Duncton Wood Read online

  So Boswell, so Bracken. But a decline from wounds is different from a decline from disease or age; its danger, and what may weigh the balance down, lies in the loss of spirit that dies with wounds—for without the will that made the first pup cry, nomole would ever have raised its head and laughed at the world about it.

  So Boswell now. The days dragged by and Bracken barely slept. He talked to his beloved Boswell in images of warmth, answering each of Boswell’s weakening despairs with whispered memories of life that he had seen or they had seen together.

  Boswell’s wound coursed deeply down his back, and though it did not fester or poison it seemed to have ripped out his will to live. He lay belly down, for any other position caused him worse pain, with his snout on one side to ease his breathing. His paws became as floppy as a pup’s and of the food, mushed up, that Bracken tried to feed him, only a small part went down—the rest dribbling back out of his weak mouth.

  But at least Boswell sometimes asked if Rebecca was coming, and that, surely, said that he was still looking to a life beyond his pain.

  Bracken dug out a temporary burrow for them both, but it was so shallow and the tunnel so short that the light of day came in. And the cold of night as well. Days ran into nights which lost themselves in days, but there were so many times when Boswell seemed so weak that it was minutes that Bracken prayed for, not whole days.

  ‘Let him hold on for one more hour… let him live until the rain has stopped… let him stay until the first light of dawn…’ So Bracken pleaded with the Stone, begging that his friend might hold on to life until Rebecca came.

  Until, at last, after eight days of waiting, Gelert returned. His paws were cut and bloody, his coat was covered in mud and grit and there were great cuts and gashes across his face where he had plunged through blackthorn and brambles, and a terrible cut under his left flank where, in leaping over some obstruction, the cut of steel had caught him.

  But he had led Rebecca in safety over the molemiles, a journey that moles still celebrate with gratitude and pride, and he took her to the ground by the temporary burrow as gently as he had led her. Who she was, or what she was for, he did not know; but his journey was done and the cliffs of Cwmoer no longer seemed to want to press down upon him; and the great moles that had threatened him from the shadows were gone. He scratched at the ground, waited until Bracken came, and then turned wearily back down the track, his tail low and his body dragging with fatigue, to hide in his own lair where he could forget these moles, or try to, and dream of summer days when no trouble such as they brought would bother him.

  * * *

  The first thing Bracken noticed about Rebecca was that she was with litter, and not his litter. The second was that she was not the mole, the fictitious female, he had created in his imagination in the long moleyears of their separation. This was not the mole he had prayed for, whose memory had comforted him, whose caress had become in his mind like the music of water or wind. She was tired, she was older, she was worried.

  ‘Rebecca!’ he said, a little hostile.

  ‘Bracken!’ She smiled, seeing at once his confusion and disappointment. And seeing, too, how much thinner he had become—just as he had been when they met for the very first time. Did he know how wild his fur looked, or how lost his eyes? Did he know how nervous and ill at ease he was?

  ‘It’s Boswell, isn’t it?’ she asked. He nodded and took her down into the burrow where he crouched uneasily as she examined Boswell’s wound. She asked Bracken questions about it, but less for the information they gave her (she got that from touching poor Boswell) than in the hope that they might put Bracken at his ease. But it was no good, and the hostility she sensed to her touching ‘his’ Boswell finally made her ask him gently to leave her alone with Boswell ‘so that I can talk to him as a healer must and for no other reason than that’.

  ‘Oh,’ she sighed as Bracken left, miserably. ‘Oh, my love!’ She was so tired and there was nothing, nothing in the world, that she desired more at that moment than Bracken’s trusting touch and caress in her fur so that she could know that he was there with her, in love and silence. As she turned to Boswell she scolded herself for thinking, as Rose had done before her so many times, that she wished there were a mole who would one day reach out and touch her and let her rest.

  Later, moleyears later, Boswell would say that his days of illness on Siabod were the days when he learned most about physical suffering. For a mole born with such a disadvantage as a withered paw, it was a remarkable thing that by the Stone’s grace he so rarely suffered assault or direct physical hardship.

  He knew, as Bracken did not, how important his contact with Rebecca was in those long days and nights. She stayed by him constantly (as close to him as Rose had once been to Bracken in the Ancient System), whispering her healing words and letting him find again, in the security of her warmth, the spirit and strength he had lost when Gelert wounded him so deeply.

  Yet Boswell was a healer, too, and as he gained in strength, his own acceptance of her great love of life, which most moles found so hard to face, helped her through her final days before her litter came. Not many males, certainly very, very few scribemoles, have ever been so close to a female with litter as Boswell was in those strange healing days.

  For Rebecca herself, the only hardship was Bracken’s uneasy companionship to them both: he made another burrow for himself nearby and unstintingly found them food and whatever herbs he could that might be of help. When the weather grew colder, as it did two days after her arrival, he reburrowed the tunnels to insulate Boswell’s burrow better.

  But there was an air of distrust about Bracken’s contact with Rebecca which put an impassable barrier between them so that, although both ached for an expression of love, neither knew how it could be given. The fact that she was with litter made him angry and turned and twisted in his mind and put a barrier of suspicion and jealousy before his eyes.

  The time came when Rebecca made a burrow of her own and began gathering what nesting material she could from the sparse vegetation that grew by the stream where they lived. She did not want to litter there, for there was something grim and desolate about Siabod, but she did not trust herself to move back down through Cwmoer, even with Bracken’s help, and anyway, Boswell was still weak.

  The weather turned colder and a bitter wind blew and began to put a layer of verglas on the rocks near their tunnels so that they became slippery and unsafe for even the steadiest talon. The matgrass snapped and crackled in the cold, darkness fell swiftly, the sun seemed lost for ever, and the snow that had fallen the night before they had first come up Cwmoer, having half melted with the rain, had now permanently frozen on the rocks where it had stayed or lay dry and shiny among the tussocks of grass. Late spring in Siabod seemed to bring harsher weather than the cruellest winter in Duncton.

  Now that Rebecca was living and spending more time in her own burrow, Bracken talked to Boswell more and found he was beginning to recover fast. As ever, Boswell was aware of, and upset by, his friend’s distrust of Rebecca. Could they never see that the love they had was as strong as the sunshine? Why was Bracken such a fool, and Rebecca, who knew so much, unable to make Bracken see their love?

  ‘Look after her, Bracken, because she needs your help, you know. I sometimes think you don’t know how much she loves you…’

  Bracken shrugged. ‘She’s more concerned with the litter of hers than anything else,’ he said, betraying his real feelings. ‘But, of course, I’ll do what I can. But a nesting female doesn’t want males hanging about, everymole knows that. They like to get on with it themselves.’

  * * *

  It was night, and the wind stirred, fretting at the tunnel entrances, seeming to find a way into even the warmest spots. Outside the stream rushed and dashed against the rocks, grass chattered against the entrances, a night when only the most peaceful moles can fall easily to sleep.

  Boswell was worried and concerned, but he didn’t know what about. Bracken
crouched, talking to him in stops and starts, eyes flickering about the burrow, sentences cut off by the howl of the wind outside.

  Rebecca, separated from them by two tunnels and the short surface run between, stirred restlessly. Her tail switched back and forth. She couldn’t get her body comfortable now that it was so full and her litter was nosing and nuzzling and turning inside her, limbs pushing under her smooth belly fur. She didn’t like this Siabod. She didn’t want her young born here among dark, peaty soil and slate fragments that cut a careless mole. She shuddered to think now of the dark falls of rock in Cwmoer beneath them and the Siabod heights, somewhere over the moor beyond, from where the peat-coloured river rushed down.

  She wanted Bracken there, nearer than he was. She wanted to hear him stir outside, and not the wind. She wanted to call his name and know that he was there to say the silly things that mean so much; the silly things no male but Cairn had ever said to her when she was very young.

  ‘Bracken, Bracken, Bracken,’ she whispered, looking at her swollen sides and trying to invoke not a mole so much as a peace and silence she had known when they had touched together by the glimmering Stillstone. She started to cry and then stopped, and then started again. She wanted him to come to her without being called. She wanted her litter to come in the warmth of his trust. She was so restless, so confused, and the burrow wasn’t right any more, not here with those black slates outside in whose shadow Mandrake had been born.

  She stirred yet again, rising clumsily to her paws and going first to the tunnel and then to the entrance and then snouting outside against the bitter wind that came down the moor. She looked over through the darkness towards where the entrances to Bracken’s and Boswell’s burrows lay and wished that Bracken was there on the surface to greet her.

  She wished he would come over to her and whisper to her and hustle her back into the warmth of her burrow and say it was all right, it didn’t matter where her litter was born. But she was restless and turned away upslope from the stream, thinking that perhaps there might be a better place for her litter nearby, where the soil was less cold and a burrow could be free of these slates. She moved restlessly along, almost talking aloud to herself, telling her young that it wouldn’t be long now and that she loved them and they shouldn’t be afraid; though she was—yes, she was—so afraid.

  ‘Bracken, follow me, follow me,’ she entreated as she moved higher and higher in the darkness up the slopes to find somewhere better. The wind grew steadily colder, but Rebecca didn’t notice; indeed, she was almost hot with sudden energy as she moved on steadily away from the safety of her burrow out on to the moor that rose round and above the quarried cliffs of Cwmoer.

  Then, unnoticed, the first whipping sleets of snow came rushing with the wind. She laughed into the wind. She felt hot and alive in it and as the sleety snow whipped along more strongly through the darkness, she did not care.

  ‘I’ll find a place for them soon,’ she said to herself, the grass changing to grassy rock, the flat turning to a slope that grew steeper and steeper as she contoured it, the cwm off to her right. ‘There is a better place… but I haven’t quite found it,’ she kept telling herself. The stream suddenly stopped her forward movement and she climbed up along it until the ground grew flatter where it had fanned out into braids of streamlets running among soft, boggy grass and moss, and she crossed it.

  So Rebecca wandered, higher and higher up the slopes of Siabod to where the soils were thin as old fur and the return down the rocks that she was able to climb so easily became more and more difficult.

  Perhaps she rested. Perhaps she drank at the chill water of the innumerable streamlets that coursed down the slopes and which she crossed without difficulty; always she must have been looking for soil and a place for a burrow that reminded her more of the peace and warmth of Duncton Wood. Until sometime in the night, as dawn approached, the energy that preceded the start of the birth of her litter must have begun to fail and Rebecca must have started to feel tired and desperate.

  Sometime in the night, not too long before dawn, the real blizzard came. Sudden, cold and harsh—a driving and swirling of biting snow that stung a mole’s snout and roared so loud that thinking became hard. The snow barely settled, preferring to race like moving ice across the surface; but then it began to form eddies and drifts to the lee side of the bigger rocks and to spread out from these in scatters of white. Nowhere safe for Rebecca to stop, so on she went, still certain that she could find a place where she could burrow down into stillness for the sake of herself and her litter.

  Did she stop now and try to turn back and discover that it was impossible to go back without sliding and falling? Did she think to find a drift of snow and stop for safety there? Did she wander here and there, confused, and know that she was lost? The blizzard grew worse, creating a nightmare dawn in which the only sound is the rushing snow and the wind seems to tear at fur and eyes and talons and tail, flattening a mole that tries to move against it, toppling one over that tries to run with it.

  It was sometime then that Bracken awoke and heard the blizzard’s roar. He went immediately to Rebecca’s tunnel, finding even the short run between the two a struggle to cross. But she was not there. He rushed back to Boswell’s burrow, and the two called uselessly, Boswell coming to the entrance and peering out into the racing snow that fell in flurries of cold into his tunnel.

  ‘Rebecca! Rebecca!’ they called, but the blizzard was so loud that they could not even hear each other’s call.

  Bracken stepped full out into the blizzard and cried ‘Rebecca!’ for he loved her, she was his love, and as panic and anger came over him at the thought of her loss, he pressed forward up the slope in the direction in which his instinct told him she had gone without even looking back to say a word to Boswell.

  ‘Bracken! Bracken!’ cried Boswell as the racing blizzard blotted out Bracken’s retreating back and Boswell too tried to go after him, but was too weak and found it hard even to regain access to his tunnels.

  While up through the blizzard Bracken went, trusting to his instinct to find Rebecca, who must have gone seeking a birth burrow as females in litter sometimes will. ‘Oh, Rebecca!’ he cried out in despair as the icy, raging snow tore at him. ‘Rebecca!’

  * * *

  She wandered on through the blizzard, no longer in any set direction but disorientated and growing progressively weaker as the effort to find a place, any place she could litter, overcame her. But not here, not here where the snow is thin as ice on the bare rock ground and shadows of half-seen boulders and shapes in the racing snow seem to loom; and where a litter would be lost. Not here!

  Somewhere, sometime, Rebecca came across the fresh tracks of another mole in the thin snow. She looked at them disbelievingly until she thought, and then she knew, that it was Bracken, her Bracken, come for her, and she turned to follow them, for they were fresh and the racing snow hadn’t even started to obscure them. ‘Bracken!’ she must have called, trying to follow and catch up with him, ‘Bracken!’

  Ahead of her, not knowing she was so close by, he pressed on even faster and called her name despairingly into the wind, ‘Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca!’

  But try as she might, she was too tired and too heavy to move fast enough, and the tracks raced on ahead of her, beginning to fill with snow, growing fainter before her as Bracken, trying to find her, moved further and further away from her. Then, finally, she lost the tracks and despair began to creep over her as she turned to the right, high above Cwmoer, to go with the wind, which was easier for her. And she knew that soon, in this waste, with the blizzard raging around, she would have to litter as Mandrake’s mother had done. ‘Oh my loves,’ she must have whispered, ‘forgive me, forgive me,’ as she hopelessly sought a place where she might burrow on the black slate plateaux of Siabod.

  Off to her left, far off now and growing further away, Bracken pressed on, fearing more and more that he had lost his Rebecca for ever in the snow.

  He stopped
and snouted about into the blizzard all around, trying to make contact with his love. Great falls of black rock now rose above him, covered in ice and with the thin half-snow of the blizzard swirling like white mist across their sheer faces. He did feel a pull from far, far off to the northwest, a pull that he wrongly thought might be his Rebecca calling. So he turned towards it and away from his Rebecca, not knowing that up there, through the wastes, far off, stood the great Stones of Castell y Gwynt, which had waited for mole for so long. He thought he could feel his Rebecca there, and so he stumbled forward across the rocks and moors where the wind was so strong that only the thinnest layer of snow settled. He prayed to the Stones for his Rebecca as he began the terrible trek that, unbeknown to him, would grant the last wishes of Skeat that the Stone should be honoured even in these wastes; and that would fulfil his promise to the scribemoles of Uffington and Boswell as well. But he only thought of Rebecca and of how somehow, somewhere, he had lost her.

  While Rebecca, lost now above Cwmoer in the whiteout of the blizzard, finally gave up her futile search for safety and settled into the thin snow, her back curled against the bitter wind, as one by one her litter began to be born and from their very first moment she battled to protect their lives just as Mandrake’s mother had once battled so bravely to protect his.

  * * *

  It was three full days before Boswell was able and strong enough to move from his burrow out into the blizzard. He had thought a thousand times of what he should do, knowing that he did not have the strength to go upslope into the storm, and the only possibility seemed to slip and slide his way back down through Cwmoer and try to find Gelert of Siabod who perhaps would know what to do. But he never could find him, wandering lower and lower down Cwmoer in his weakness from the wound until the time came that he had to find food and so give up the search. Soon afterwards he knew he would never find the strength to go back up into the blizzard wastes above Cwmoer. He had lost Bracken, lost Rebecca. The seventh Stillstone, the seventh Book… they were not after all his to find. He found that he could not even return to Siabod, for the way by which he had come so recently with Celyn and Bracken was blocked by snow and ice. So he turned his back on Siabod and pointed his snout back to the south, towards Uffington. Asking himself as he left, those futile questions to the Stone that anymole asks in the face of pointless tragedy, all of which begin with ‘Why?’