Duncton Wood (52 page)

“At night, up here?” queried Mullion.

“Death hangs in the air at any time,” said Boswell. “With luck we’ll be able to get off the path by the way I originally came and there’ll be food to find when we get there. But whatever you do, do not look directly into the eyes of a roaring owl, as it will instantly hypnotize you.”

The climb up the burrowed tunnel was no problem, since it was small enough for them to flex their limbs against the sides, but once out onto the wet slope they were in continual danger. The passing owls were snout-shatteringly loud, and each one left its wave of noisome smells which so disorientated them that they nearly lost their grips more than once. Indeed, Bracken, used as he-was to the clear air of Duncton Hill, started to faint and had not Boswell, at risk to himself, put his paw hard against Bracken’s back, he might easily have slipped back down into the wet running darkness from which they were trying to escape.

Thus, slowly and dangerously, they climbed a mountain whose top they were afraid of reaching. When they got there it was far worse than either Bracken or Mullion could ever have imagined. The noise, the stench, the flashing owl gazes! They all kept their snouts down and their eyes averted for fear of being transfixed by the owls’ gaze – but even so, they could see the light of the owl eyes flashing and shooting on the grubby wet grass that grew on top of the embankment, and the ground continually trembled with their passing.

“Whatever you do, and whatever happens, do not look round at the roaring owls,” repeated Boswell. “Once they have transfixed you with their gaze, they will crush you with their talons.”

The owls passed intermittently from both directions – the ones on the nearer path going one way and on the farther path the other. The three moles waited for a lull before looking up and across – but it was too murky to see much and their snouts were so upset by the fumes and vibrations that they could not snout out much either. Bracken felt a lassitude growing over him. His will to move was fading. He wanted to crouch down and sleep. He wanted..., until Boswell nudged him. “Come
on,
we must move. They are so powerful they can confuse you and put you to sleep without even touching you. Come on!”

It was suddenly Boswell who was leading them, for he seemed to have the power to fight the weakness this terrible place put into a mole.

“Listen!” he said urgently. “We will run across to the area between the two paths...”

“But if they see us,” faltered Mullion, looking up just a little at the owl gazes about them.

“They mustn’t, and you mustn’t let them. Wait until I start and then follow, and do not look toward them, however near they may seem.”

Boswell waited for another lull and then was suddenly off through the grass and onto a hard, wide path that smelled of death. In the distance an owl’s gaze shone up into the sky, round across the marshes behind them and then along the path toward them, casting their three shadows before it. “Run!” gasped Boswell, hobbling across the road as fast as he could, the road so wide, the danger getting so near. “Run!” The path stretched hard and black ahead of them as the roaring owl grew nearer, its noise shaking the air about them and its gaze bright and moving on their fur.

Fast as they ran, the roaring owl seemed to fly faster toward them, getting bigger as the edge of the path they could now just see ahead of them seemed to retreat. Each pawstep forward seemed to take a lifetime, each second brought the owl bigger and nearer, its eyes brighter as they tried to reach the center, as Boswell trailed behind the other two.

“Run!” It was Bracken’s voice shouting out over the owl noise, urging Boswell on to the safety of the central edge. And he was almost there, his paws almost among the sparse vegetation that scraped a living there, when the roaring owl loomed mightily above him and roared past, the wind from its wings so powerful that he was bowled several moleyards along the road.

In the silence that followed, Bracken and Mullion watching in dread, Boswell turned back on his paws, shook himself, and ran at last to join them. “Running’s not my strong point,” he said, and Bracken shook his head in disbelief that a mole should make a joke of nearly dying. There was more to Boswell than met the eye.

The central strip between the paths offered them some cover, though the creatures still flew close by in each direction and every time they did so, the world seemed to be replaced for a few moments by hell itself.

It was Boswell, once again, who urged them on, running out into the darkness of a lull once more, the others following.

None of them knew quite what happened next. However it was, Mullion forgot himself when he was halfway across and looked up at another approaching owl, its eyes catching his into a transfixation of horror. He stopped and turned toward it and it was only when the other two were across and looked back that they realized what had happened. There Mullion crouched, snout toward the approaching owl, quite still and waiting for death. It was Bracken who gasped, but Boswell who acted. He darted out into the path again, hobbled over to Mullion as fast as he could and went between him and the roaring owl. Bracken could not hear what he said but he saw him shouting, saw him cuff Mullion and saw Mullion shake himself as if awaking and then Mullion turned and ran toward him to safety.

But then something worse followed, the sight of which Bracken would never forget. As Boswell stood poised to follow Mullion, lit up by the owl’s gaze, there was the sudden ghostly shadow of a ragged translucent white in the sky as from it there dropped, at terrible speed, a tawny owl, its feathers caught in the glare and its talons heading straight for Boswell. The roaring owl noise got louder and louder, the tawny owl fluttered for a moment above Boswell, its wings shining and shadowy with light, and then down the last few moleyards onto Boswell. There was a squeal, a fluttering of wings as the owl started to rise again, with Boswell as its limp prey. But beyond it, on the far path, a roaring owl passed by and the wind from its wings seemed to beat the tawny owl back down toward the ground, straight into the murderous path of the one that had caught Mullion in its gaze. There was a rush and a thump, a squeal, and a flying of feathers and the roaring owl passed by, taking with it the tawny owl and Boswell. Silence. Nothing. Bracken stared at the path in disbelief. He looked at Mullion, who looked despairingly at him and then into the path again.

“It even eats its own kind,” whispered Mullion.

“But...,” began Bracken, utterly shocked by what had happened. Another roaring owl passed. Silence again. Boswell had gone.

They retreated into the cover of the grass on this side of the path.

“We had better get out of here,” said Mullion matter-of-factly. “Which way did he want us to go?”

“To the west,” said a voice from the darkness behind them. It was Boswell! He was covered with blood. “Not going without me, are you?”.

Bracken ran back to him, reaching forward before Boswell collapsed from his injuries.

“It’s owl’s blood, not mine,” said Boswell. “He got killed when the roaring owl went over him, but 1 didn’t. It went over me, too, but by the Stone’s grace his talons missed me. Now. Shall we get going? Again.” Even his normal calm sounded just a little shaky.

They followed him down the path under cover of the grass that grew there, so shocked by what had nearly happened that the proximity of other roaring owls going by no longer disturbed them. They hid each time a yellow gaze lit up the path and grass near them, then went on again, until the night grew deep and the roaring owls came less often.

Until at last they came to a part where the path gave way to gravel and then a wall, creeping along its edge, round its far corner, and then blissfully away from the path and down an embankment again, this one drier and less steep. As they went down, they moved into a beautiful darkness, the sounds and gazes of the owls now high above them, and never had Bracken appreciated more the moving stillness of his own world.

Boswell insisted on leading them on along the edge of a field – to get them away from the owl paths as quickly as possible – until there was no more than a distant occasional roar, and they were back in the elements of earth and silence and rustling that they knew. A quick, tired digging of temporary burrows, a snouting out of a couple of worms each, and then tumbling head over heels and falling down a dreamland embankment of moss and soft grass into the sleep of the tired and safe.

   26  

T
HEY
stayed for several weeks near the field to which Boswell had led them. Not only were they all tired and in need of rest and food to regain their strength, but February was just starting and with it the worst of the winter. The thaw was soon followed by more snow, which gave way to freezing rain that finally slunk into miserable cold days when the nights dragged on and on and the days were so gloomy they barely got started before they were finished.

Mullion, being a pasture mole and used to open ground, stayed out in the field, quickly taking the opportunity of the thaw to create a simple but extensive system deep enough underground to avoid the frost, which when it came again, drove worms and grubs down into his tunnels. His lines of freshly dug molehills began to poke out of the snow for a wide area over the field.

Bracken hunted around along the edge of the field until he found a small copse just beyond the fence farthest from where they first came, where he created a more complex Duncton Wood-style of system, with subtly connecting tunnels and secret entrances concealed by long grass or leaf mold.

As for Boswell, he refused Bracken’s offer to help to build tunnels and worked slowly on his own to create his own system – starting it from inside an abandoned rabbit tunnel. Bracken was surprised at how big Boswell insisted on burrowing his tunnels and it took him several days before he realized that the feeling of familiarity they gave him, as if he had been there before, came from the fact that they were not unlike some of the tunnels in the Ancient System.

But it did not need this to prompt him to satisfy his curiosity about Uffington. Indeed, he could hardly Wait for Boswell to recover from their ordeal before asking him a dozen questions. His curiosity was matched by Boswell’s about Duncton. But asking questions is one thing, giving answers quite another. The fact was that Bracken was not very eager to talk about it in detail. So he merely outlined the system’s geography, described its personality, explained where he had come from, but affected vagueness about the Ancient System and never even mentioned Rebecca.

These glimpses scarcely satisfied Boswell, whose eagerness after so many moleyears to talk to the one mole he had met who knew anything about Duncton was only tempered by Bracken’s almost painful inability to talk in detail about it. He guessed its causes and, with a compassion and wisdom that Bracken did not realize, eventually stopped seeking the information he felt he needed to pursue his quest to Duncton.

In fact, his self-denial in not pressing Bracken surprised him, for if there was one vice of which he was aware in himself it was impatience. Again and again he had caused annoyance and trouble with other moles he had met since leaving Uffington with his habit of saying too directly what he thought, and his habit of jumping five paces ahead of anymole talking to him.

His fault lay in his own quick intelligence, which made it almost painful for him to have to sit and listen to some-mole prattling on toward a point that was perfectly obvious the moment he opened his mouth.

With Bracken he found he did not feel this frustration – not that Bracken’s thinking was so swift and clear that he never wandered in talk; he did, but there was a quality in Bracken that roused in Boswell feelings he had not known before and swamped any impatience he might have felt. It was as if Bracken had unknowingly opened a tunnel for Boswell into a world of suffering and joy he had never entered before.

The books he had read, the writing he had learned to scribe and interpret, the two works he himself had worked on all seemed quite irrelevant beside the unfamiliar breathless feeling of being on a brink of something when talking with Bracken.