her stuff. The rough men apologized and picked up a table and righted a vase.

One of the men said something about a map.

The mouse watched from her hiding place as her grandmother handed one of the men a parchment with a red string around it. It was the parchment that her father had given her before he left.

She jumped out from where she had been hiding, ran across the floor and hopped undetected into the hem of one of the men.

She peeked out to see her grandmother smiling at her as they left. Some of the men picked up the tables that were still knocked over and straightened some of the relics they had moved.

The men ran through the forest toward the beach. All the little mouse could see was rocks and sticks and fallen leaves.

The mouse found herself on a little jolly boat, then on a large ship. It was a pirate ship. She held her position in the hem until she saw her chance.

The man she had caught a ride on had sat down to eat at a large dining room with the rest of the crew.

The mouse jumped out as the man scooted his chair into position under the table, and ran across the room, up the bookshelf, across a rafter, and down onto the chandelier that hung directly above the middle of the table.

The chandelier swung back and forth with the movement of the sea. She settled in.

The men ate a large feast. They ate cheese and wine and bread and fish and chickens. They were al yelling and hollering. They were celebrating.

When the men finished eating, they cleared an area of the table and spread out the map.

She was directly above the map.

She was startled when she saw that one of the men was wearing the necklace that her grandmother had given her father, and it was not her father. What was this about? She purposed herself to get the necklace back as soon as she could.

She sat patiently for some time. The men were loud and ruckus, laughing at intervals and even throwing food at one of the crew.

That’s when she noticed the cat. One of the men tripped over the cat, almost sitting on him. The cat narrowly escaped being sat on and shot up the same bookshelf the mouse had used to get to the chandelier.

Maybe he hadn’t noticed her. She was right, at first. She sat very still. Something in her was very afraid of the cat.

Then she felt his eyes.

The movement of the boat swung the chandelier toward the cat. The cat was reaching out his paw. Then the chandelier swung away from the cat. The mouse was very happy when the chandelier swung away from the cat.

She swung back and forth for some time. It was very stressful. And not just for her. It looked like the cat almost lost his balance a couple of times reaching for the chandelier. The mouse caught a glimpse of the cat’s eyes and felt something strange, almost as if she knew the cat. But she had never seen that cat in her life. Not as a mouse or as a girl.

The mouse saw something in the cat’s eyes that made her feel something deep inside of her.

Well, then it happened. The cat lost his balance.

The cat reached out too far, the chandelier caught the cat’s claw, swung him off the bookshelf, and onto the table, where he knocked over a glass full of wine, right onto the map.

Everyone around the table stood up and yelled. One of them grabbed the cat by the scruff and took him out of the room. One of them picked up the cup that had spilled while another dabbed the map with his sleeve. The map was ruined.

There was some yelling and some complaining, and then some quiet.

Slowly, the men left the table. The map was left as it was. Soon, there was no one in the room, except for the mouse. Yelling and gunshots from frustrated men came through the door.

The mouse dropped down from the chandelier and quickly folded up the map, rolled it in a small roll and stuffed it into an empty bottle of rum.

She pushed it out the door and toward the rail. The men were so distracted that she rolled it past several of them without being noticed.

She was about to push the bottle overboard, when she remembered the words of her father.

“Remember to feed the cat.”

She remembered that the words he had spoken to her the night he left were strange, with her not owning a cat. She decided to do what her father had told her to.

She ran back into the dining room, foraged around for table scraps, found a fish, and took it in her mouth to the stern. She had heard one of the men say he had tossed the cat overboard on a dinghy, tied to a line.

The mouse found the line, climbed down with the fish in her mouth, and tossed the fish into the cat’s dinghy, then for some reason, thought it would be a good idea to chew through the line.

As she took the last nibble, the cat drifted away, and the mouse ran up the line to the deck again.

Once on deck, she found her way through the ship’s scuppers to the dormitory. She found the man whom she had seen wearing her father’s necklace sleeping in his bunk.

The necklace was still around the man’s neck.

She carefully climbed onto the man’s chest, unhooked the necklace and started back to the edge of the bunk.

Just as she reached the end of the bunk, one of the other men noticed her and started yelling.

“Mouse! Mouse!” he yelled. “Get the cat!”

She quickened her step, although she knew they wouldn’t find the cat, took the necklace back up the scuppers to the deck, dropped it into the bottle alongside the rolled up map.

She corked the bottle and shoved it off the deck, overboard into the ocean, then jumped in after it. She landed a few feet away from it, swam toward it, climbed on top of it and held on.

As she drifted, hoping she would drift to shore, she heard the captain yell “Weigh Anchor!”

The ship disappeared into the dark night.

She couldn’t tell how long she had been adrift, but suddenly, she struck ground. The sound of the bottle scraping along the sandy beach was music to her ears.

She waited for one more wave, hopped off the bottle, and pushed it the rest of the way.

She rested on the shore for a while. She was happy to be on shore, but she was sad for the cat. She was also thinking about the necklace. Where was her father?

The sound of the lapping waves and the occasional seagull was suddenly overshadowed by a “Meow”.

The mouse sat up and looked around, and saw in the distance, off shore, the cat in the dinghy.

The cat had made it. He’d be on shore in a matter of minutes.

The mouse was not sure whether to be happy to see the cat or run for her life. This was, you might remember, the cat that was going to dispose of her when they met at the chandelier.

She decided she’d take a chance. She waited on shore until the dinghy tumbled onto the shore.

The cage toppled over and opened, and the cat tumbled out. Right in front of the mouse.

After shacking the water off his ears, the cat noticed the mouse and bowed down as low as he could in front of the mouse.

The mouse nudged the cat to get up and had a good look in his eyes. For a second, the mouse thought she was looking into her father’s eyes.

The cat couldn’t help but think of her daughter as he gazed into the mouse’s eyes.

They both shook their heads as if they were shaking something off of their whiskers.

The mouse suddenly ran off and came back with strands of rope that had drifted onto the shore. She tied one end of the rope to the bottle and the other end to the cat’s tail. The cat was not happy about this, but he felt he owed her his life, so he went along with it.

The mouse motioned to the cat to follow her, and he did.

They hiked into the forest just beyond the beach, through thick undergrowth, over some fallen logs, over a small river, up a steep hill, and then the forest opened up to a small clearing with a small cabin in the far end.

The cat and the mouse made it through the clearing, up the steps and onto the porch.

There was an elderly woman waiting for them in her rocking chair on the porch.

“Well, well, well,” said the old woman. “You found each other.”

The cat and the mouse both looked at each other not knowing what the old lady was talking about.

“Well, come on then,” said the old lady. “Let’s get inside and get you two cleaned up.”

The mouse hopped up onto the old lady’s long dress and climbed up to her shoulder.

The cat, still dragging the bottle of rum with the map and the necklace inside, followed closely behind, careful not to get stepped on, or stuck outside.

Next: The Long Lost Shark