The Singing Mouse Stories

Hough’s first book, published in 1895, opens in a narrator’s room hung with the relics of a sporting life: a worn coat, a gun with browned barrels, a rifle whose stock broke in the Rockies. After his visitors leave and the fire burns low, near midnight, the Singing Mouse comes out for its bit of bread, folds its paws, and sings. The walls go rich with art, and what follows is fable rather than plotted story. Rivers, mountains, stones and white moths carry the meaning in pieces called “What the Waters Said,” “How the Mountains Ate Up the Plains,” and “Where the City Went,” turning over memory, loss, and the conduct of a life. Sixteen sketches in the 1895 book; the 1910 reprint used here adds six more.