Duncton Wood (8 page)

If that had been the only incident it might not have mattered, but despite her sincere good intentions, Rebecca did other things as bad. One day, for example, she managed to lose not one of her brothers in the wood, but
all three.
One of them nearly got killed by an owl and the other two were gone for two days and were only brought back to the home burrow by, of all moles, a Marsh End female. “It was Rebecca’s fault,” they wailed, though they were by now nearly adults.

Rebecca tried to explain to Mandrake: “It was only a game of hide and seek and I thought it would be fun to go a bit farther than usual in the tunnels and perhaps for a moment or two onto the surface I’m terrible sorry
I
didn’t know where we were but it wasn’t
hard
to find the way back I don’t understand how they got lost for two days and there weren’t any owls about I’m sure please...,” but Mandrake was furious. Indeed, so furious was he that few moles have ever seen him like that and survived. His anger with her on these occasions was always out of proportion to the crime, if crime it was. Yet still her spirit seemed to thrive on it.

But while she grew big and headstrong like Mandrake himself, she also became smiling and graceful like her mother. She loved to touch things and to dance or find some quiet spot in the spring sun and lie softly, with the ecstasy of it on her snout. She would chase her brothers like a growing male yet comfort them when they were hurt as the kindest female did.

There was a fine lightness of spirit, of life, about her and perhaps it was this that Mandrake, in his black anger, would try vainly to catch and crush. As she grew older. Mandrake’s only recourse was to increasing violence toward her, and as the spring advanced, she found it best to keep her snout down, and well out of the way.

There came a time in April when suddenly there was wild blood in the air, and Rebecca found it exciting. Mating time was starting. She knew she shouldn’t go onto the surface, but Mandrake himself seemed to be gone more these days and her mother was losing interest in the autumn litter because it was almost full-grown now. So though Rebecca felt tied still to her home burrow and was still not really an adult, she was drawn by the life in the air up into the busy wood.

Busy
and
noisy. Birds darted and flitted about the trees, which were now heavy with bud. Anemones, celandine, daffodils were almost everywhere. Some days, it was true, the sky would be gray and dark with the air around the trees and undergrowth heavy and still. But only some days. Increasingly she would poke her snout out of a tunnel entrance early in the morning and see a magical, light, swirling mist running through the wood, white and pink as the sun broke through it. The buds and flowers about her seemed to be opening, reaching up through the light mist to the sun beyond.

“Oh!” she sighed. “How beautiful!” Near her a cluster of celandine, yellow petals half open, reached up softly to the sky. The mist thinned before her eyes until it was almost gone, and she ran across the surface among the trees feeling she was part of the spring excitement of the wood. From afar off to the eastside, the soft caw-caws of rooks carried to her, long and slow compared with the trilling of the blackbirds and thrush that darted in and out among the trees as excited as she was. She ran to the center of Barrow Vale to watch the wood wake up as the last of the thin wisps of mist swirled away into the sunshine. A warm, moist, nutty smell had replaced the rotting smell of winter, which she now saw, for the first time, was unpleasant and hung about the tunnels still.

Duncton Wood spread away all around her – over to the westside and the east, down to the south where her brothers had gotten lost, and up toward the slopes leading to the top of Duncton Hill. Oh, she wanted to sing and dance and call everymole together and celebrate! Duncton Wood! The name was magical in the sunlight. The winter’s years have gone! She laughed, or rather smiled aloud, her joy shaking among the yellow petals of the celandine which were now open, and echoed in the constant calls and whistles of the birds. The great oaks, round and solid at their bases, rose high about the edge of Barrow Vale, and somewhere among their branches a woodpecker drummed its territorial rights from a tree and then flew direct to another oak to drum again.

“It’s my wood,” she whispered to herself, joyfully. “My wood!”

“And mine too,” said a voice behind her, the voice of Rune. She turned round, startled, but as’ usual found it hard to see him immediately, so good was he at hiding in impenetrable shadows, even on a sunny day.

“You shouldn’t be here, you know,” he said coldly, but with a smile to his voice that only seemed to underline the threat it carried.

To Rebecca, Rune, who still smelled of winter, spoiled everything she was enjoying about the morning, and so she ran off without a word, across Barrow Vale. Rune followed urgently, easily keeping up with her but hanging behind two or three paws’ distance. Rune wanted Rebecca, he wanted to mate with her. His desire was not lust, for Rune did not give way to simple lust, the lust he felt for any female in mid-March, but a kind of sick sensuality based on the fact that she was Mandrake’s daughter. He felt, in some way, that his position in the system gave him the right to take her and also that it would make him equal with Mandrake.

Sensing at least some of this, Rebecca’s joy in the morning died within her and she ran anxiously down into the tunnels toward her home burrow, trying not to appear too disturbed by Rune’s presence. He followed behind her, the sound of his paws on the tunnel floor liquid and smooth. Her breath became irregular; she could smell Rune behind her and hear his chill voice calling after her “Rebecca, Rebecca, I was only joking about you not being allowed out on Barrow Vale. Stay and talk.”

Rebecca scurried on, ready now to turn with her talons on Rune and draw his blood if she had to. Imperceptibly the scamper along the tunnels turned into a chase, until they were traveling at speed, and Rebecca had to think very fast to twist and turn in the right direction. Sometimes Rune would disappear down a turn in the tunnel, only to reappear ahead or to the side of her, so she had to turn away from the direction of her home burrow to keep clear of him. Sometimes he would laugh or call after her “It’s all right, Rebecca, I won’t hurt you.” She was out of breath with running and becoming confused as to which way to turn, everything rolling round in her mind as her chest heaved and panted with the effort of the chase. “I want you, Rebecca. I want you,” Rune called, his voice seeming to echo darkly from all directions, as if there was a Rune down every turn in the tunnels.

Finally she could stand it no more and stopped in her tracks and turned round with talons raised but shaky to face him. He eyed her calmly and, inching forward very slowly, got bigger and bigger. He smelled of the dead of winter and she felt as if she was falling back into a pit, her talons soft and useless, scrabbling ever more weakly above her head as she fell back and back. Somewhere, far, far away, she thought she could hear the urgent drumming of the woodpecker on the oak’s side, but it was only the pounding of her heart, which no longer seemed to be part of her. Rune came nearer, smoothly nearer, looking down at her, petrified before him, lusting in his power before her.

But the moment was suddenly broken by the terrible shout of “Rebecca!” It was Mandrake, suddenly Mandrake, and now she
did
hear her heart thump, thump, thumping, and she felt terribly frightened as the two male moles she most feared in the system loomed above her.

“This is not the time to leave the home burrow,” said Mandrake, adding with threatening force, “How many times must you be told?”

“Just what I’ve been telling her. Mandrake, my very words,” purred Rune, turning with a black smile to Mandrake. “It’s not true,” she said. “He wanted...”

But Mandrake ignored Rebecca, going straight to her and striking her so hard that she fell back and hit her snout against the tunnel wall, and it brought tears to her eyes. She ran crying from them both, back to her home burrow.

Mandrake turned to Rune: “She will not mate this spring, Rune, not this spring. She is not ready, and I will kill anymole that tries. Whichever mole he might be.”

Then Rune ran off down the tunnel, as ever awed by Mandrake, who, it seemed, was impossible to fool. However, he promised himself, a cold laugh in his voice, “I’ll have her yet.”

So April ran on toward May and most Duncton females grew big with young so that when the burrows started to warm up, they were ready for their litters. Rebecca, who had seen the males grow aggressive and her father angry with bloodlust, and Sarah grow excited and running, sighing, nervous, taken in the burrow by Mandrake, and Rebecca near to hear the deep softness in his voice and wonder about the world in a whirl about her, and thinking of Rune chasing her not knowing where to turn, watching the males who dared not come near thinking of Mandrake and Sarah, Mandrake so powerful on Sarah, she wanted to run to them. Oh Oh Oh she would sigh alone, drifting into adulthood.

She heard the cries of littered pups and wanted to go near and croon over them as she did flowers and the sunlight, but she never dared go near for fear of attack. She steered clear of males after her father found her with Rune, for though he never said anything to her directly, she knew he would kill anymole who came near. So, when males did come near, she would discourage them, though often they were young like her and sweet, so sweet, that she wanted to dance with them, and laugh as they did to match her desire and run, her spirit rising and diving like larks did over the pastures beyond the edge of the wood.

As summer started, she felt miserable and isolated, for even her brothers went off for long periods searching for mates across the wood. Sometimes, though, they would return to the home burrow, far they were still youngsters at heart. If they had been beaten in a fight, as they always were by the older, more experienced males, she would delight in comforting them and making them laugh again. But they had changed, becoming more aggressive toward her, and sometimes she sensed in them the same urgent demand that had been in Rune’s voice in the tunnel when he chased her, and she would turn away from them, unhappy.

   5  

B
RACKEN
was raised on the westside, where fear was a dirty word and blood (provided it was somemole else’s) was a thing to celebrate. Westsiders were tough and Burrhead was the toughest. That meant his mate’s children had a lot to put up with in the way of fighting, bullying, being surprise-attacked, and generally being knocked about, as mole youngsters learned the arts of self-protection and aggression in the toughest school in the Duncton system.

Bracken’s mother. Aspen, came from the eastside, Burrhead having fought and killed for her after the February elder meeting. Apart from Mandrake, who killed other moles automatically in mating fights, few of the moles actually killed opponents in fights. One or other retreated before they were hurt. So Burrhead’s performance made him feared.

He was, in fact, unusually aggressive, and in a system without Mandrake might well have emerged as the toughest mole of all. He was, however, brutish-tough rather than cunning-tough, and moles like Rune or Mekkins had more native wit about them than he did.

It is unlikely that they, for example, would have put up with a mate as untidy as Aspen. Her burrow was always in a mess, littered with uncleared droppings, grubby, dried worm bits festering m the burrow’s recesses, and vegetation brought in by the youngsters.

Aspen chose the names, as traditionally the females did – the strongest, Bracken’s brother, being called Root for obvious reasons; the female was called Wheatear because there was a very slight discoloration over her right ear – as there was over Aspen’s. And she gave Bracken a name traditionally given to the weakest of a litter of three.

Burrhead was never impressed by Bracken – in fact, he wasn’t much impressed by the litter as a whole, since it only produced one useful male. Still, as he watched the three pink pups struggling at each other and their mother’s teats, he got some satisfaction from the fact that the strongest. Root, seemed very strong indeed. A conclusion which was well justified, as Root developed into just the kind of bullying, aggressive mole Burrhead hoped for in a son.