Duncton Wood (95 page)

T
HERE
is a point at which the gentlest touch becomes the softest caress becomes the sweetest nuzzle becomes the lightest push becomes the most loving romp in the world: but Bracken and Rebecca never found out exactly where it was.

He would look at her in burrow or among dry leaves, and she at him, and they would wonder at the wonder of where they were. And what words they said, or never finished saying, they never knew. Except that when he Said I love you I love you I love you it was never, never enough for him, because what words can satisfy the ache to be so wholly with another mole which even bodies cannot satisfy?

Sometimes playful, rompish, silly, she would ask him again, just one more time, do you really love me and he would hesitate and sadly shake his head and she would cry out oh oh oh oh Oh as he said No I don’t
think
I do with such love that it was better than him saying that he did.

Or she would talk about a mole who wasn’t there, whom she had known, whom she really
did
love, yes she did!

What was he like? Bracken would ask and she would think and nuzzle him and start to say, then stop, then start again that, well (nuzzling close), describe a mole whose paws and snout and fur and scars and very soul were just like Bracken’s own and Bracken would say: Strange, I knew a female once, not far from here, who I think I loved...

“Oh, what was she like?” asked Rebecca breathlessly. “And
did
you love her?”

But Bracken wouldn’t say but only show, by putting his claws among her soft, gray fur and snouting at her soft as wind and strong as roots so that she closed her eyes and smiled and sighed aloud until he did it harder and she held him to her so that the mole he knew was she, Rebecca, and she was moist where he snouted and she wide and he pushing and she snouting him soft and hard so that he was hard to her with haunches so powerful to her, and claws that hurt before exquisite now, running down her back and up it, up it higher, higher, and higher until they didn’t need the preface words, or feel the ache of being two apart because he was there upon her, mole of moles and she so proud and he as well, for his the sound of sighs and calls and cries of the only mole that held a beauty for his eyes, beneath above upon below.

Theirs was the laughter and theirs the tears of making love as days passed into night and leaves changed into stars.

Rebecca knew she was with litter at the very moment that it happened, because the light about them both, in the deep darkness of their burrow, was just as it had been by the Stillstone beneath the Duncton Stone: glimmering white, a halo over them, as the burrow filled with the sound of the sighs of wonder.

Bracken knew she was with litter when one dawn he heard her burrowing nearby, at the end of one of the tunnels, and singing the kind of song that she must have sung as a pup, before he had met her. He laughed and smiled and fell asleep again, the scent and warmth of her all about him; while she heard his laugh and knowing why he made it laughed as well as she felt his power and strength in the tunnels all around her, giving her a kind of freedom that she’d never had.

It was May, and the nesting leaves she began to take down to the birth-burrow she was making bore a fresh Maytime scent, each one seeming to her more and more special. She took down grass as well, and the fragrant stems and florets of ground ivy which, because they were not so brittle as the dry and delicate beech leaves, gave her litternest the strength she felt it needed.

As the days passed and May grew warmer, she kept more and more to herself as she steadily extended her tunnels, which lay adjacent to the ones Bracken had originally burrowed between the Stone and the pastures.

Bracken had reoccupied his old tunnels, the ones she had lived in for so long, and she liked the feeling that he was there in tunnels she had grown to love and where, he said, he basked in what he called her “delicious scent.” They spent long periods near each other, wallowing in the pleasure of having to say so little to understand so much.

Their only visitor was Comfrey who, as the days went by, grew less and less nervous and awkward and was able to crouch for long hours near them without even twitching his tail or looking about himself uncomfortably. Their love calmed him.

It was only because of him that they found out about what each of them had done in their long moleyears of separation. By themselves they never talked of it, but Comfrey had always been a mole to ask questions and there was so much he wanted to know. Rebecca would tell him things very simply, almost as if nearly dying in a blizzard or traveling all the way back from Siabod were the sort of things moles did every other day. Although she rarely referred to the Stone or its providence, there was in all she said the sense that behind each incident there was its common power, whose pattern a mole might wonder at but never fully understand.

Bracken’s stories were more dramatic, more male, and Comfrey would often shudder at the close escapes he and Boswell had had and wonder what powers the two moles must have possessed to have, faced so much and come out of it all alive.

But it was only to Comfrey that Bracken would talk like this – to the other moles in the system he was a mystery: they knew what he had achieved, but none of them could ever make him talk of it, and sometimes they wondered if a mole like him, who didn’t seem all that special, could really have done so much.

But more often it was the fact of Bracken and Rebecca being together that they talked about, and there was barely a mole in the system who did not sense the peace and love that surrounded the two most respected moles in Duncton. Their presence together near the Stone began to bring a peace and depth of feeling to the system that contrasted almost magically with the dark dissension created by Rune before Bracken came.

As for Rune being killed, it must be said that the communal opinion in the Ancient System, fickle as ever, now held the consensus “He never was a nice one, that Rune, and I always said it was a bit suspicious the way that he came back like that and pretended to be doin’ us all a great big good turn...”

“That’s wot I thought exactly, only I didn’t like to say because, well, you don’t like to carp when things seem all right about a particular mole even though you yourself have your own doubts...” And so forth.

Comfrey, of course, was their darling again and now that Rebecca was definitely out of the running, there was no doubt in anymole’s mind who the healer was.

It all made Comfrey smile, but he didn’t mind because, like Rebecca, he healed and listened and cared for them for no other reason than that he wanted to – it was the Stone he tried to listen to, not the changing words of other moles.

Rebecca’s litter came one night two hours before dawn in early June and was the last to be born that summer. Its birth was quick and joyous, all four pups being nudged at and licked to start their tiny scrabble into life almost before a mole could blink.

It was her third litter and the second she had reared, and she did it as simply as eating or breathing.

Bracken heard the births and stayed nearby but did not enter her burrow, much though he wanted to. But a day or two after they came and their bleats and mewing were beginning to carry, she called out for him and he came slowly into her tunnels to look at them.

How big he seemed to her, crouching at the burrow entrance and looking in wonder at the four pups who seemed to be permanently trying to untie the knot into which they had tied themselves as pink, soft paws and questing snouts jostled and pushed at soft, furless bodies and they climbed over each other with innocent indifference.

Rebecca had three of their names already – Rose and Curlew for the two females and Beech for the smaller of the males. This last was a common name and Rebecca knew it had always been his favorite tree to shelter by, so Bracken did not bother to tell her that one of Rue’s litter by him had been called the same.

As for the fourth, she hesitated over what name to give it, wondering if she might not choose the name of one of the moles they had both loved – Mekkins or Boswell.

Bracken shook his head. It wouldn’t have been right. This mole did not look (if pups can look like anything) like either of them. He was, in fact, the largest of the litter and though not the quickest to fight his way through a scrabble for a suckle (that was Curlew’s place), he was always close behind.

Bracken watched indifferently – names didn’t mean much to him. In fact, he was thinking of something else, as fathers often do when faced by the wonder of new life they have not borne themselves yet helped to create and before which they may often feel a curious impotence. Can these pups really live to be adult, they think, as they gaze in awe at the weak, blind things that carry life in every single movement they make?

The four rolled and tangled up before him and Bracken’s mind took him back to the blizzard on Moel Siabod and he wondered how such tiny things, for Rebecca’s Siabod litter can have been no bigger, could ever have survived conditions in which he himself had nearly died. The thought was horrifying. For a moment their paws all piled on top of each other and then splayed out in tiny protracted talons, and he thought of the great rock splinters and fragments near Castell y Gwynt; and the mixing of their mewings’ seemed like the winds he had heard howling there.

Then suddenly, for a moment, the so-far-unnamed mole scrabbled his way to the top, his snout shooting up above them all, his paws clutching out into thin air and failing to catch onto anything to stop him falling back down again, away from Bracken, and behind the pile formed by the other three.

It seemed to Bracken that he was back beside the desolate Stones near Siabod and slipping and falling as his son had just done, down into the nameless cwm with the great peak of Tryfan which was, for that moment, his son’s tiny snout, above him and he falling away from it. He shivered with the memory and yet felt the wonder again of seeing Tryfan.

“Call him Tryfan,” said Bracken simply.

“Yes,” said Rebecca, not needing to ask the reason. “Tryfan, sweet thing: Tryfan, my love...” It was the first of their pups Bracken heard Rebecca talk to by name.

Close though Rebecca’s tunnels were to the Stone, the litter seemed too young to go up to it out on the surface a few weeks later, when Bracken was to speak the Midsummer ritual once again.

But they sensed the excitement and knew that the adults were doing something special, for all of them were restless and fractious that day, bleating especially loud and mewing for no reason at all.

In fact, by Midsummer Night they had already started to wander far and wide in Rebecca’s tunnels and she often had to round them up and shoo them back to her main burrow because she still liked them all to sleep together. Because of this, one of the females from the system agreed to come to watch over them while Rebecca went up for the ritual itself at midnight, so that she would know they were safe.

Even so, they must have sensed that she was leaving them for the surface, because they stumbled bleating after her when she left, despite her smiles and love words to them, and the female had to quiet them with her own words. “There, there, she’s not going far, you silly things; she’ll come back, so don’t you go fearing over that. Shhh, my darlings, shhh.”

What a night it was! Warm and clear, with a moon that shone as powerfully as a sun, and beech-tree branches that swayed against it high above the gathering moles, the shiny sides of the beech leaves shimmering with pale light in a faint breeze.

What excitement for them all to know they were going to hear the ritual as it should be spoken, by Bracken who had traveled off so far – all the way to Uffington and farther, so they said – and who was taught the ritual by as fine an elder as Duncton Wood has ever seen, name of Hulver!

Youngsters from early litters were brought up to the clearing and crouched about in groups or scampered when they shouldn’t, wondering what the fuss was about until they saw the Stone and were awed by its great size and the way it seemed to move against the rising moon.

How many mothers whispered “Now don’t you forget what you’re going to be seeing and hearing tonight, because this is for you, this is, and Duncton’s honored to have a mole like Bracken here to say those holy words he learned when he was scarcely older than you are now! So don’t you forget!” And strange to say, although their puppish eyes wandered here and there, and they thought mainly of play and worms and chasing their siblings through the tunnels, there was many a youngster who
did
always remember that special night.

But there was one who was not there – not on the surface, anyway – who would have an even more special reason to remember the Midsummer Night when Bracken spoke the ritual: Tryfan.

He was not only bigger than his other siblings, he was also by now far the most adventurous; and even the most careful females can lose track of a single pup when she’s trying to keep track of four of them at once. So, as they scampered round in Rebecca’s burrow, the female looking after them did not see Tryfan scramble into the tunnel.

Did he go looking for Rebecca, or was it just the excitement of exploring the tunnels? He himself was never able to say, for all he could remember were snatches of images, moments of places, wondrous and fearful incidents such as any pup remembers of something that happened when he was very young and which made an impression for a lifetime upon him.

He remembered the sound of his siblings’ play, suddenly distant, and wondering why he was alone; he remembered the tunnels seeming huge and chalky and looking around behind him and hearing his lonely bleat echo about him, confusing him. He remembered running into tunnels that felt old as time, and curving round and seeing chalk dust on his paws.

He heard the murmur of moles on the surface above where the moles were collecting, carried by some tunnel wind or rootway of vibration, down to where he actually was – the round, circular tunnel that surrounded the Chamber of Echoes, the tunnel from which Bracken had first started his exploration of the central core of the Ancient System. Now Bracken’s son, Tryfan, wandered there alone, and tiny, his fur too young to show, snouting this way and that and not knowing where he was.