Duncton Wood (82 page)

Although in the final stages of their journey to Capel Garmon they had managed to avoid all contact with roaring owls, the route on which Bracken now led them took them steeply down into a river valley in which, as they knew from experience, they would sooner or later have to cross a roaring-owl route. In fact, it came sooner, right at the bottom of a steep valley side. They were glad to reach the bottom, for the valley side was wooded with coniferous trees, never a good place to find food. They pressed on over the roaring-owl way without difficulty, using the technique they had developed over the moleyears – a long touch of the snout on the hard, unnatural ground they found in such places and then, when both agreed that there was no vibration, a fast dash across.

Once on the other side they found that the air was heavy with the scent of a deep, cold river and though tempted to press on and find it, for rivers were a good place for food. Bracken insisted that they stay higher up the valley by the roaring-owl way and follow along by the side of it. It was a wise decision, for this route took them to a bridge over the river from whose height they could hear that it would have been too fast and wide for them to have swum across safely. They waited until dusk before risking the bridge, but once across dropped right to the river’s edge, where they found food on the thin strip of rough pasture fields that ran by its side.

On the side of the river from which they had come the ground rose steeply with massive coniferous trees covering it in darkness and stiff silence, while higher up on their own side a smattering of deciduous trees, mainly oaks and ash, gave way to rougher, starker ground that grew thicker with coniferous forest the higher it went. They pressed on downstream until, after only four or five molemiles, a tributary flowed down into the main river, a tumbling, rocky stream too rough for a mole ever to cross.

“But then, we don’t need to,” said Bracken.’ “That’s where Siabod lies, off up this valley somewhere.” He pointed his snout upstream and they both headed westward again, wondering what lay up the valley above them.

Their progress was mainly slow, for the valley was steep and rocky, but here and there it flattened out into sheep-pasture fields where the food was good and the going easy. But however flat the ground immediately ahead of them sometimes was, they were aware, constantly and claustrophobically, of the steep valley sides rising to their left and beyond the river to their right, and of the dark green forest that clothed it, out of which ugly snouts and flanks of gray-black rock protruded more and more frequently. Bracken felt he was taking them straight into a rocky trap from which, should they run into trouble, there would be no easy escape. The river raced and roared down past them and occasionally its sound was joined by the rumble and rattle of a roaring owl as it went by on the way that ran a little higher up the valley side.

Because the valley was so closed in they could get no sense of what lay beyond it, either to the side or straight ahead, while from down the valley and into their faces ran a continual run of bad weather, rain and wind, sometimes hail, and air that got colder and colder. It gave them the feeling that their situation was only going to get worse.

It was on the fourth day after crossing the bridge that they ran into their first snow – not falling from the sky, but lying in wet, streaky patches in hollows in the ground and several days old, judging from the way it had been trodden over and messed on by the sheep. It was grubby, half-thawed snow and it matched the place they were in. High above them, where bare rock was exposed, an occasional patch glared against the dark rise of trees, though these had now shed whatever snow had settled on them from their steep branches. As night fell, the temperature dropped and the snow patches began to freeze and crackle at a talon touch, their icy surfaces catching the last purple glimmer of daylight in the chill sky above.

It was on the following day, the fifth in their journey up the valley, that they met their first Siabod mole. It happened suddenly among some tussocky brown grass near the river’s edge where they had gone to take a drink in a tiny backpool made accessible by treading sheep.

They heard his voice from the tussocks above before they saw him: “Beth yw eich enwau, a’ch cyfundrefn?” They did not understand the language at all, though from its tone and his stance it was obvious what it meant.

“We’ve come from Capel Garmon,” said Bracken, to make things simple.

“In peace,” added Boswell.

“Dieithriaid i Siabod, paham yr ydych yma?” His words were a question, but that was all they could tell. They waited in silence. If he was a Siabod mole, he was not what either of them had expected, which was a mole as big as Mandrake, and as fierce.

He was thin and wiry and had a wizened, suspicious expression on his face that spelled distrust. His snout was mean and pinched, and his fur looked more like a bedraggled teasel than anything else. His small black eyes traveled rapidly over them, taking in their strength, their relative size, Boswell’s crippled paw, their positions (which was lower than his down by the water) and generally giving them the feeling that they were being picked over by the snoutiest little mole they had ever come across.

Then Boswell spoke again. “Siabod?” he asked.

The mole stared at them, his eyes flicking from one to the other, the faintest wrinkles of contempt forming in minute folds down the furless part of his snout.

“Southerners, are you?” he asked, speaking in ordinary mole so they could understand, but in such a way that the question was also accusation and with a harsh, mocking accent to the words.

But before they had time to reply, he darted back into the grass from which he had emerged and by the time Bracken had climbed up to it, was gone. Bracken called after him, shouted out that they intended no harm, asked him to come back, but the only reply lay in whatever words a mole cared to divine in the rushing and rippling of the cold, indifferent river.

“He’s gone,” said Bracken.

“Let’s press on,” said Boswell, “as you have said more than once. He’ll be back.”

“Yes, and with other moles. He was Siabod, all right. He spoke with the same accent Mandrake had,” said Bracken.

“Well, I can’t see where else he can be from up here,” said Boswell, running along a little behind, “and that must have been Siabod he was speaking and —”

“He was so pathetic,” said Bracken contemptuously., “He reminded me of nothing more than a wireworm in a tunnel when you expected to see a lobworm. Nasty little character he was. I mean, he might have helped us.. The anger in Bracken’s words reflected his apprehension of what they might soon face.

They pressed on, a new life flowing through them now that they had made contact, if contact it was, with some-mole, however contemptible he seemed to Bracken.

Indeed, they were so full of the encounter and the discussion of the possibilities of the first mole bringing others, and their decision just to push forward and see what happened, that they hardly noticed that the wood on their side of the river suddenly gave way to clear, rough pasture, while the valley widened out to their left into a gentler slope. As they moved forward, their snouts to the ground ahead and not looking up at the prospect that very slowly began to loom before them, they did not notice that beyond the now gentler valley side, off to their left, what looked like a mist was beginning to swirl in, swath after swath, among the upper branches of the highest trees. Not mist but low cloud, whose lower edge smoked like moist grass caught by fire, while beyond the gaps in these low clouds there was not more sky but a grim, great blackness, spattered here and there with specks of pure white that rose soaring like a wall high and massive above the valley: a mountain.

Because the mist was so pervasive and changeable, it would have been impossible, even had Bracken and Boswell been aware of the scene looming so high beyond them, to make out the complete shape of the gloomy heights above the valley side.

But no sooner were they conscious that the valley had widened and that the quality of windsound had grown deeper and heavier than the mist began to fall in waves toward them into the valley. At first it was only a thin veil that softened and deadened the russet and gray slopes behind it, but as it crept, swirled and surged lower, its higher parts grew thicker and the valley sides above them were lost in an impenetrable murk like the opaque off-white that slinks across the eyes of the creature going blind with age.

Then, faster than a forest fire, more silent than snow in the night, more unexpected than an owl’s attack, the mist was down across the ground where they crouched, racing and running between them in cold and clammy fronds, robbing everything of color before masking everything in gray.

It was like no mist either of them had ever seen on the chalk downland they knew, where a mist generally came with cold, still air and a mole waited patiently for it to go. This one was moving and racing and challenging, a living mist that disoriented a mole by putting its chill around his snout and forming mysterious shapes in its layered depths that seemed to move around him, or make him feel
he
was moving when he was, in fact, crouching still.

“Boswell?” called Bracken to his friend who, though only a few moleyards away, was becoming obscured by the thickening white between them that not only cut off sight and smell but muffled and distorted sound as well.

“Boswell, stay close to me or we’ll get separated.”

When the two moles came together, each noticed that the other’s fur was coated with the finest of condensation and that their talons were shiny wet with it.

With no reference points of sight or smell around them but the now-muffled river, they instinctively tried burrowing, but the ground was so wet and full of flat, granular stones that jarred the shallowest talon thrust that they gave it up.

“I don’t like this one bit,” said Bracken, looking around at the mist in which the light intensity continually changed as the layers between them and the sky thickened or thinned with the run of the breeze. “I’ve never felt so exposed in my life. Let’s make for the river and we can find a temporary burrow in its bank.”

Bracken started off one way, then paused and, shaking his head, went another before stopping and moving in yet a third.

“I think the river’s
that
way,” said Boswell, pointing in a fourth direction.

“No, I can distinctly hear it
that
way,” said Bracken, pointing somewhere else and resolutely leading them toward where the sound of the river seemed, possibly, to come from. The mist moved about them, drifting one way, racing another, fading before them so that they caught a glimpse of a scatter of gray rock for a moment before it disappeared again, or a stand of grass appeared to their left or right.

Then they heard voices, harsh and quick, somewhere ahead; or was it behind? Siabod voices.

They stopped, snouting about themselves in confusion and for the first time in their long journeys together found they were totally lost. They could hear the river but not find it, and the only reference point they really had was each other.

“Best thing to do,” said Bracken in a voice that made quite clear that it was what
he
was going to do whatever else happened, “is to crouch still and wait until it clears. And if those were moles we heard, I hope they find us, because they can lead us to somewhere safe.”

He looked in the direction of the sky-above them, seeking out a lighter part of the mist and hoping it might clear. Then the voices came back, from somewhere else, and there was a sudden rush and squeal of a massive herring gull in and out of the mist above them.

Time was as obscured as place, and neither mole could have said whether it was ten minutes or two hours before the mist began to clear as suddenly as it had begun. First they were able to see a greater distance along the ground as one patch moved off and was not so quickly replaced by another. Then the swirls above them parted for a moment to reveal, quite unexpectedly, the hint of a blue sky. The light brightened around them, and soon they were able to make out the direction of the sun itself, though it was too diffused to show its shape. The mist suddenly cleared to their right, bringing the sound of the river clearly to them once more, and there it lay, quite a way below them; without realizing they had moved across the valley and a little way up its side in their wandering. They were about to start off toward it when a voice sang out of the light mist that still lay ahead of them: “It’s lost you are, is it?”

Bracken tensed and stepped a pace or two in front of Boswell, squinting to see if he could make out from the dark rocky shapes and shadows ahead where the mole was hidden. He felt angry and frustrated enough for a fight.

The mist rolled away and there were four moles ranged on the slope a little above them, the one they had seen and three others, all equally stunted and mean-looking.

“Siabod moles,” murmured Boswell.

“Yes, we
are
lost, as a matter of fact,” said Bracken boldly, “and we’d be obliged if you’d tell us where Siabod is.”

There was a rapid crossfire of talk among the four moles which they could not understand before the smaller one, who had met them already, approached and said “And what would you be wanting with Siabod? It’s not a place you just go to, you know.”

“If you hadn’t scarpered when you saw us before, we wouldn’t have been mucking about in that bloody mess,” said Bracken, waving a paw at the retreating mist and deciding that a bit of aggression wouldn’t go amiss.

It went very amiss indeed. One of the other moles stepped forward and said in a high, angry voice, “Now don’t you go talking to Bran like that, or you’ll have something else to talk about, see?”

Bran smirked and stepped cockily forward in a way he had not dared to do when he was alone.

“Well?” he asked.

Bracken did not reply because he was engaged in a snout confrontation with the other mole, who did not impress him one bit. He had learned a great deal about aggression over the moleyears and could tell a phony when he saw one. Also, he was hungry and he was itching for a fight.