From her very first venturing on to the surface, she loved the smell and colour of trees and plants. At first it had been the acorns cracking down to the ground, the rustle of the last falling leaves, autumn fruit and the surprise of bright holly berries thrown in a red huddle by an entrance after a storm.
As February advanced, the slow growth of shoots and new leaves enthralled her, and she would run up into the wood day after day, sniffing the cold spring air, to see what new delights she could find. One day it was the yellow delicacy of winter aconite rising among sodden leaves and stem bottoms as pale as the spring sunlight. Another day she crouched for hours before a cluster of snowdrops, their white petals dancing in the cold wind, the black leafless branches of a great oak hanging starkly above them.
Then she was amazed at the speed with which shoots of dog’s mercury rose up into the spring light, but quickly learned to take paths avoiding them because of their rank smell. If she had to go through a patch of them, she would run and hold her breath as she did so, emerging gasping and laughing, often with a brother or two in tow.
As spring advanced, she found the flowers grew more scented and she would bring them, wild and sweet-smelling, down to a place near the entrance to the home burrow so that their scent met any mole who entered. Her mother would tell her the names, and Rebecca would repeat them over and over, mingling them into verses with names of other flowers Sarah told her about, but which were not yet in bloom.
Adults got quite used to young Rebecca dancing with her brothers, singing flower songs, leading them in a game of her own invention, whose verse might run:
Vervain and yellow flag,
Feverfew and rue;
Some for my mother,
Plenty left for you.
And they would tumble about laughing, mock-fighting and rolling on the wood’s floor.
Now Mandrake found it harder to control her. It was not that she, Rebecca, was disobedient in any way, but her spirit was, and that seemed something neither of them could control. It was almost as if her life, and love of it, thrived on his malevolence. Not that, for a moment, she ever enjoyed annoying him or being the subject of his anger. But each time he knocked her down, sometimes literally, up she would get to run off somewhere and, despite every good intention on her part, do something else that displeased him.
‘You’re not to play so roughly with your brother,’ he would say, but she would.
‘It’s dangerous up on the surface now by the edge of the wood,’ but there she would be found.
‘You’re to stay in the home burrow today because there are things to do,’ but she wouldn’t.
She managed to do terrible things without even trying. Just before the April elder meeting, for example, she couldn’t resist having a peek about the elder burrow, somewhere she had never seen and which, since everymole was always talking about it, she thought she would have a look at. So she did, and very impressive she found it. After she had left it to wander off around Barrow Vale, a terrible cry went up: ‘The worms, the elders’ worms! They’ve been eaten. Somemole has been into the elder burrow and eaten all the worms!’
She heard it, and it was true, dreadfully true! She had eaten them! Well, she had seen them in a pile in the corner of the burrow, squirming about in a delightful way and, yes, she had had one, but she had hardly thought about it because, well, she was looking around the burrow, and yes, then she did have another one; no, it wasn’t intentional; yes, she did eat it, the burrow was so interesting, you see, and she was hardly thinking, and… Oh dear, another one, were there really five missing? She couldn’t possibly have eaten five, perhaps another mole came in… No? Well, she could always…
Only old Hulver laughed when he heard about it. It was a sign of the times, he thought, that everymole took the whole thing so seriously. Mandrake attacked Rebecca viciously and also hurt Sarah, who was trying to protect Rebecca; the elder meeting was held in an atmosphere of acrimony, though it was nomole’s fault among the elders.
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 further than usual in the tunnels and perhaps for a moment or two on to the surface I’m terribly 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 had 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 towards 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 on to 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 and out 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 grey 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 centre 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 got lost, and up towards 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 had 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 the
ir 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.
For Rebecca, Rune, who still smelt 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 towards 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 travelling 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, turning round to face him, with talons raised but shaky. He eyed her calmly and, inching forward very slowly, got bigger and bigger. He smelt 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 her words, going straight at her and striking her so hard that she fell back and hit her snout against the tunnel wall, bringing 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 towards 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 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 over 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, for 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 towards 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.
Chapter Five
Bracken 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 in 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 had hoped for in a son.
Bracken had an unpleasant childhood. He was always struggling for food and losing, ending up with scraps. As a result, he was slow to grow, which perpetuated the situation, making him the skinny runt in the family, always ill and whining when very young, frightened and crying when older. However, he was at least intelligent (‘cunning,’ Burrhead called him) and quickly learned to avoid being attacked when danger threatened or his bigger brother was feeling aggressive. He found that there was no point in fighting back, because he always got beaten, so he took to hunching up into a defensive stance so that he was always ready for the blows and scratches that came to him from all sides. He adopted a low snout, keeping eyes averted and playing the fool so that Root and Wheatear were bored with him.
His task of survival was easier because his two siblings, like their father, had a complete lack of imagination, which meant that he could usually work out well ahead of them what they would do and then take appropriate avoiding action.
At the same time, he had enough sense to work out what would please them—worms, new places to play, new tunnels to explore—and put it their way, which meant that they relied on him, grudgingly, for ideas. That didn’t stop them thumping him quite a lot and ignoring him a great deal, but that was better than out-and-out assault. Still, he did often end up in tears, and it was then that Aspen came, for a rare moment, into her own. For along with her untidiness went a certain romantic whimsiness which meant that she loved telling stories. And when Bracken was upset, she would comfort him with mole legends and tales, simple stories of honoured, brave moles, or tales of fine males fighting for their mates.
Many were traditional mole legends, of which every system had its version; others were peculiar to Duncton and were usually set in the long-distant past, when the moles lived in the Ancient System up on top of the hill. Aspen entered into the spirit of these tales to such an extent that she would often moan and weep as she told them, and Bracken, his head against her flank, would feel her breathing getting heavier and faster as she neared a climactic end, and for a while he would forget his tears and the bullying in the drama of the tale.
Duncton Wood Page 5