Duncton Wood (29 page)

“What mole are you, and where are you from?” Bracken asked.

“My name is Rue from beyond Barrow Vale,” she said, “but my tunnels were taken away by.., they were taken from me. I lived here until the Stone Mole came. What mole are you?”

“Bracken, from the westside.” The answer was, in his own mind at least, untrue, for he was really of the Ancient System now. But ever cautious. Bracken had worked out that if he should meet another mole, he would first find out where they were from and then say he was from anywhere else but the Ancient System.

“I knew Hulver,” he added, by way of explaining why he was there. There was a pause while they considered what to say next. Then each asked a question simultaneously.

“Who’s Hulver?” asked Rue. “Who’s the Stone Mole?” wondered Bracken. They laughed, their mutual interruption breaking the awkwardness between them. They each sensed that the other meant no harm.

“It’s a bit unsafe staying here,” said Bracken. “It would be safer in the tunnel.”

“Oh, I can’t go in there,” said Rue, horrified. “The owl’s there.”

“Yes, I know,” said Bracken to her surprise. “That’s what I want to see.”

After a lot of persuasion, he managed to get Rue back into the safety of the tunnels, telling her that the owl would not attack her and, should Mandrake and Rune return, he knew a quick way out to safety. But it was more the simple fact that he so obviously intended not to harm her, and even seemed to have her safety at heart, that finally got her back to the burrow at the heart of Hulver’s system. He even went so far as to get her some worms, and without any difficulty either, since he seemed to know the tunnels quite well. Once fed, they snuggled down on either side of the burrow, where they answered each other’s questions about Hulver and the Stone Mole. Bracken told Rue all about Hulver and Rue explained what she knew, and had heard, about the Stone Mole. He realized long before she got to her own experience in these very same tunnels that he, himself, was the Stone Mole.

“Show me where it happened,” he asked her.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” whispered Rue, who had worked herself up to a terror just telling the story.

“It won’t hurt you,” said Bracken. “It’s only an image.”

“How do you know?” asked Rue.

A mole like Rune would not have answered this question, for he would have known that a mole’s power often lies in keeping others ignorant, and that it was in Bracken’s interest that no mole knew who he truly was. But Bracken was not aware that he had an interest, being more concerned to reassure Rue, who was the first mole who had been friendly toward him since Hulver himself.

However, there is a difference between naiveté and ingenuousness, and Bracken’s fault, if fault it was, was that he was naive. He told her no more than that he had been into the tunnel behind the great flint and possibly what she had heard had been his noise and actions on the other side – as he had heard Mandrake’s earlier that day. As for the sights he had seen in the Ancient System, and the sounds he had heard, there was something about them that warned him to keep them secret. Some things, especially when a mole does not understand them, are best honored by being kept secret in the heart rather than scattered to the winds as words.

Rue would only go so far as the last curve in the tunnel leading to the great flint seal, peering on from there nervously as Bracken went on to the end, raising his voice over his shoulder to keep her reassured.

He told her “It is just an image, just a carving – something the ancient moles used to do to frighten other moles away.” He raised his talons to the flint on a level with the curve of the beak and scratched it very slightly to show how the sound was made, and its screech whispered round the tunnel like a distant echo of the terrifying sounds he had heard before. She started to cover her ears again, and Bracken stopped. He looked at the owl face, surprised to find that it held no fear for him as the other one had. Looking at it, he felt a different mole from the one who had looked at the others, and he hoped that at last he had found the strength to delve back into the tunnels and make his way to the Chamber of Dark Sound, and beyond.

“Is there a giant mole in there?” asked Rue.

“There aren’t any moles in there at all, not a single one.”

“But the Stone Mole lives there!” Rumors die hard, even when the subject of them is there to put the record straight.

It was late and both of them needed sleep. Bracken thought it wiser to abandon the main burrow, since Mandrake and Rune might come back at any time, and so they occupied instead tunnels to the west of Hulver’s system, where a few abandoned tunnels remained from some system of the past.

Even then. Rue might have been reluctant to stay there had not Bracken said that he would stay on a few moledays to help her seal up the connection between these tunnels and the others, so that Rue would have the makings of a system of her own. It was no hardship to him and, indeed, sometime before dawn, he awoke briefly to hear Rue’s deep, peaceful breathing in a burrow nearby the tunnel where he slept, and was grateful to have company again, even if only temporarily.

Rue was a survivor, and recovered fast from her ordeal. With Bracken there to help her seal off her new system and to burrow out one or two new tunnels and entrances, it very soon took shape. Better than that, it gave Bracken an opportunity to put into practice one or two of the subtleties of shape and sound he had observed in the Ancient System as he created a couple of bigger-than-normal tunnels which Rue looked at in surprise and soon adopted with pleasure. Somehow they managed to pick up the sound of the September rustles of beech leaves from the surface, where hints of the autumn were just beginning, to show, and carry them on into the more traditional tunnels that were the basis of her new system.

There was change in the air. The distant smell of autumn. And not so distant either when the wind blew, carrying a few beech leaves down to the wood’s floor or scurrying the more crinkled leaves of the few oaks that grew on the slopes along between the trees.

After three moledays, the tunnels began to look spick and span and Rue said “Are these your tunnels?”

It was a strange question, for Bracken had never thought for one moment that they were. His future lay with the Ancient System and his time here was a welcome respite from pursuing his explorations of it to the end. The question was Rue’s way of asking him when he was leaving. She was restless and increasingly proprietorial about the place and wanted him gone. She wanted to dwell in her own place, or so it seemed to Bracken.

He looked wearily in the direction of the higher slopes and knew that he must be off. He was beginning to like Rue now that he had seen the nervousness fall off her to be replaced by the good sense that was her nature. She made a mole feel comfortable, even if not always welcome. But that was the way with some females. Burr-head had once told him. Sometimes he was surprised to find that he even felt aggressive, like an adult male, toward her.

“Are these your tunnels?” The question still waited between them. Well, of course they weren’t. He felt he wanted to mock-flght with her and pretend they were and to let their laughter fill the place with sound, as once or twice his laughter had mingled with Wheatear’s when they were very young pups and when Root wasn’t around to break up their games.

“No, they’re yours. You know that. Rue.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.” And she got up, restless and a little irritable and though he didn’t want to go, he felt he should.

Outside, above the biggest beech on the higher slopes, the September sky was changing. Now blue and clear, now white and cloudy, as the morning hesitated over whether it was the remnant of a defeated summer or the vanguard of a new autumn.

“Well, I’ll go, then,” said Bracken, a little miserably, as he led the way to one of the entrances higher up the slopes. Rue stayed in the burrow as she watched his departure. She was glad to see him go, because there was an uneasy power about him like some of the youngsters she had had who had not yet learned their strength and are clumsy in their ignorance. Only this mole’s strength wasn’t physical but something else. He was such a strange mole to be with.

September. Such a funny month for a female who hasn’t mated in the spring. September. And the morning in the sky above seemed to decide to be a part of autumn.

Somewhere near the entrance where Bracken paused, his sense of isolation very rapidly returning, a great plop of rain fell; and then another, almost into the entrance itself, spattering onto Bracken’s face and hiding drops of silver in his fur. With a sigh he left the shelter of the tunnel.

The air Bracken stepped out into was getting heavier by the minute with the pressure of an impending storm, and the blue, clear patches in the sky, now pushed to the end of the wood, were disappearing fast, squeezed out by the heavy gray clouds that darkened the sky and told of the coming of the first autumn storm.

Several more drops of rain, and Bracken turned to look at Rue again, but he couldn’t make her out any more in the shadows of the entrance, so he turned away and set off, swinging spontaneously to the southwest toward the Stone rather than toward the place where he could get back into the Ancient System.

“If the Stone calls you,” Hulver had told him, “you go to it, because it knows best.” In his misery and renewed loneliness, as he left Rue and her tunnels behind, the Stone was calling Bracken, and he obeyed its command.

Down among the shadows of her tunnel entrance. Rue watched him go, cursing herself as a fool for letting him go just yet, but remembering with a little giggle, which made her sound almost a youngster again, that males, even strange ones like Bracken, have a habit of coming back again when they are needed. Especially by females.

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F
ROM
the moment Rebecca left Barrow Vale for the westside, after Rune had been called away to hear Rue’s story, she saw what she was doing as a journey of discovery. Perhaps she wanted to find the pastures and to test their scent; perhaps to press on up the legendary slopes to see the Stone; perhaps even to make contact with Bracken at last, though she was now a little nervous of doing so, because part of the price she had paid for holding on with such conviction to the idea that he was alive was that she believed him to be, at the very least, a mole almost as big and powerful as Mandrake himself.

But these were the vaguest of hopes, for Rebecca lived more in the delightful present than most moles, having little time for reveries concerning herself when there was so much to see, to do, and feel
now.
And as her journey coincided with the start of autumn in Duncton Wood, there was the excitement of the wood’s sudden surrender to the season of change for her to enjoy.

On the second day, when far off to the east and up on the slopes Rune and Mandrake were leaving Hulver’s burrows after investigating Rue’s story, Rebecca awoke to a morning when the wood’s floor was draped and decorated with a thousand dew-hung cobwebs. They ran in ladders and cascades of wet brightness up and down the untidy brambles, in and out of the ground ivy, over and around the dead twigs of fallen branches. About them the ground was moist and almost steamy, for it was still warm from the summer, and the sun that replaced the drizzle of the previous few days still had the strength to start drying the moistures onto which its light fell.

Sometimes, as Rebecca traveled on the surface, a spider would retreat into its silk-lined nest, its front legs poised tense against possible assault as she passed. Sometimes one of her front paws would catch a long anchor thread from a cobweb, which would stretch as she pulled past and then break, the web to which it was attached trembling as one of its supports was pulled away and the dew caught in its symmetry, suddenly dropping and falling to the bramble thorns or fallen leaves beneath, leaving the cobweb bereft of light.

Later the same morning, in a more open vale of the wood, she found herself face to face with the tiny red fruit of wild strawberries which brightened the shadows of their crumpled and serrated leaves and among which stood a few pink flowers of rosebay willowherb rose, tall as a small shrub and far beyond Rebecca’s sight. But at least she could sniff at some of the blackberries, still hard and green, whose hairs tickled her snout and stopped her trying to nibble at them.