“Now let’s do our dance,” Sixclaw hissed.
With his back paw, he kicked a cloud of dirt into Kit’s face and, at the same instant, sprang on him. Kit was knocked backward to the ground, the cat on top of him. He could feel the pinpricks of the sharp claws piercing his fur. He tried to knock the orange cat off, but Sixclaw was too strong for him. The cat tried to bite at Kit’s wrists, but the cans he wore as armor protected him. Kit took a swing with one of them and bashed Sixclaw across the head. That knocked the cat sideways and let Kit twist himself free. He popped to his feet.
But he wasn’t a trained fighter, and Sixclaw was.
“Claws up, Kit!” he heard a news finch shout. “Keep your claws up!”
Before Kit could raise his claws, though, the cat was on him, tackling him facedown and pressing his snout into the dirt.
“You know, when I sent those dogs to kill your parents, I didn’t expect you to run away,” Sixclaw taunted. Kit’s nose squished against the ground. He couldn’t breathe. The cat’s claws cut deeper into him. He felt blood trickling down his side. “A good son wouldn’t have run away. A good son would’ve stayed and fought. I was surprised, Kit, that you were not a good son. But I guess that’s how you ended up here, in Ankle Snap Alley, where the most wretched vermin under all the skies go to die!”
Kit twisted his neck around to see the cat on his back, silhouetted now by the white-hot sun above him. The cat had one claw raised, preparing to swipe and slash Kit’s neck open. No matter how Kit struggled, he couldn’t free himself.
Behind the cat, he saw the Blacktail brothers. They were out of breath from fighting, but they were still armed and close enough to help him. They would never be his friends, but they were on the same side in this battle at least.
Even as the air was leaving his lungs, Kit found the strength to call out. “Help!” he cried. “Shane! Flynn! Help me!”
The Blacktail brothers looked at Kit in his peril, looked at each other, and simply turned away.
Indifference was their revenge.
Kit closed his eyes. He pictured his mother and father in their burrow back beneath the Big Sky, and he smiled. He would see them again soon. Let the struggles of the wide world work themselves out. He could feel the fight leaving him. Even the sunlight felt cooler all of a sudden, like it was turning into the Forever Moonlight, where all raccoons go when their time has come. Kit would miss his new friends in the alley, but now, at least, he was going home.
“Do it quickly,” he whispered to Sixclaw.
“Wait!” Titus shouted. Kit opened his eyes and saw the small gray dog standing atop a trash can at the other end of the fence. Otis and Ansel, Rocks the dog, and Uncle Rik were all tied up at its base. Enrique Gallo, the mighty rooster, talons dripping with the blood of the Flealess, had also fallen. He lay, wheezing with a wounded wing, against the Dumpster at the entrance to the alley, held in place by twin German shepherd dogs in spiked collars. Titus shouted loud enough that even the birds in the sky stopped flapping their wings. The fighting petered out all around. The alley fell quiet; only the whines and whimpers of wounded animals sliced the silence.
“You have fought well, vermin of Ankle Snap,” Titus announced. “But you have lost. Behold your hero, there!” He pointed at Kit on the ground. “Surrender and we will allow you to go into exile. Head out from this place, go wherever you vermin go, and never return to the turf beneath the Slivered Sky, and then, you will live. But if you stay and fight, we will kill you all, as surely as we’ll kill this raccoon.”
Titus waited.
And then, the skunk lowered his tail, hung his head, hiccupped once, and turned away. He staggered from the alley without another word.
Kit watched as a family of foxes slipped from their hidey-hole and scampered off in broad daylight. The moles grumbled in their own old language, then vanished into the ground to tunnel to less dangerous dirt. A squirrel whispered to another squirrel, and the whisper was passed along, and every squirrel in the alley ran to pack their seeds and nuts.
“They’re smarter than they look,” said Titus.
“No more waiting,” Sixclaw whined. “I want to kill him now!”
“One thing first,” said Titus, hopping down from the trash can and prancing over to Kit on his spindly gray legs. “I want to know, Kit, if you really believed you could win? Did you actually think that all these winged, wattled, furred, and feathered vermin belonged here together? Did you really think you could unite them?”
Kit did his best to shrug, but couldn’t move much beneath the cat. Instead of answering, he just rolled his eyes around the alley. Titus followed his gaze. The wounded animals, mole and mouse and pigeon and rat alike, helped one another grab what they could carry and close their shops to go into exile. On the field of battle, there were injured stoats nursing bleeding ferrets. Mrs. Costlecrunk, the gossiping chicken, held the hand of the fox in his bloody suit, and an owl stood among the church mice, advising them on the best way to bandage their wounds.
“Wind the cloth in a counter-centrifugal motion, chaps! Counter-centrifugal!” the owl hooted while the mice smiled politely and acted like they understood him.
“I never could have united them,” said Kit. “But it looks like you did it for me. By trying to destroy us, you turned us into a community. I guess sometimes it takes a villain to show everyone else how to be a hero.”
Titus growled, snarled, and barked at the insult. “Kill him!” he shouted at Sixclaw. “I changed my mind! Kill them all! Let none escape this alley!”
“With pleasure.” Sixclaw smiled.
“You should have been more circumspect,” Kit said with his last ounce of breath.
“Circum-what?” the cat wondered, but Kit didn’t have time to answer. Sixclaw swiped his claws toward Kit’s throat.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
A DEAL’S A DEAL
THE cat’s claws never touched Kit.
There was a SNAP! so loud it shook the ground.
“No,” Titus yelled. “Impossible!”
Kit looked up just in time to see Gayle let out a voluminous burp as she hit the ground. On the alligator’s back sat a white rat, riding her into the heart of the Flealess horde and holding Sixclaw’s belled collar dinging in the air.
The Flealess shrieked and scattered.
“It’s Gayle!” they yelled. “She’s left the sewers!”
The army fell into a full retreat before the gator’s teeth.
“Thanks for keeping your promise, Kit,” Gayle told Kit. “That cat was delicious.”
“I thought we agreed there would be no revenge,” Uncle Rik said.
“There wasn’t,” said Kit. “Sixclaw rang his own dinner bell when he tossed Eeni down there.”
“Smart move, Kit,” said Eeni. “Getting Sixclaw to throw me down into the sewers.”
“I’m only as smart as the friends I count on,” said Kit. “And it helps when they can snatch the collar off a killer cat.”
“Well, you can always count on me when something needs snatching,” said Eeni.
“Howl to—”
SNAP!
Gayle snapped her jaws at Titus, who was trying to hop away. He took a clumsy step, and a wire trap popped up around him. “Ahh! I’m stuck,” he yelled.
“So, Kit,” Gayle asked. “You want me to eat this dog? He looks cleaner than most of the snacks I get.”
“No, please, no . . . ,” the small dog pleaded, his voice suddenly as high and yippy as one would expect from a dog of his breeding. “Kit, please . . . don’t let her eat me! I just want to go back home!”
Kit looked at Titus, quivering in the cage, helpless in front of the giant reptile. As helpless as Kit’s own mother had been when the pack of hound dogs came for them.
“I could let you go . . . ,” said Kit, “if you recognize that the Bone of Contention
grants the Wild Ones the right to live in this alley from now on. And swear before the scribes that the Flealess will let us live here in peace. Do that, and I’ll ask Gayle not to eat you.”
Titus whimpered, but nodded.
Gayle shrugged. “I was full anyway.”
Martyn stepped forward, writing quill and bark in hand. “The scribes are ready,” he declared, and Titus inked his shaking paw through the wire of the cage and pressed it down onto a new agreement for peace between the Flealess and all the families of fur and paw, wing and claw who chose to call Ankle Snap Alley home from that moment forward until the last moonbeam touched the world.
“Lousy flea-bitten den of filth,” Titus muttered when he made his mark. “You can have it. Now let me out of this cage!”
Kit ignored Titus. Let the People free their own pets, he decided. Maybe it would teach them to be more careful where they put their traps.
“Kit, would you do the honors?” Martyn asked, extending the ink to him.
Kit dipped his paw and then, like Azban, the First Raccoon, he pressed it to the bark to seal the deal on behalf of all the Wild Ones. The crowd erupted in cheers. They hoisted him and Eeni and Uncle Rik onto their backs and paraded them through the battle-torn wreckage of Ankle Snap Alley.
“Why are they cheering for me?” Uncle Rik wondered. “I’m an historian. Historians don’t get carried away. Put me down!”
The creatures laughed, and no one paid any attention to Titus in his cage.
“Let me out,” he shouted. “Hey!”
The creatures of Ankle Snap Alley were bloody and battered, but laughing and making music with every hoot and howl and flap and whistle their voices could produce.
“What now?” Kit wondered as they set him down. Every creature under the Slivered Sky seemed to want to shake his hand.
“The finches will want to interview you,” Eeni told him. “And the Blacktail brothers won’t have forgiven you. And who knows what that Titus will think up next. He’s whipped, but I bet he’s not beaten.”
“So this isn’t over yet, is it?” Kit sighed.
“The only things that ever really end are rainbows and summer naps,” said Eeni.
“What’ll we do if they come back, though?” Kit wondered. “What if they ignore our deal again?”
“We don’t need their permission to stay,” Eeni reminded him. “We’re wild. We hold our ground. Together.”
“Yeah,” said Kit. “We do.”
Chapter Thirty
WILD LIFE
THE turn and tumult of life returned to Ankle Snap Alley. Ansel and Otis cleaned up their bakery, repaired the counter, and brought in new trash-can lids for tabletops. They reopened once more to serve hungry creatures who had a few extra seeds in their pockets to spend on candied corn husks and jelly-stuffed banana peels. They did add one new item to the menu, in honor of the great Siege of Ankle Snap Alley: sweet-’n’-spicy cat paw stew.
Blue Neck Ned’s eyes bulged when he saw it on the menu. In the kitchen, Otis laughed.
“Relax, Ned,” Ansel told the pigeon. “There’s no real cat paw in there. It’s just leftover cat food the Rabid Rascals sell from the Dumpster.”
“I knew that,” Blue Neck Ned grumbled, before digging into a piping-hot bowl of the stuff.
The air was turning crisp, hinting at winter, and all the creatures were doing their best to pack on extra fat before the lean months to come. They’d sometimes glance at the lighted windows of the People’s homes and wonder who had the better deal, the free and wild vermin of the alley or the cruel and coddled Flealess, who’d be warm and well fed for winter.
Shane and Flynn Blacktail set up their game again, this time near the Scavengers’ Market, where the Rabid Rascals hung out, figuring they’d have protection if they needed it. Ever since Kit had rallied the animals to fight together, the Blacktail brothers had been nervous they’d turn on them next. They weren’t about to play honest, so they needed to play near some muscle.
“An acorn here, a peanut there. If you pick your nose, you’ll pick nose-hair,” Flynn sang, although the ballyhoo wasn’t his best and he had no takers that evening. The moles went to work, the chickens gossiped, and Enrique Gallo ran his barbershop.
Among it all, Kit felt at home.
“Good to see you, Kit, my lad,” the skunk greeted him on his way into Larkanon’s. The skunk’s name, it turned out, was Brevort. Rocks, the dog outside Larkanon’s, never exactly said a kind word, but he’d lift his head and snort once if Kit walked by, which was for Rocks a great show of magnanimity.
“Mag-na-nimity?” Kit asked Eeni when she used the word.
“It’s like generosity,” Eeni explained.
“Why not just say ‘generosity’ then?” Kit wondered.
“Because where’s the fun in that?” Eeni shook her head. “If everyone just said what they meant, talking wouldn’t be any kind of trick at all.”
“Talking shouldn’t be any kind of trick at all!”
“Says you.” Eeni laughed, and the two friends walked together paw in paw to find the trash can Uncle Rik had discovered to pilfer “historical artifacts.”
“Scholarship doesn’t cease,” Uncle Rik called out from above, his rear end sticking straight up to the sky, with his voice muffled inside the can. “It offers new mysteries to the curious raccoon who seeks them! Wonderful mysteries!”
“What’d you find?” Kit asked him.
“It’s the score of the season! We’ll be wintering like walruses!” Uncle Rik began tossing his loot out of the trash can and over his head, so that Kit and Eeni had to scramble to catch the stuff to put it into the satchel they’d brought.
There were unraveled mittens and half-gnawed apple cores. There were worn-out shoes that didn’t match each other, and a variety of fruits that matched each other too well in moldy green.
“And something special for you, Kit,” Uncle Rik declared, tossing up a strange little item, a strap with a buckle and a flat dial on it, ringed with People’s writing.
“They call it a watch,” said Uncle Rik. “They use it to tell the passage of time.”
“They look at this thing to tell time?” Kit marveled. “Why don’t they just look at the sky?”
Uncle Rik shrugged. “People play their own games, I guess . . . but that’s filled with gears and springs and all kinds of parts. I thought you’d like to tinker with it.”
“Thanks, Uncle Rik. I—”
Suddenly, they heard the loud snap of a trap in the distance. They all tensed, then relaxed when the sound was followed with the tiny whining voice of a mouse.
“Little help! Hello! I seem to have gotten myself stuck in this trap! Hellooo! Kit?”
It was Martyn, who managed to get himself trapped every other night. Kit had a nice little business springing animals out of the old traps that the People hadn’t cleaned up, although they had stopped leaving new ones after they found their beloved Titus howling and shivering in one of them on a cool afternoon.
Kit’s uncle insisted he should charge a fee for getting the trapped animals out, but Kit usually ended up doing it for free. Most of the animals of Ankle Snap Alley couldn’t afford to pay him anyway.
“I gotta go help the mouse.” Kit sighed.
“You’ve a good heart,” said Uncle Rik.
“Too good for this place,” said Eeni.
Kit blushed. Eeni gave him a friendly push.
“I’ll sure miss you two this winter,” said Uncle Rik.
“Yeah, you wi— wait. What?” Kit cocked his head, tipped his hat back on his ears. “Why will you miss us? Where are you going?”
It was Eeni’s turn to blush. Uncle Rik gazed down at her from the trash can. “You didn’t tell him?”
She shook her head.
“But I thought you were going to—oh, chirping chic
kens, I’ll do it.” Uncle Rik cleared his throat. “Kit, you and Eeni are going to school.”
“We are? But . . .”
“Saint Rizzo’s Academy,” said Uncle Rik. “A very fine place.”
“It’s all right,” Eeni grunted.
“But I want to stay here,” Kit whined.
“Eeni will be going too,” Uncle Rik told him. “You need to be around creatures your own age. And you need an education. Ankle Snap Alley’s no substitute for rigorous study.”
“But . . . but . . .” Kit couldn’t think of a reasonable objection, so he threw his arms in the air and shouted, “I’m wild!”
Uncle Rik shook his head. “We can talk about it tomorrow. Let’s go to Ansel’s and get some dinner. It’s late and the sun will be coming up soon.”
As they walked toward the bakery, Kit couldn’t get over it. “School?” he said again. “Really?”
“Trust me, Kit.” His uncle put a hand across his nephew’s back. “It’s a big world beyond the alley, and even the wildest of creatures still has a lot left to learn.”
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