Duncton Wood (3 page)

T
HE
entrance down which Rebecca ran so thankfully was the highest of those leading into the main Duncton system. Above it the wood narrowed to the summit of the hill, flanked on one side, the southeast, by the steep, rough face of the chalk escarpment and to the west by rolling pastures that fell gently away to clay vales in the distance.

Up there the chalk reached nearly to the surface of the ground, yielding only a thin, worm-scarce soil, but supporting tall gray beech trees whose fall of leaves formed a dry, brown rustling carpet in the wood. The roots of the trees twisted like torn flank muscles among the leaves, while here and there a patch of shiny chalk reflected the sky.

There was always a windsound there, if only just a murmur among the leaves. But sometimes the strong gray branches of the trees whipped and cut the wind into whines and whispers; or a tearing screech of winter gales raced headlong up from the slopes below, exploding into the trees on top of the hill before rushing on over the sheer scarp face, carrying a last falling leaf or tumbling a dry and broken twig out and down to the chalk fall below.

This highest and most desolate part of Duncton Wood is also the most venerable, for beneath its rustling surface is the site of the ancient mole system of Duncton, long deserted and lost.

here too stands the great Stone, at the highest point of the hill where the beeches thin out, bare to all the winds – north, south, east and west. And from here a mole might see, or rather might sense, the stretching triangle of Duncton Wood, spreading out below to the escarpment to the east, the pastures to the west, with the marsh, where no mole goes, beyond the northern end., At the time Bracken and Rebecca first met, and for many generations before, the system lay on the lower slopes of the hill where the wood was wide and rich. There the beeches gave way to oaks and ashes and thick fern banks, and pockets of sun in the summer. Down there, birds sang or flittered, while badgers padded and barked at night. Down there, life ran rich and good with a worm-full soil black with mold, moist with change. There the wind was slowed and softened by the trees.

No mole, not a solitary one, lived now up in the Ancient System. Slowly they had migrated down from the desolate heights, rolling down through the generations as a pink mole pup rolls blindly down a slope too steep for its grip. First its stomach rolling over its weak front paws, then its soft talons scrabbling uselessly at the soil, then its rump and back paws arching over, until at last it lies still again. So, bit by bit, the generations had come down to the lower system where the wood lay rich and welcoming. They migrated still, but only from one side of the wood to the other, as each new generation left its home burrows in the middle of summer to make burrows for itself or reoccupy deserted ones.

In Bracken’s time the strongest group in the system were the westsiders, whose burrows flanked the edge of the wood next to the pastures. The soil there was rich and much desired, so only the toughest moles could win a place and defend it. With the dangerous pasture moles nearby as well, westsiders needed an extra measure of aggression to survive. Naturally they tended to be big and physical, inclined to attack a stranger first and ask questions after. They laughed at physical weakness and worried if their youngsters didn’t fight the moment they were weaned. Gentler moles like Bracken, whose father, Burrhead, was one of the strongest of the westsider males, had a tough time of it. They were ridiculed and bullied for not wanting to fight and only the most wily learned quickly enough that to survive they needed to be masters of compromise, cajolery and the art of disappearance at times of trouble.

Eastsiders were less aggressive. They lived on a drier, harder soil, which made for fewer of them. They were small and stocky and superb burrowers. Independent, not to say eccentric, eastsiders were rarely seen and hard to find, for their tunnels spread far in their worm-poor soil. Their territory was bounded to the east by the steep drop of the chalk scarp and to the south by the rising slopes of the hill.

Northward lay the marsh, where the air hung heavy and damp with strange rush grasses clicking scarily above a mole’s head. Although the Duncton moles called it marsh, it was in fact a range of poorly drained fields, permanently wet from the two streams that started near the edge of the wood where clay overlay the tilted chalk. Because the marsh was always waterlogged, it couldn’t be burrowed, which made it dangerous ground for moles. The smell was wrong, the vegetation different, the noises of birds and other creatures strange and terrifying. The marsh assumed vast proportions in their minds, a place of dark, dank danger never to go near.

The northern stretch of the wood next to it was called the Marsh End and the moles who lived there – the marshenders – were feared and reviled, as if they carried a curse from the dangerous place they lived so near. They were felt to be a treacherous lot, known to attack outsiders in twos or threes, something the westsiders would never do. They were unhealthy, too, for if disease came to the system, it always seemed to start in the Marsh End. Their females were coarse and mocking, inclined to spur on their mates with encouraging shouts or mock them the moment they suffered defeat, switching their loyalties at the fall of a talon.

No one group lived on the slopes above the main system below the top of the hill. Just a few older, hardy moles, who liked to tell stories of the old days and who eked out a scraggy living in the poorer chalky soil there. Many went mateless in the spring, and few pup cries were heard there in the April weeks.

No mole knew the whole system – it was too large – but all knew and loved its center: Barrow Vale. Here the elder burrows lay, and in early spring white anemones glistened between the trees before the bluebell carpet came, mirroring a clear spring sky.

At Barrow Vale a pocket of gravelly soil caused the oaks to thin out, creating a natural open space warmed by the sun in summer, white and silent in the snow of deep winter, always the last place of light in the wood at nightfall. Being worm-scarce because of the poor soil, its tunnels were communal and every mole went there without fear. It was a place of gossip and chatter, where young moles met to play and venture out, often for their first time, onto the surface. It was relatively safe from predators, too, for the tunnels that radiated from it to all parts of the system made for early warning of an approaching danger long before it arrived.

As for owls, the most fearsome enemies of the moles, they rarely came there, preferring the wood’s edge where they could wait in the trees and dive down on their prey clear of the branches. So, for a Duncton mole. Barrow Vale was a place of security to go back to from time to time.

Yet it had also become something of a trap as well. For long, long before when the system had been smaller, up on top of the hill, with the Stone as the natural center, the lie of the land made them outward-looking, seeking new places, eager to follow their snouts into the distance. But lower Duncton Wood was worm-rich and safe, so it was foolishness to want to go outside it.

Inevitably there were dark stories of those who had tried and always, so it seemed, met a terrible end. Some had actually been seen to be torn in the talons of an owl almost the moment they set paw onto the pastures; some had died of sadness, others had suffocated in the mud of the marsh.

But generally, few moles concerned themselves with these places or such fears: they kept their snouts clean, fought for their own patch, found and ate their worms, slept in their dark burrows, and pulled themselves through the long moleyears of winter until, blinking but aggressive, they came out in spring for the mating time.

Each full moon represented the passing of another moleyear with the Longest Day at Midsummer the happiest time and the Longest Night – at the end of the third week of December – the darkest and most treacherous: a time to placate the Stone with prayers and to celebrate the safe passage into the start of the new cycle of seasons in the snug safety of a warm home burrow. A time to tell stories of fights gone by, and worms and mates to come. A time to survive.

A place to survive! By the time Rebecca and Bracken were born, that was all the once-proud Duncton system had become. Its pride was all in the past when, setting out from the shadow of the great Stone, many a young adult male ventured forth from Duncton Wood carrying its name far off to other systems. Inspired by the talk of scribemoles, many of them headed for the Holy Burrows of Uffington, others simply wanted to show that they could live for a while alone, or in other systems, and then come back with their experience and wisdom to their home system. And how exciting it was when one returned! Word would go round the chalky tunnels of the Ancient System and many would gather about him and give him worms for encouragement as he told his stories. Of fights and strange places and different customs. A very few were able to tell how at Uffington they had had the honor to see, perhaps even to touch, one of the legendary White Moles said to live there.

But that was past. Even the oldest mole in the system, Hulver the elder, could not remember a time when a mole had left the system and returned, or a time when the system had been visited by a friendly mole. Hulver himself rarely talked of the past – he tried but had found that the ears of the new generations seemed increasingly deaf and he had given up. He preferred to mutter and sing to himself, picking out his hard life as one of the isolated moles who lived in the worm-poor slopes below the hilltop.

Once in a while he would talk, though, and the moles around would listen out of respect for his age (or rather for his ability to survive). Indeed, after the last elder meeting before the Longest Night preceding Bracken’s birth, when everymole was in a mellow mood, he had told a group of chattering moles in Barrow Vale: “I can remember my father telling me that the system used to be visited each Midsummer year by a scribe from the Holy Burrows” (and old Hulver inclined his head to the west where Uffington lay). “He would crouch with the elders by the Great Stone, for that was the center of things then, and question them about the state of the system.

“But even when I was young, it was a long time since a scribemole had been. They said then, and I believe it now, that something happened to stop the scribes coming and that no scribe could ever come again. If I had known that to be so when I was young – when I was
your
age,” he added, looking especially at the younger moles about him, “I think I would have gone forth as my father’s father did, even if it meant that, like him, I never came back.” But Hulver was old and they dismissed this last comment as old age talking, a foolish dream that may have crossed each of their minds at one time or another, but which none with sense should listen to.

Yet Hulver was right; something had happened. The system, the Ancient System of Duncton – a system whose glorious past was written up by the scribes in some of the most venerable histories in Uffington – had been cut off.

It was isolated, anyway, by the sheer chalk escarpment, and the marsh to the north. And then, in Hulver’s grandfather’s time, the road that had always been a hazard far off to the north and west had been developed so that it was uncrossable for moles, or hedgehogs or almost any creature.

Scribemoles charged with the fearful task of visiting Duncton had tried and failed. Some were killed on the road by what the moles who lived near it called “the roaring owls,” some never had the courage, or the faith, to venture onto it at all.

So Duncton had been left unvisited, safe enough in its isolation but declining in spirit through the years for want of the kind of stimulus new moles, especially scribes, could give. Many of its traditions died, only the most important, like the trek of the elders to the Stone at Midsummer – and on the Longest Night – surviving. Its legends and stories were passed down but in an increasingly romantic or simple form, for few of the new moles had the love of language or spiritual strength that taletellers of the Ancient System had had.

Yet had they been able to know what was happening in other systems, the Duncton moles might have drawn a small consolation from the fact that their own decline merely echoed a decline in the spirit and energy of moles in general. Even the scribes were not quite what they were, for in the past a scribe
would
have made his way to Duncton Wood, reveling in the trial to his soul that the new dangers created; and once there he would have left no doubt about what he thought of the fat, sleek, complacent mole the Duncton mole seemed often to have become.

But would the Duncton moles have cared? Certainly most of the seven elders of Bracken’s youth would have been unimpressed by a scribe’s comments, for they were of the new breed, born with the inward-looking attitude of the lower system. Elders like his own father, Burrhead, for example, simply would not have understood a scribe-mole’s comments about the lack of spirit at Duncton: “Haven’t we got worms? don’t we defend the system, aren’t there plenty of youngsters coming out?” That’s what he would have said.

Rune was another elder, originally from the westside as well, though to be near the center of things he had moved his burrow nearer to Barrow Vale. He was a menacing mole who wove warning into his words, which were usually as dark and dank as the Marsh End soil. What he lacked in terms of Burrhead’s size and muscle he more than made up for in cunning and deviousness. His ear was tuned to disaster, for he knew when the bad weather was coming or when a tree might fall. He knew when the owls were hungry (and was capable then of leading his opponents to a place where they might become owlprey) or where disease might be found.

He was always the clever one, was Rune, always so clever. But you didn’t stay long with him without sadness creeping into you and a desire for clean air in your fur. You didn’t meddle with Rune either, because a terrible thing would happen to moles who did: they seemed to die.

His voice was cold as ice, dry as dead bark and covered with the red velvet of a dangerous sky. No mole liked to fight him, no mole ever came forward who ever saw him kill. Yet each mating time he would kill for a mate, luring his rival somewhere dark and treacherous. Rune was a shadow on life, and much feared.