PeeWee's Tale

This book is for
a teller of tales & good friend,
Barbara Ann Porte
—J.H
.

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

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.”