Nurk

  Nurk

  The Strange, Surprising Adventures of a (Somewhat) Brave Shrew

  Ursula Vernon

  * * *

  HARCOURT, INC.

  Orlando Austin New York San Diego London

  * * *

  Copyright © 2008 by Ursula Vernon

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication

  may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

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  without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  of any part of the work should be submitted online

  at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed to the

  following address: Permissions Department,

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

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  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vernon, Ursula.

  Nurk/Ursula Vernon,

  p. cm.

  Summary: Nurk, a sort-of brave shrew, packs up

  a few pairs of clean socks and sails off on an accidental

  adventure, guided by wisdom found in the journal

  of his famously brave and fierce grandmother,

  Lady Surka the warrior shrew.

  [1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction.

  2. Shrews—Fiction. 3. Dragonflies—Fiction.

  4. Courage—Fiction. 5. Diaries—Fiction.

  6. Letters—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.V5985Nur 2008

  [Fic]—dc22 2007030788

  ISBN 978-0-15-206375-7

  Text set in Meridien

  Designed by Linda Lockowitz

  First edition

  MP C E G H F D B

  Printed in the United States of America

  * * *

  For Thomas Maximilien McRudd

  CHAPTER ONE

  —FROM THE JOURNAL OF SURKA AURELIA MAXINE SHREW

  ON THE BANK OF A STREAM, on the edge of a forest, there lived a shrew named Nurkus Aurelius Alonzo Electron Maximilian Shrew, which is a hard thing for anyone to have to live with. Everyone called him Nurk.

  He was small and gray, and had small gray ears and a small gray tail and enormous white whiskers that spread out in a fan around his nose. He lived in a snug little house under the roots of a whistling willow tree, and every evening he would sit on his front step and watch the stream go rolling and roiling and rollicking by.

  More than anything, Nurk wanted to be like his grandmother Surka the warrior shrew. Surka had been a fighter, a dishwasher, and a pirate queen, and he was very proud to be related to her. Her portrait hung in his front hallway, and it was the first thing anyone saw when they entered his house. (Since the portrait showed her brandishing a severed head, this was a bit of a shock for first-time visitors, but Nurk's love for the portrait was undimmed.)

  The problem was that he wasn't sure that he really wanted to have an adventure of his own. Most of the stories of adventure seemed to start somewhere very far away and skipped over the details of how you got there or what you were supposed to pack. They sounded messy and occasionally terrifying. Nurk was worried that he wouldn't go about having adventures the right way and would miss them entirely, or have a bad one where he spent most of his time wet and cold and hungry and without clean socks. Also he had to admit that he couldn't think of any situation where he would want to brandish anyone's severed head.

  He wished that his grandmother was around to ask, but she had vanished long ago into the wild wibbling wastes, and no one had seen her since. He would have liked to talk to her, about adventures or anything else, and hear what she had to say. She had been very brave and very fierce, and Nurk suspected that he was neither, but it would have been nice just to see her again.

  So for quite a while, Nurk was content to walk along the bank of the stream, kicking at pebbles and daydreaming about the adventures he might someday have.

  ***

  EVERYTHING CHANGED the day the letter arrived.

  The letter was small and soggy and written in a nearly illegible hand, and it was being carried by the smallest, angriest hummingbird that Nurk had ever seen.

  "Shrew," said the hummingbird, perching on a willow switch, which bobbed and swayed under the bird's weight. "Shrew. Willow tree. Hmmph." He fixed one small black eye on Nurk and then on the willow tree, then flicked his tail feathers as if to say that he'd seen better.

  "Hello," said Nurk, who felt that it was important to be polite to government employees.

  "Hmmph." The hummingbird dipped his long bill into the small sack of mail at his waist and pulled out a letter. "Hmmph. You Urk?"

  "Errr ... I'm Nurk..."

  "Got a letter for an"—the hummingbird squinted at the address—"Urk. Shrew. Care of the Whistling Willow, Upstream." He frowned down at the little shrew. Since hummingbirds are mostly beak, the frown appeared to take up most of his body. "That you?"

  "It might be." Nurk twisted his tail in his paws. "I'm a shrew, and this is the whistling willow, and my name is Nurk, so if they misspelled it—"

  "Hmmph." The hummingbird eyed him with deep suspicion. "'Might be'? 'Might' isn't good enough. Letters have to go to the right person. Ad-dress-ee only. How do I know you're Urk?"

  "Well ... I'm Nurk, and I'm a shrew, and this is the whistling willow—"

  "So you say." The hummingbird waved the letter at him. "How do I know you're a shrew? You got any identification?"

  Nurk glanced down at himself, baffled. No one had ever questioned whether he was a shrew before. It was generally considered self-evident. "Errr ... what else could I be?"

  The hummingbird drummed tiny claws on the willow twig. "Well ... you might be a mouse pretending to be a shrew. Or a very cunning earthworm. Very important letter here. People might be trying to steal it."

  "But I didn't even know I had a letter coming!" said Nurk, wondering exactly how cunning an earthworm would have to be to successfully impersonate a shrew.

  "Aha!"

  "'Aha' what?" Nurk was beginning to wonder if the letter was worth it. He rarely got mail, except for a birthday card from his great-aunt, and his birthday was months off. Still, he'd hate to miss a letter, and who else could it be for?

  "Aha ... er ... hmmph." The hummingbird apparently wasn't sure himself. "You're awfully small for a shrew."

  Nurk thought this was a bit insulting, coming from a bird smaller than he was, but decided to let it pass.

  "Are your parents home?"

  "My parents are dead," said Nurk.

  The hummingbird coughed, and the bit of skin at the edges of his beak flushed. "Didn't-know-sorry-for-your-loss," he muttered rapidly.

  "It's okay," said Nurk. It had been several seasons since his parents were eaten by an owl, and he was beyond having to blink back tears when he thought about them. "But can I please have my letter?"

  "Hmmph." The hummingbird glared at him some more. "Do you swear you're Urk?"

  "Actually I'm N—Yes, I swear." Nurk had no desire to go around the conversation another time.

  "Okay." The hummingbird held out the letter. Nurk reached up for it, standing on the tips of his pink toes, but the hummingbird held it up out of reach.

  "Now you do realize," said the bird gruffly, "that if you aren't Urk and you open a letter intended for someone else, you've committed theft and mail fraud and misrepresentation and swindling a public employee and using a false name and maybe even treason?"

  "Goodness," said Nurk, who hadn't realized that at all.

  "Right, then." The hummingbird dropped the letter into Nurk's paws and buzzed into the air. He hung suspended above the shrew's head, wings whirring. "Enjoy your letter, Mister Urk."

  "It's Nurk—," the shrew began, but the hummingbird was already flitting away, the afternoon light flickering on his jewel-toned feathers.

  Nurk sighed and turned his attention back to the letter. The name on the envelope was badly smudged, as if it had gotten soaked in the rain. The only part that was clearly legible did indeed say "urk."

  "Well, really," he said to himself, sitting down on his front step, "who else could it be for?" He pried the flap up with a claw and pulled out the message inside.

  Water had seeped into the envelope and soaked the first few lines into a blur of ink. Two lines down, he began to make out words, occasionally interspersed with dark wet blobs.

  Nurk blinked.

  This was clearly not a birthday card.

  He read it twice through, but the words didn't change.

  "Why would someone send me a letter asking for help?" he said, mostly to himself. He didn't know many people who didn't live nearby—his great-aunt and a few distant relatives, but that was all. Surely none of his neighbors, like the salamanders, would bother sending a letter—they'd just come and ask him for help.

  And he couldn't imagine a situation where anyone would say that if he couldn't help them, nobody could.

  He turned the letter over, looking for the return address, but it was badly smeared. It had to be someone downstream—they'd sent the letter to "Upstream," after all—but who could it have been?

  And then his eye fell on the address, and he let out a tiny squeak.

  What he'd taken for another blob of ink after the k in "urk" was suddenly obvious as an a. The letter was sent to "urka," and that almost certainly meant that it was sent to Surka, his grandmot
her, and that meant—

  "I've opened someone else's mail," said Nurk in horror.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HE LEAPED TO HIS FEET, looking for the hummingbird—perhaps if he was still in sight, Nurk could return the letter and explain the misunderstanding—but the little bird was long gone. Not even a brightly colored speck dotted the sky.

  "Mail fraud," moaned Nurk to himself, wringing his tail in his paws. "Theft and misrepresentation. Maybe even treason. Oh no. What am I going to do?"

  He set the letter down on the step and edged away from it, as if it might bite. He needed advice, but he didn't know who to ask.

  As if the thought had summoned him, there was a wet slapping sound, and the great spotted salamander that lived next door came eel-ling and oiling its way up the stream bank.

  "Oh ... said Nurk, fighting a sudden desire to hide the awful letter. "Oh, hello."

  The salamander nodded to him. It had a name—at least, Nurk thought it was a name—in the bubbling salamander speech, but it sounded like "glub-glub-glub," and since all salamander words were some variation on "glub," Nurk had long since given up trying to pronounce his friend's name.

  It didn't speak now but gazed distractedly up at the sky.

  Still, the salamander had been living in the stream as long as Nurk could remember, and perhaps it had some advice about mail.

  "Listen," said the little shrew, "I have this problem—a case of mistaken identity, really..."

  The salamander listened gravely to Nurk's story, patting at the mud with its broad, soft fingers.

  "So what do I dooooo?"

  The salamander considered this at great length.

  "Should deliver the letter," said the amphibian finally, ducking its head. "Send it on to the right person."

  "But I don't know where she is!" said Nurk. "I don't even know if she's alive! Nobody's seen Grandma Surka in ages!"

  "Oh." The salamander considered further, looking up at the sky again. "Should take the letter back, then."

  "But I don't know who sent it!"

  "Still." The salamander waved a hand distractedly at him, staring up at the sky. Its throat was orange and pulsed when the salamander was nervous. It was pulsing now.

  "Errr ... is something wrong?" asked Nurk, after a moment. The salamander definitely seemed to have other things than mail fraud on its mind. Nurk could not imagine what on Earth would be more important than mail fraud, theft, and attempted treason, but then again, he wasn't a salamander.

  The salamander dropped its head and looked at him. "There's a storm coming," it said. "The mud is unhappy."

  Nurk wasn't sure how mud could be unhappy—or happy or anything else, since it was mud, after all—but the salamander seemed quite upset. The shrew peered up at the sky, but it was clear except for a few high clouds. "It doesn't look too much like a storm," he said.

  "It's coming," said the salamander. "The water is fizzy and fretful against my skin, and the mud is unhappy between my toes. It will be the sort of storm that comes once in a century." It blinked its huge gold eyes solemnly and shivered.

  The problem with talking to salamanders, Nurk had always found, was that while they were usually friendly, they lived in water as much as on land, and sometimes it was hard to understand what they were trying to say. It wasn't that they tried to be confusing, but salamanders think very differently than shrews, and sometimes what they mean by a word isn't what a shrew would mean.

  Nurk could see that the salamander was making an effort to speak plainly, though, and the bit about the storm seemed clear enough. "Thank you," he said.

  "Get down deep in the mud," said the salamander. "Get deep, deep down, where the storm won't go. I'm going down to the bottom of the stream. I'd go, too, if I were you."

  "I'm not sure I can hold my breath that long," said Nurk doubtfully.

  "Oh." The salamander sat back and thought about this for a long moment. "I'd still try/' it said finally, and with a slap of its tail went wiggling and worming down the bank and plop! into the stream.

  Nurk put his chin in his paw and considered.

  It still didn't look much like a storm. The high clouds had been joined by a few more of their kind, and there was a bit of a breeze, but other than that, it was a perfectly pleasant evening, or would have been if he wasn't suddenly guilty of mail fraud.

  Still, the salamander had gone out of its way to warn him. It couldn't hurt to be prepared.

  Nurk went inside to close the windows and make sure he had plenty of candles.

  A FEW HOURS LATER, he was glad that he had paid attention to the salamander's warning.

  The storm had come raging in like a dragon made of clouds, breathing lightning and bellowing thunder. Rain lashed the ground and whipped the stream into a high froth. Nurk's whistling willow tree bent under the onslaught, until the creak of the wood sounded like a moan of pain.

  Nurk thought about leaving the tree—if it was uprooted by the storm, it would be very unhealthy for anyone inside—but the tree had been in his family for generations. Since the unfortunate incident with the owl and his parents, Nurk had lived alone in the tree. An elderly great-aunt who lived on the other side of the island came by occasionally to check on him and make disapproving noises.

  Still, for all that time, Nurk had made it a point of pride to keep up the willow. He cleaned the gutters and washed the windows, patched holes in the bark and weeded the front walk. The willow was part of the family. He couldn't just abandon it.

  Staring out the front window as the tree shuddered and creaked, Nurk could see a lot of repairs in his future.

  "Assuming I even have a future and the post office doesn't come and take me away for stealing Grandma Surka's letter."

  He sighed.

  The irony was that Grandma Surka probably wouldn't have cared that he had opened her mail. He hadn't seen her since he was very, very small, but his memory was of a wild, laughing, larger-than-life figure who was utterly disdainful of such minor details and who drank acorn milk right out of the carton. (This had been very impressive to Nurk as a child, and it had taken months for his mother to break him of the habit.)

  "Should take the letter back, then," the salamander had said.

  "The salamander doesn't know how far it is," Nurk muttered to himself. "It's downstream. How would I get there? I don't even know who sent it..."

  Even if he did somehow find the person who'd written the letter, what if they were angry? It was obviously important—they'd been begging Surka for help. They'd be awfully disappointed to get Nurk instead.

  Worse yet: "What if they expect me to help them?"

  It would be an adventure, all right, but this sounded serious. He was only a little shrew.

  Even Surka had to start somewhere, said a traitorous little voice in his head. He ignored it.

  "I've got trouble enough already ... mail fraud, theft, possibly treason..."

  And that was another problem—what if he tried to return the letter, and instead of being grateful, they had him arrested for opening it in the first place? How badly did they punish you for opening someone else's mail by accident? Did they give you a stern look, or did they feed you to owls? Nurk didn't know.

  Maybe it would be better just to shove the letter under a stack of papers and pretend it never existed.

  But it had sounded really important.... The shrew twisted his tail in his paws in an agony of guilt.

  Creeeeeaaaaaaaaaaakk ...!

  Something hit the door with a bang and Nurk jumped. Thunder rattled the windows. When he peered out, during the brief flashes he could see broken branches flying through the air. He edged away from the window.

  "Maybe the salamander was right," he said to himself.

  There was only one place where he could get deep, deep down in the tree, and that was in the root cellar. Taking a candle and a bag of pistachios, and making sure all the other lamps were out, Nurk went to the stairs and pulled open the door to the root cellar. The creak of the hinges was lost in the creaking of the willow tree.

  Just as the tree had been the home of shrews for generations, the cellar had been the home of their junk. Old trunks and boxes were piled along the walls, rising in cardboard columns over Nurk's head. Bins were buried under drifts of broken toys, unmatched dishes, headless hammers, orphaned jigsaw puzzle pieces, and keys to unknown locks. There was a whole box full of broken whisker brushes (shrews have very long whiskers and groom them as carefully as other people brush their teeth) and another box that looked like the final resting place for six generations of kitchen junk drawers.