Duncton Wood Page 17

  A mole on the surface might think, as the vagrant sun catches the pink petals of bramble flower, that spring is suddenly back again and it is wild cherry blossom that is on show. But not for long. Let the high banking clouds smother the sun and the brambles look again like what they truly are, a tangled untidiness bearing wavering petals which never seem quite to know how to stay crisp and neat. Still, what’s it matter? What mole cares? There must be something better to talk about…

  Chatter. Gossip. Rumour. The three consorts of August. One for the lazy, one for the idle, and the third for the bored. For the older moles of Duncton, the ones who have seen at least one Longest Night through, the main source of chatter and gossip in August lies in the doings of the youngsters. They have by now left the home burrow far behind and, after a molemonth or two of scurrying about in shallow runs and burrows, are just beginning to establish themselves—the ones who have survived, that is. For many have been taken by owls or lost strength in territorial fights and, unable to find sufficient food, died a lingering death in hot July, to be pecked at by crows or colonised by carrion flies and egglaying beetles.

  These struggles go on into the middle of August and many a Barrow Vale mole, complacent in the knowledge of having his or her own territory (though not too complacent because some of these Westside youngsters are still very hungry indeed for territory), will pass the time of day with the kind of talk that begins ‘Have you heard what happened to… ?’ or ‘One of them Marshenders had the effrontery to… ’ And so on, and so forth.

  In an August when things are well settled by the third week and when there is enough food about and a mole gets bored, rumour may take over from gossip. Who can say where it comes from or why one story seems more fascinating than another? Some rumours fly on a breeze of hope to float about the burrows brightly and give pleasure to those who hear them, and those who pass them on. Others sneak in on the winds of discontent, shadows on whispered conversations whose dark pleasures lie in the fact that if what they say will happen really does, it will be somewhere else, to some other poor mole.

  Occasionally, very rarely, a rumour may come which contains both the seeds of hope and the germs of discontent, and seems to herald change of a kind that will affect everymole, not just one.

  Such a rumour arose that August in Duncton Wood, and unknowingly Bracken was the cause of it.

  His panic flight from the Chamber of Dark Sound (as he now called it) took him towards the slopes, and the pleasant woodland scent of the tunnel lured him finally outside. But his surface senses had been dulled by the long time underground and by his illness, and without realising what he had done, he went straight into the path of a Westside youngster who was establishing his territory. Bracken looked so wild and desolate that the youngster (who was no older than Bracken himself) fled back to his home burrow with a garbled story of a wild monster mole he had seen coming from the Ancient System. The story soon got round the Westside, and what a good August story it was for moles to get their teeth into!

  Then Bracken was spotted over on the Eastside, and an exaggerated version got back to Barrow Vale—a wild mole seen on the Ancient System, massive and fearless, who would kill anymole that tried to get near him.

  It was enough to get the rumour going even more strongly, and the Eastsiders, a superstitious lot, resurrected an old legend that one day the Stone would send its own mole to bring havoc on the system as a punishment—though for what nomole was certain. And it was from this story that Bracken unwittingly gained himself an awesome name that became the subject of rumour, thrilling fears, and an exodus of youngsters who might otherwise have tried to make territory near the slopes: he became the Stone Mole.

  ‘Aye, he’s up there all right, you mark my words; and he’ll be down this way, I shouldn’t wonder,’ was how one Barrow Vale gossip put it, his words heavy with complacent warning. ‘Just been biding his time, he has, just waiting for the right moment, and now he’s come. The Eastsiders call him the Stone Mole, and that isn’t such a bad name if you ask me…’

  When Mandrake first heard the story, he thought it was amusing, and laughed. Probably some Pasture mole gone astray, he thought. Well, he’d sort it all out when he felt like it. As for Rune, he latched on to anything that had possibilities for his own advancement, and there was a way the Stone Mole rumour could help him. His smile was smug with the potential of it all.

  Had Bracken any inkling that such a rumour had gained ground, he would have been amazed. He regretted the contacts with moles he had so unsuccessfully made on two different occasions since he emerged out of the confines of the Ancient System, because he now reckoned that it was best, on the whole, to continue to lie low.

  The first, with the mole on the west side of the slopes, was just an accident. Nothing he could do about that. The second was more regrettable, since it was born out of a desire in him to make contact with somemole somewhere after such a long isolation. The two old Eastsiders looked friendly enough—and what a relief it had been to hear mole being talked. It was almost like listening to Hulver himself talking, so learned did they seem. And they used one or two words of the old language that Hulver had sometimes used. Spurred on by the promise of this and their seeming gentleness, he had come out into the open after listening to them for a while, and approached them. When they challenged him with the traditional greeting, he tried to answer as best he could but, well, he wasn’t sure quite where to say he had come from and, anyway, he was so unused to talking to another mole, let alone moles, that somehow he stumbled over his words. Then they looked frightened and ran away from him and he looked back behind him to see if there was some big mole or other creature that was threatening them, not realising that it was he, himself, they were running from.

  This incident saddened Bracken, for it made him feel isolated and lost and left him craving contact with another mole, anymole, even more. The idea that they were running from him dawned on him slowly as he scratched his side and felt his fur still hanging loose on his gaunt body, while he thought of the two older moles so plump and sleek who had fled from him.

  ‘I must look a pretty sight,’ he whispered to himself, snouting first at his flanks, then at his scarred shoulder, and finally rubbing his paws down his thin face.

  * * *

  Bracken did not know it, but he looked a lot better than when he had first emerged from the Ancient System’s tunnel and started to live in the warmer air and wormier soil of the slope surface. But while a mole will normally recover from injury or illness very fast, swinging back from near death to full health in a matter of moledays, one that has been as ill as Bracken had been, both physically and emotionally, may take moleweeks or even moleyears to recover fully. (Just as such illness may be moleyears in the making, so the route back to health may be moleyears in the finding.)

  Still, physically at least, he was improving. In the days that followed the distressing incident near the Eastside, he took it easy, eating as much as he could, sleeping a great deal and keeping well hidden. He still wanted to make contact with another mole, more and more so as he began to feel healthier, but he was regaining his normal caution and would try to be more careful next time.

  It was perhaps three or four moledays into September before he returned to the Ancient System tunnels by the way he had come out. His intention was to explore the periphery of the tunnels on the slope side so that when, and if, he made contact with a mole again, he would have a good working knowledge of the system’s main routes and be able to escape back into them if he needed to.

  It was in this period that Bracken began to perfect his peculiar—some might say unique—talents for exploration and route-finding. He already had an instinctive grasp of the strategy that distinguishes an explorer (able rapidly to establish his sense of place in a widespread system) from an orienteer, able to grasp only the minutiae of tunnel directions in a smaller area. The key to this strategy lies in getting to know the outline of a system before exploring its detail—which was wha
t he was now doing with the Ancient System.

  Bracken knew that there were two parts to the Ancient System—superficial summer tunnels which, on the edges, were bigger, forming an all-round peripheral system serving the central core; and a deeper, probably more ancient, set of tunnels, whose area was much more restricted and where food supply was likely to be a major problem except in the winter moleyears, when worms were driven deeper underground. He suspected that the big communal tunnel he had first entered from the cliffside formed a wide encirclement of the whole summer system, and this was soon confirmed by his following it from the slopes right round to the cliffside. It petered out, somewhat, further on, where it turned northwards on the west side and he did not bother to burrow his way through the many roof-falls in there. Instead, he pursued it back past the slopes and north of the Stone clearing where, again, it continued its circle round the whole system and faded again as it turned southwards. From this great circling tunnel there were several routes radiating into the centre.

  First, he must find his courage and return to the deeper system where, though he dreaded doing it, he must make his way to the Chamber of Dark Sound and somehow past that long-dead mole.

  But before doing that, Bracken decided—perhaps more as a way of delaying the day when he must go back to the deeper tunnels—to find out what tunnels lay between the summer communal route on the east side and the slopes beneath, to where, here and there, the present Duncton system reached. His objective, for he liked to have one, was to make his way to Hulver’s tunnels, for he was convinced that the sealed-off tunnels he had seen in them, and puzzled over, must lead up into the Ancient System. It was there, where Hulver himself had lived and had tried so hard to maintain a living link between the old and the new, that the physical link must lie. Bracken wanted to establish the fact of it before doing anything else.

  It was in this period of a moleweek or so that Bracken began to perfect another of his strong talents for exploration and route-finding. His accidental discovery that a mole may use sound to make carved walls ‘speak’ had made him think about the possibility of using sound on ordinary walls in ordinary tunnels.

  Of course, he already did this instinctively to some extent, using, for example, the echo-back of his pawsteps from a wall ahead to gauge how far he had to travel before reaching it. But until now Bracken had only done this in the tunnels he knew—and the soil in the Duncton system was too soft and absorbent ever to allow moles there to refine this technique very much. Up here, however, the soil was harder and much more responsive to sound and vibration, and now Bracken began to exploit the fact. He spent long periods trying different sounds on particular stretches of tunnels, learning to read the tunnel ahead from the sound it sent back. A straight tunnel running into a T-junction sent back a much clearer signal than a similar tunnel that had twists and turns; a tunnel with many burrows off it was more muted and richer-sounding than a similar tunnel with simple runs off it; softer soil—of which there were pockets on the Ancient System—was less responsive than harder soil and deeper sounds had to be used on it to get a maximum return of echo. Different sounds had to be used to maximise the information coming back from even clear-sounding tunnels—too sharp a sound, for example, in a responsive tunnel came back so fast and its echo repeated so often that it drowned itself in his own sound, and the information was lost.

  So Bracken proceeded on his explorations, testing different sounds, trying out different thumps and scratches with his paws, and generally making enough noise to frighten a whole system of moles, let alone one, had they been there. But to Bracken it seemed that nomole would ever be there and, protected by his sense of isolation (though often regarding the fact of it as a curse), he went on in his humming, sounding, scratching, thumping way, turning the art of exploration into a science.

  It did not occur to him, as he made his rambling approach through the peripheral tunnels towards Hulver’s old system, that another mole might have occupied them. But so it was. She was a female, and her name was Rue, and in her time she had littered well. Then, in the early summer, Mandrake himself had loomed, one terrible day, into her burrow and turned her out of the cosy tunnels beyond Barrow Vale, which she had occupied for moleyears, to make way for his darling daughter, Rebecca.

  Rue didn’t have a chance, and believed Mandrake’s growling threat that if she so much as showed herself on Rebecca’s territory or anywhere near Barrow Vale, he would maim or kill her.

  She had already been distressed by her inability to litter that spring, though she had mated more than once. The sounds of other pup cries upset her and gradually she found she ate less and that her heart was not in keeping the burrows and tunnel tidy, though she was normally a very neat mole.

  Already dispirited, she was easy prey to Mandrake’s will and so became yet another victim of his unpredictable moods. Rue suddenly found herself competing with the new crop of youngsters for territory. She was a small mole and, coming as she did originally from the Eastside, was not a great fighter. She certainly wasn’t weak or even gentle, like some of the Eastside moles, but she was no match for the bigger Duncton ones. The system she had won for herself, and that Rebecca had taken over, lay between two richer ones held by stronger moles and to some extent was neutral territory—perhaps that was why she had managed to hold on to it so long.

  May, June and July were one long nightmare for Rue as she scratched about for a living wherever she could. Cut off by Mandrake’s threat from her friends and the territory she knew, she became scraggy and dishevelled, and her eyes began to wear the look of a female on the way to defeat—one who faces a mateless future and a territoryless death. She might have made for the Marsh End nearest where she had been brought up, but that was moleyears and moleyears before, in times that she had long stopped thinking of, and in her present state it seemed a hazardous journey to make. And Marshenders do not take kindly to strangers. Driven from one tunnel to the next, barely escaping with her life more than once, so real are the threats to an ageing mole who falls from territory and grace, she slowly found herself in August making towards the one place where old moles may, before the shadow of age creeps right over them, find a temporary security and some vague hope—the slopes.

  For younger moles the name is literally dreadful, for it puts into their minds the possibility that they, too, might one day wake up with aches in their backs and shoulders and find that they cannot move, or hear, so well as once they could. But Rue was nowhere near that stage, though to all outward appearances she might have seemed to be.

  She grubbed about the quiet surface of the slopes, fearful of the owls said to haunt the heights above, running from temporary hide to temporary burrow, meeting aggression from one or two Slopesiders whose tunnels she crossed until, one day, she came to a tunnel that smelt empty and deserted.

  It was an outlier from Hulver’s old system and had not been reoccupied by any other mole since he had gone from it for ever in June.

  She waited by it for three moledays, keeping her snout low and listening with care to see if there was a mole somewhere about. Badgers she heard, from the humpy ground somewhere towards the Eastside; crows she heard and saw; a fox prowled past quite close, but she smelt him long before he came and did not even bother to hide as youngsters often did before they learned better, because she knew that a fox will not touch a mole. ‘A fox may be a mole’s best friend, when his path with ours doth wend’ said the old Eastside proverb she had learned when she was a pup. The fox sniffed about and tiptoed away.

  Apart from that, nothing. So, after three moledays, Rue made her way timidly towards Hulver’s old tunnels and could smell the emptiness all around. ‘Oh!’ she sighed, though she hardly dared let the relief sound in her voice.

  Suddenly bold, she darted this way and that in the tunnels, snouting out one tunnel after another, running from burrow to burrow. There was a whiff of weasel at the end of one, only faint, but she sealed it off all the same.

  She didn’t yet dare
to eat down there, so she found some worms and took them out into a temporary burrow on the surface nearby. Then she returned and completed her exploration, eventually finding the central burrow, the one where Bracken had crouched miserably after Hulver’s departure for the June elder meeting and which, to her delight, was as deserted as everywhere else. In fact, although the place needed a little dust cleared away at one or two tunnel junctions and the nesting material was old, the whole place seemed to her tired eyes as bright as a primrose, and she sensed a peaceful air about it, which she could not know was one of the legacies left behind by old Hulver.

  Rue was overjoyed. Her whole appearance changed from that of the hunched-up, aged mole she was becoming to one full of the joy of a place of her own and something to care for. Indeed, she began to sing a song the like of which these tunnels, and most others on the slopes, had not heard in generations—the song a youngster mole traditionally sings when, after the summer is over and the autumn is setting in, she has found a place of her own and can relax into it for the winter:

  ‘Rue’s found a cleansome home,

  Rue’s got a place.

  Let sun and moon and stars go roam,

  Rue’s got a place.’

  Then, with her tail held higher than it had been for molemonths, she busied herself with replacing the nesting material, shoring up one or two entrances, and, most important of all, finding where the best spots for food were.

  * * *

  Three moleweeks later, when September was well started and the leaves on the beech trees on the surface were beginning to dry and mellow with the onset of autumn, Bracken solved the problem of which tunnel led down to Hulver’s system. He had had difficulties, because the tunnels seemed to have been made deliberately complex here, but slowly, and by occasional recourse to the surface, he made his way in the right direction until the whole pattern fell into place and he found the tunnel that led resolutely down the slopes to the point where Hulver’s system started—or stopped, depending on a mole’s point of view.