Page 37 of The Claiming of the Shrew
“Yes,” he said. “I think I do. Come on.”
“Do you want to stop and get your clothes?” Hester asked, hurrying behind him toward the door.
“No time!”
If Leah was in danger, he didn’t plan to stop for anything.
LEAH
It turnedout that being trapped in a coffee can, on the verge of starving (well, not yet, probably, but it felt like it) sent Leah’s inner shrew into panic.
OUTOUTOUTESCAPEESCAPE HELPHELP DONOTWAAAAAAAAAAANT
Wild shrews were skilled climbers, but her weak back legs made that difficult. Still, she tried scrambling up the sock as high as she could go. Most coffee cans had plastic lids. If she could just get up there, she might be able to chew through it.
After rolling back to the lowest point of the sock several times, she turned her energy to a different tactic: knocking the coffee can over.
She had next to no body weight, but what she lacked in mass, she made up for in momentum and fury. Flinging herself at the side of the coffee can, she pinged off it like a furious pinball, and felt it jiggle a little.
After pausing and listening to see if she could hear anyone moving nearby, Leah went into a frenzy of, quite literally, bouncing off the walls. The can wobbled, it bounced a little, and then?—
She must have been near the edge of something, because abruptly she was in freefall.
The weightless moment lasted only for an instant before the can hit something, up became down, and she was abruptly buried in sock. Leah thrashed around, dimly aware that she was still in disorienting motion—the can was rolling, maybe?—and then it stopped with a clunk and all was still.
Leah dragged herself out of the sock and found that she was lying on a metal surface. The can was on its side.
Take that, mystery kidnapper! You can’t keep this shrew down!
Using mostly her front legs, and pushing with the back legs for thrust, she scuttled up the can and bonked off a new surface. Sniffing at it, she found that it was indeed a plastic lid, snapped firmly over the top of the can.
Now that she was here, she could feel, more than see, pinpricks in the plastic. Someone had made an effort, after all, to punch air holes for her, but they were very halfhearted, just little pokes with a nail or similar item.
However, the pokes gave her something to sink her teeth into.
Literally.
Leah set to work with her sharp fangs, enlarging one of the holes.
There wasn’t much that shrews and other small mammals were better at than chewing through things, unless it was getting in and out of tight spaces. A few minutes of frantic gnawing and ripping, and she had enlarged the hole enough to squeeze her round but compressible body through the opening.
She hesitated with just her head stuck out, sniffing the air with her long, whiskered nose. It was dark in here—merely dim to a shrew’s night vision now that she was no longer imprisoned in a can, but at her tiny size, all she could see were a lot of bigshapes that failed to resolve themselves into anything helpful. The air was full of a confusing mix of nose-tickling powerful smells, perfumes and soaps and mothballs and glue and face powder and musty old fabric and rubber and cardboard and latex and?—
“Oh,” Leah squeaked to herself. She was in the costume trailer. Or somewhere similar: a storage area where many things were kept. But probably the costume trailer. She recognized the overall vibe of the smells, although the mishmash was nearly overwhelming to her sharper-than-human senses.
Footsteps creaked loudly on the trailer’s steps. Leah hastily flung herself into the effort of squirming out the hole. It was a tighter fit than she’d hoped, but just in time, she plopped to the floor.
The door opened; there was a wave of fresher air, and the lights came on.
Leah frantically pedaled her front legs and hurtled herself in a half-drag, half-roll into the safety of the nearest pile of crumpled costumes. She had never been so glad that the costume trailer was always stuffed to the gills and an absolute mess. There were a million places for a shrew to hide.
“What the ...” The voice was male and annoyed. It was familiar, but she couldn’t easily place it. Not someone she knew well. “I left you right on the table. Where—oh there you are. Pesky little rodent.”
Leah shrieked indignantly from among the rustling fabric before stifling herself. Shrews werenotrodents! The very nerve.
A big hand came down and picked up the coffee can. There was a moment of silence, then a curse, and the enormous figure took a huge step back and closed the door, cutting off her main angle of escape.
No big deal, Leah thought. There must be lots of spaces in this trailer that a shrew could slip out of. She’d certainly beenstartled by more than one mouse when she was digging through costumes and other props.
