The Tale of Pip the Slippery Mouse

Once upon a lonely hill there stood a little house. All day long the little house buzzed with busyness, just like all little houses do, for the family living inside were a busy kind of folk. There was cooking and baking and cleaning and rustling and bustling and a whole lot of other hullabaloo that busy folk have to do.

But late at night, when all the world is dark and the moon shines her silvery light onto the little house; even busy folk go to sleep. That is when something else stirs within the house – something quiet, something small, a little something that lives inside a hole in the kitchen wall.

His mother named him Phillip Huxtable Mouse, for a little brown mouse he is. His friends just call him Pip. First Pip sticks his head out through his little mouse door. He looks to the right. Then he looks to the left. He looks up and then straight ahead. Then he listens for the sound of hustling and bustling and hullabaloo. For that is what any sensible mouse should do.

So with no busy folk to be seen and no sound of hustling, bustling or hullabaloo, Pip does the one thing every hungry mouse would do. He twitches his whiskers and wriggles his nose, sniffing for any whiff of cooking or baking left about for a hungry little mouse to find. His little tummy growls as he sniffs the air, for a sweetly yummy smell reaches his lair.

With a wriggling nose and silent toes, little Pip ventures out of his hole, for no yummy treat can hide from a mouse’s clever nose. He has sniffed something sweet, so he scurries up the table leg to sneak a peek. And there it is up on a kitchen shelf – a plate laden with tasty leftover treats.

He dashes across the kitchen table, and then scuttles up onto the kitchen shelf. One by yummy one, he chooses bits of cookie scraps to carry back to his home. When his little mouse arms can hold no more, he waddles slowly back across the kitchen shelf, taking care not to drop any crumbs along the way.

There is a sudden BANG! It gives poor Pip such a fright. Pip’s tiny mouse feet freezes in their tracks and his tiny heart hammers in his little mouse chest. When his frozen feet finally unfreeze, he drops his cookie scraps, jumps off the shelf and lands with a PLOP!

Pip’s tiny mouse arms and tiny mouse legs move as fast as they can. He is flailing and floundering, yet his tiny mouse feet are not moving as they should. The faster poor Pip runs, the surer he remains in one spot – for poor Pip the mouse had landed in the butter dish. The stick of butter is cool and slippery, it feels quite strange and soon Pip tires of running in one place. His tummy grumbles and that gives Pip an idea.

He licks and he nibbles and he gnaws, his little mouse mouth not taking a rest until there is a hole in the butter large enough for a slippery mouse to slip through. So, with a grumbling belly grumbling no more, he bravely pushes forward and lands with a PLOP! onto the table top, then merrily skids and skates all the way back to his little mouse hole in the kitchen wall.

He slips into bed and falls right asleep with a belly full of butter. That night Pip dreams of rolling hills filled with flowers made out of cookies and sweets and yummy treats galore. What more could any young cookie loving mouse ask for?