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NOAH’S MOUSE

Note to the Reader

Perhaps you already know the story of Noah and the Ark, how the animals went on board — two by two — to be saved from a mighty Flood.

Still, there is one part of the tale that you have never heard before.

 A tiny part.

 A mouse-sized part.

 CHAPTER ONE

“Watch that tar bucket!"

 Tovi the Mouse squeaked commands from his perch on Noah’s shoulder.

 “Pound those nails straight if you want this Ark to stay afloat!"

 It was a hot summer day, and Noah's wife and sons and their wives and children were all hard at work. They scurried around the shipbuilding site, with the grown-ups complaining, and not too quietly, about having to take orders from a rodent.

Tovi the Mouse and Noah had spent weeks and weeks designing the enormous ship they called the 'Ark.' It was three stories high, with berths for animals and humans, and storage bins for food and fresh water. It would be watertight enough to survive being tossed about on a rollicking sea.

The midday sun sizzled. Tovi could see that his workers were getting tired and cross, so he called for a lunch break. The mouse nibbled his bread and cheese and squinted up at the sky while Noah chatted with the grandchildren. The boys and girls looked on this Ark-building business as an exciting holiday.

 Tovi was a great favorite. The children felt it was quite a distinction to have a talking mouse for a playfellow. But since becoming Chief Ark Architect, Tovi turned down all their requests to romp. There was so much to be done, and who knew how much time they had left before the rains came?

Toviya, Tovi to his friends, was a deeply practical creature. He came from generations of seafaring mice who traveled the waters of the world. Only his father had broken that tradition. He ran away from his family to join a troupe of circus acrobats when Tovi was a mere squeak of a mousekin.

Tovi missed the father he had never really known. Throughout his young mousehood, Tovi practiced tricks and tumbling and tightrope-walking in secret. He planned to go join his father when he was old enough. Instead, as Tovi came of age, his mother took him aside and confided tearfully that his father had met with an accident not uncommon for a mouse in his line of work. He had been eaten by the Circus Bear.

(This was in fact due to a misunderstanding and should not reflect too badly on the bear. Tovi’s father had been sent to take the Circus Bear to lunch. The Bear misunderstood and thought the mouse was lunch. Language is a precise and delicate thing.)

 So, after grieving for his father, Tovi went back to family tradition and fell in love with the sea. He loved the tang of salt water and seaweed, the whip of sails in a crisp wind. He loved scampering up the rigging — and here his acrobatic training stood him in good stead — to keep watch in the crow’s-nest. He loved steering into a new harbor, somewhere he had never been before, with all the adventures in the world ahead of him.

CHAPTER TWO

Tovi was already a seasoned sailor and shipbuilder when he first met Noah.

 It was out on the wharf in a grimy seaport town where Noah was booking passage home. Tovi was struggling to carry his sea chest up the gangplank and had almost lost his grip when Noah stooped down and helped him.

 "There you go," he said to the mouse, and went on his way.

 “He's a kind-hearted sort," thought Tovi. "Not like some."

 He would have doffed his cap in thanks but didn’t have a free paw. The next time they met, he found Noah leaning over the side of the ship, very much the worse for the heaving waves.

 "He really is a terrible sailor," Tovi chuckled to himself, with that combination of sympathy and superiority of all those who never suffer any ill effects from plunging through the ocean in a rickety wooden vessel.

 The little mouse kept Noah’s mind off being seasick for the whole voyage by telling tales of his travels and performing the occasional acrobatic trick. By the end of the trip, the two were fast friends.

 Noah thought he had never known anyone so brave and game and funny. He loved his family dearly, but Tovi was the companion of his heart.

 The mouse decided that his next adventure would be on land. He traveled with Noah to the beautiful spot where Noah’s family had houses and gardens and fruit trees, chickens and sheep and a herd of goats. After the rough and tumble of ship life, it looked to Tovi like Paradise. So he stayed. Sometimes at night, though, he still heard the sea in his dreams and wondered if he would ever go sailing again.

 Now Tovi sat looking around his shipyard. He felt proud to be at the helm of the Ark-building operation. It was a vessel much bigger than anything he had ever seen in his whole seafaring life, and he spent many an hour going over the building plans with Noah. Tovi did not want to say anything discouraging to Noah, but he had to admit that they had one little problem: the Ark was not anywhere near water. The building site stood in a valley far, far from the sea.

 “It’s the driest of dry-dock I’ve seen in all my born days,” Tovi muttered more than once, with a shake of his little head.

 Noah said they were building the Ark on faith because God had told him what to do. That was enough for Tovi. If Noah said he talked to God, Tovi believed, even though his practical soul was full of many questions.

 At the end of lunch break he noticed Noah's sons bringing on board the cages that their wives had woven of willow branches.

 He scampered back up Noah's arm and onto his shoulder.

 “Tell them to put the insect cages on top,” he said into Noah’s ear. “The buzzing will drive the animals crazy if they’re below-decks."

 Noah repeated the instructions. His sons were feeling drowsy in the sun, and moved at a pleasant after-lunch pace, too slow for Tovi.

 "Tell those lubbers to make haste!” the mouse squeaked at Noah.

 "Now Tovi, you know I am nothing but a landlubber myself. A lubber when we first met, and a lubber forever, never mind the fact that I'll soon be going on another sea voyage."

 Noah gave a shudder, remembering that long-ago battle with the waves. The waves had always seemed to win. If it hadn't been for Tovi, he didn't know how he would have made it through that whole lolloping seasick voyage.

Tovi, usually the most thoughtful of friends, paid Noah no attention. His mind had no room for anything but building the Ark.

CHAPTER THREE

Noah’s sons, Ham, Shem and Japheth, worked hard all the long day long, but they did manage to gossip and kvetch along the way.

 They were not afraid to tell their father to his face about their fears that the Ark might be one crazy Folly. The summer had been blistering hot with little rain. They had spent all their time building a behemoth-sized ship in the middle of a pasture. They were loyal sons and obeyed their father, but they had their own opinions, yes they did.

 They all liked Tovi and knew how much Noah valued the advice of his friend, and had to admit that the mouse’s seafaring know-how was a big help. Still, although none of them had built so much as a rowboat before, they felt miffed that one of them had not been put in charge of the Ark.

(If that seems unfair, imagine how you would feel if you were a grown-up being ordered about day in and day out by a little creature you could hold in the palm of your hand.)

 Ham felt that as oldest he should have been made builder-in-chief.

 Shem had always been good at organizing things and felt that he could have kept the building supplies in much better order than a mouse.

 And Japheth, as youngest, felt that his talents were, as always, very much unappreciated.

 Mrs. Noah worried too. She had heard Noah explain how they needed to go into the great wide world and bring back two of each living creature for the Ark. Like Tovi, Mrs. Noah was a practical soul. No matter how big the Ark, she could tell it was going to be crowded in there, with all those animals and birds and insects. It was going to be very smelly and very noisy. Really, how would anybody get any sleep?

Mrs. Noah thought of her husband as the dreamer of the family. She was the one who saw to the details of their life. She was the one who made sure that the goats were tended to and the cheese was made, the seed crops laid by each harvest, and the roof weatherproofed before winter came. She organized her daughters-in-law to spin and weave and keep them all in clothes. She made sure each son had his own plot of land to tend, and his own duties to keep the place humming.

Now, thought Mrs. Noah, at the stage in life when all she really wanted was the comfort of her own home, now her husband comes up with this idea that they were all going to have to live on a ship for who knew how long with a bunch of unruly and no doubt smelly animals.

Well, if that was their fate, so be it, she thought. She respected Noah’s vision. Howsomever! She would have something to say about keeping the Ark clean and tidy and well running, or her name was not Mrs. Noah.

Noah found himself tumbling through a hundred feelings each day. He felt grateful that he and his family would be spared from the terrible flood that was coming. He felt sad for everyone to be left behind. He felt honored that he had been chosen to save the animals. He worried about finishing the Ark, getting the animals aboard in time, and making sure they had enough supplies to last them all their days afloat. At the top of his list of worries, though he would never admit this to Tovi, was the fear that he was going to be seasick for the whole long voyage.

Finally, with Tovi as chief shipbuilder and nag, they finished the Ark on a hot bright day under an aquamarine sky. They all felt proud. It was a very impressive ship. No matter how odd it seemed to have built a seagoing vessel so far from water, the whole family gathered around and cheered.

Tovi perched on Noah’s shoulder, gazing up at the Ark. He was thinking back to the day when Noah learned that the whole course of the world was about to change forever.