Duncton Wood (50 page)

Bracken turned away from them all and faced the still, frosted wall of tall, haggard grass, diving into it and through, a final chase to his own destruction. Through the grass, leaving the shouts, into an alien world where the birds have eerie calls and slow flapping wings and long, sharp beaks big enough to kill a mole. Running once more, but with the voices fading at last behind him.

“He’s gone into the marsh, the silly bugger!”

“Who was ‘e then? Never seen him before.”

“E’ll be drownded or eaten ‘fore the hour’s done.”

“Who was he. Rune?”

“Somemole we’ll wait for, that’s who. So patrol this edge until I’m satisfied he’s gone for good,” said Rune.

Silence came and the wood was gone forever behind Bracken as he wearily wended his way over the tussocks and ice of the frozen marsh. No food, no shelter, little hope. Lost in a frozen waste. No good going back.

On he went into a fearful day, with whispers of wind in the reeds above his head, the frozen debris of an alien world at his paws. And hunger bearing him down. A long day of fear, a night of rustling ahead. Another dawn came, a day of gnawing at dry grass stems and snouting out the dangers that seemed to wait at every turn. Another afternoon. A sudden spell of bright, cold sun that made him feel as vulnerable as a flea on an open paw. Night and cold. Day and fear. A starting up of blustering winds as hunger weakened him step by step. The carcass of a dead and frozen bird, torn by other scavengers more used to the marsh than he. A tearing of teeth at it, something to eat, a frozen survival, and then black crows wheeling from the sky and down at him, and he was off again, shaken by the cawings and wheelings of blacksheen wings.

Then the worst horror, the ultimate fear of every mole in nightmare straits: oozing mud. The wind brought a thaw and that brought a softening to the grasses, and a heaving to the ground. Where it had been solid to his tired paws, it now squelched wet. Where it had supported his weight, it now let him sink. His belly was covered in the slime of mud as finally, and desperately, he dragged himself on. Everything gone, why cling to life? But what makes a mole fight death? What force drags one tired paw before the other?

His progress – where, he wondered? – grew slower. If he stopped, he sank, if he went on, he grew more and more in need of sleep. A great crow dived from the white sky again, wheeling and calling about him. On and on, with talons ready. Bracken tried his best.

His best was just good enough, for as the marsh thawed out behind him, the frost quite gone, and pockets of water appeared again where ice had been. Bracken neared a wall that skirted its northern edge. The grass adjacent to it was a little drier and he was on it, and up to the wall, and suddenly alive for a moment more as the crows wheeled about and he looked for cover. The smell of a hole, damp and cool, and he was chasing to it... along the wall to a great round drainage pipe set into it, and into its dank shelter. Behind, against the white sky, there was the flutter of a black wing, the hang of a dark gray claw, the tap of a death beak. He turned away in fear into the strange round tunnel and started down it, only trying to stop himself when it was too late. For it sloped down steeply, its bottom’ was slimy with mud and as the sides were too wide for him to reach to grip, he could not stop himself sliding faster and faster down it, a tired anger mounting in him, to be falling to his death like this.

Then, slipping helplessly toward a bright light, where the tunnel ended in a void, he fell tumbling in a shower of mud and water into a concrete drainageway, beyond the marsh and wall.

He opened his eyes into a waking nightmare. For fighting and clawing at each other in the mud and slime that had fallen with him onto the hard ground of the drainage channel were two moles, both intent, it seemed, on finding any worms or other food that had come from the pipe in his fall. There was something wild and desperate about each of them – their fur was unkempt and their flanks thin from starvation, and one of them was rapidly losing the fight. Indeed, so unequal was the struggle that the smaller of the two was simply retreating from the other when Bracken first fully realized what was happening.

With one final clout, the bigger one turned back to where Bracken lay, to search for food in peace, the other watching from a distance, hoping, perhaps, to pick up a scrap or two.

All this Bracken took in very quickly, and as he did so he felt himself suddenly lifted onto his paws by a sense of anger and outrage. Had he run and run and run from fighting in Duncton only to find himself landing straight into more fighting even in this evil-smelling place?

It was as if his frustration with Rune and Mandrake, at Cairn’s death and the henchmoles, even back to Root and Wheatear – all moles who had faced him in one way or another with fighting from which he had run – had finally boiled over into rage. He snarled, his talons extended, and without any more ado he attacked the bigger mole viciously. There was no fear in what he was doing, and little thought. He simply crashed down his paws and talons, grunting and snarling with each lunge, encouraged to even greater violence by each successful contact with his surprised and then frightened adversary. For a moment, the mole fought back, but then, lowering his snout in a gesture of defeat, he turned tail and ran off down the channel, out of the range of Bracken’s sight.

Bracken watched him go, shaking with anger, and then turned to the smaller mole who crouched quite still looking at him. Quite what Bracken expected he did not know – but certainly not the response he got. For, instead of showing any thanks for his deliverance from the bigger mole or any acquiescence to Bracken’s superiority, or even any fear, he had the nerve to ask “What-mole are you, and where are you from?” – the traditional greetings of the superior mole to the inferior.

Bracken was so taken back by this insolence that he very nearly started laying into this mole as well, but then the sight of one so weak and pathetic-looking being so bold struck him as frankly comic.

“You’ve got a nerve,” he said. “My name’s Bracken, from Duncton Wood.”

This appeared to have as startling an effect on the small mole as his own question had had on Bracken.

He darted forward, limping in a curious way as if he was injured, and exclaimed, “You mean the Duncton system?” Bracken began to nod and then said: “And whatmole are you, for Stone’s sake?”

“Boswell of Uffington,” the mole replied.

III

RACKEN

   25  

U
FFINGTON
! N
O
single word could have heartened Bracken more at that moment. A mole from Uffington! It had always been Hulver’s greatest wish that he should live to see such a thing and now, here in this strange place, Bracken had been led to just such a mole by the Stone’s grace.

His excitement was, however, tinged by a sense of disappointment, for this Boswell did not in any way look as Bracken had imagined one of the legendary moles from Uffington would look. He was small and crippled, his weak paw making him walk in a darting, hobbling way that had his head swinging to the left – the side of his weak paw – then up away from the ground on his right and then down again. His coat was a very dark gray flecked with white and he looked half-starved.

He spoke in a quick staccato way as if he could not get his thoughts out fast enough to keep up with his words, and he had a habit of interrupting Bracken when he spoke with a “Yes, yes,” as if he knew what he was going to say before he said it. Which, often, he did.

Despite his overt weakness he seemed quite unafraid, although a semblance of fear – very like that he had shown before the other mole – would sometimes cross his face. Bracken soon realized that this was a guise, a kind of mask he wore to appear so pathetic that no mole would wish to persist in attacking. Perhaps that’s why he’s managed to survive, thought Bracken, whose only knowledge of crippled moles was that they never survived their first summer because they could not get territory of their own.

Perhaps the most disconcerting quality he had lay in the way his eyes, small and bright as a bark beetle’s wing, fixed Bracken with a gaze so direct and penetrating that at first Bracken felt positively shifty looking at him.

“So you’re from Duncton, are you?” said Boswell, before Bracken could get a word in. “Just the mole I’ve been looking for.”

“Well, it would be nice to know a bit more..

“Yes, yes,” interrupted Boswell, “all in good time. Right now there’s
no
time. If you want to rest you had better forget it. We’ve got to get out of here as fast as we can.”

“We’ve
got to
 
—” started Bracken, who had no intention of allying himself to anymole just like that, whether he came from Uffington or not.

“That’s right.
We.
You can try it on your own but you won’t succeed.”

It did not take Boswell very long to persuade Bracken that they – and his
they
included the other mole, who now lurked near them looking both angry and fearful at the same time – were in a desperate situation.

The place into which Bracken had fallen was a long, narrow drainage channel made of a smooth unnatural stone, which smelled wrong and had high impassable walls. On one side was the marsh, on the other side an embankment that rose massively upward and sloped away out of sight. But though Bracken could not see its end, he could smell and hear what was there – creatures whose noise was loud and rumbling, so great, indeed, that the very ground shook with their passing and whose smell was so sick with death that it made a mole’s snout go numb.

“Roaring owls,” said Boswell obscurely.

“Owls?”

“Seen them myself. I came here
down
that embankment two nights ago. There’s a flat path at the top, wide as a mole’s system, and the roaring owls fly along just above it. You wait till night comes and you’ll see what I mean.”

By this time the third mole, whom Bracken had driven away, slunk back within earshot. He seemed to want to join in the discussion and nodded his head when Boswell was describing the owls.

“Their gaze is so fierce that you can see it at night even down here. It’s like fire,” he said, creeping over to them.

“Fire?” queried Bracken, who had never heard the word.

“Like hot sun,” said the other, “only it kills everything it touches.”

As if this weren’t enough, they went on to explain that the channel they were in was plagued by carrion crows and the occasional kestrel, which dived and pecked at any creature alive or dead caught in it. They had taken a mole only hours before Bracken’s arrival, and constantly squabbled and pecked over a dead hare that lay away farther down the channel.

“There’s no cover here. You can’t burrow. And the stench of the roaring owls is enough to kill a mole,” exclaimed Boswell.

“And there’s no food – that’s why...,” the other mole didn’t finish; he didn’t want to remind Bracken of the circumstances of their first meeting.

“What’s your name?” asked Bracken, taking the initiative for the first time.