He would enter into them as she did, his eyes perhaps half closed or affixed to some distant place beyond the walls of the burrow, and soon he would be there, fighting to the death, weaving magic with his talons, facing the most dreadful dangers. Aspen loved to paint in the rich colours of her own whimsy the scene when the hero mole returns from his quest across the wood to fight owls, or outfox foxes, or find worms to save the system. This would move Bracken deeply, for he wished he might return home one day as his heroes did, to a snug burrow, warm with love, friendly and wormful. Wanted, not an outcast.
It was from these beginnings that Bracken’s fascination with the Ancient System grew, and when he ventured on to the surface, he would often stop and stare dimly up in the direction of the top of Duncton Hill, far beyond his sight and hopes, and wonder if he might ever climb there himself. One day Aspen told him about the Stone that was said to stand there, ‘though it’s a long time since anymole but the elders went up there, and then only at Midsummer and Longest Night. It’s probably just legend, but a nice one, don’t you think?’
The idea of the Stone fascinated him so much that he gathered his courage and dared ask Burrhead about it one day when he seemed in a mellow mood. To his surprise, Burrhead was very ready to give an answer: ‘Aye, the Stone’s up there right enough. I’ve seen it myself, though I don’t suppose that’ll happen much more because, if I have my way, we’ll stop the Midsummer trek.’
‘Why?’ asked Bracken tentatively.
‘Owls and worms, two words you should get into your head, my boy. Owls is dangerous up there and worms is scarce. No point risking ourselves for some ancient ritual which nomole but old stick-in-the-muds like Hulver can remember.’
‘What’s the Stone like?’ demanded Bracken, encouraged by his father’s unusual willingness to talk. And noticing that Aspen was listening too.
‘It’s nothing, really,’ said Burrhead, ‘just a stone. Well, a big stone. Tall as a tree, shoots straight up into the sky. It’s grey. It turns dark blue as night falls and then pitch black, blacker than night itself, except where the moon catches it and it’s silvery grey.’
So there were moments of stillness for Bracken in his burrow, when Aspen would talk to him and even Burrhead would tell him things, and he was unmolested.
But as May advanced and Root and Wheatear gained in strength, such moments became rarer, and he had to use all his ingenuity to avoid being hurt in their rough-and-tumble fighting, which always had him as the butt.
There came a time, at the end of May, when Root would seek him out and deliberately intimidate him, trying to make Bracken raise his talons so that he would have an excuse to fight him.
‘He started it,’ Root would tell a despairing Aspen, faced once more by a bewildered, hurt Bracken.
As the days wore on, Bracken began more and more to spend time by himself, exploring away from his home burrow, finding he had further and further to come home again for sleep or worms. In this way he made his way to Barrow Vale one day, but found it too full of other moles, curious about who he was, so he turned away and tried other directions. Another day he went right to the edge of the wood and looked out for the first time on to the pastures, frightened by the open space and massive sky beyond the trees, terrified of the cows who hoofed and pulled at grass beyond the fence.
But Burrhead did not call him cunning for nothing. Bracken quickly realised that his timid appearance and obvious youth allowed him to cross the tunnels of moles who might otherwise be hostile to him. He developed various ways of approaching them, finding that even if they started off hostile, he could usually disarm them by asking a question which established his inferiority and their importance.
‘I’m lost,’ he might say. ‘Can you tell me where the Barrow Vale is from here?’
Or, if he knew their names (which he would try to find out from the preceding mole he had encountered), ‘I was looking for Buckbean because he knows an awful lot about the system,’ and Buckbean suddenly did, indeed, feel he knew an ‘awful lot’ about the system, and would feel flattered and retract his talons—though still standing his ground until quite certain this youngster was safe.
Bracken was to use this approach later and more effectively with the Eastsiders, who were more willing to pass the time of day talking than the Westsiders. But even so, many Westsiders yielded to Bracken’s combination of youthful vulnerability, innocence and flattery to answer his sometimes spurious questions and let him continue his explorations.
The more so because, as Mandrake’s power had increased, he had let it be known that he preferred moles to stay in their territory and not wander around without reason, so a safe stranger like Bracken was welcome for the interest he could bring. It was true, in fact—though the Duncton moles didn’t know it, since they kept to themselves—that there was traditionally more mixing and visiting in Duncton than, for example, out on the pastures.
Mandrake himself came from a desolate system where individuals kept themselves to themselves, but his reasons for encouraging isolation in Duncton were not nostalgic: he knew that the more isolated each Duncton mole was, the better could he control them. And he seemed to have a peculiarly deep-rooted aversion to the Stone.
This all being so, a visiting youngster was more welcome than he once might have been. He could pass on a bit of gossip, he was safe, and Mandrake’s rule didn’t apply to youngsters.
In this way, Bracken was able to learn a great deal about the Westside and something about the system, too. He would hear gossip about the elders, news of the havoc and deaths caused by Mandrake’s henchmoles, among whom his own father was a leading figure, and stories of Mandrake himself.
Of all the things that he heard, it was these that made the biggest impression on him, for there seemed no end to Mandrake’s strength and power:
‘He’s so strong he’s been known to destroy an oak root thick as a mole to make a tunnel.’
‘He’s the best fighter the system’s ever seen and ever likely to see, if you ask me. Do you know, my boy, when he first came to Duncton he killed twelve of the strongest adults before he even set paw in a tunnel? Twelve! Mind you, I wasn’t there myself.’
‘They say the first time he went down the Marsh End he stopped a group of Marshenders from attacking him by just pointing his huge snout at them and staring. Didn’t say a word; just crouched ready and stared. They backed away, tearing at each other to escape. That’s how powerful Mandrake is.’
Mole after mole, females and males, came out with stories like this, so that soon Mandrake assumed terrifying proportions in his mind.
Indeed, Mandrake might well have taken on the mantle of powerful protector of Duncton and its moles in Bracken’s mind had it not been for the fact that his own bullying father was one of Mandrake’s henchmoles and forever going on about the fact. So Mandrake took on a dark and sinister role in Bracken’s imagination rather than a benevolent one.
It was for this reason that Bracken was both surprised and fascinated when, one day towards the end of May, he heard a Westside female say, with the indirectness of a gossip who deliberately invites a follow-up question by the mystery of what she says: ‘Mind you, there’s one mole who can stand up to Mandrake, and there’s nothing, I tell you, absolutely nothing, he can do about it. Not a single solitary thing.’
‘Who’s that?’ asked Bracken, amazed.
But she continued her train of thought, piling on the mystery for her own delight: ‘Yes, he can huff and puff all he likes, but I don’t think he can do a thing.’
‘But who is it?’ asked Bracken, eaten up with curiosity.
‘Why, Miss Stuck-up-Rebecca, that’s who. His darling daughter. Twists him round her talons she does. Mind you, dear,’ his confidante placed her snout close to his ear and affected to look down the communal tunnel in the direction of Barrow Vale, ‘mind you, all that won’t last much longer, if you know what I mean,’ digging him in the ribs.
Bracken didn’t know what she meant and wa
nted very much to know. ‘Do you mean…?’ He hesitated encouragingly, and she obligingly continued.
‘Yes, you know I do. We all know she was an autumn-litter mole, which means she’ll be nearly ready to leave her home burrow by now. What’s more, it wouldn’t surprise anymole if Sarah, Mandrake’s so-called mate, had another litter this summer. Mandrake’s not one to hang about, is he? And Sarah isn’t going to want Rebecca around with another litter of her own to bring up.’
So, piece by piece, Bracken built up a picture of the system and its leading moles. He learned about Rune—‘cunning as a stoat’; he heard about Bindle—‘sulking over on the Eastside now’; he delighted in the stories about Dogwood and Mekkins; they told him about Hulver, about how the owls were most dangerous on the edge of the wood, and about how dangerous the Pasture moles were.
He often heard about Rebecca as well, especially from the males, who revelled in the scrapes she got herself into, causing Mandrake to tear a strip off her again and again, so they said.
She was, so he was variously told, wild, nearly as big as a male of her age, an autumn mole (which meant that she was tough), obstinate, always laughing, inclined to dance about Barrow Vale on the surface, the bane of her brothers’ lives, and frequently punished by Mandrake.
Bracken, who naturally grew increasingly curious about Rebecca, might have been tempted to go and find her had she been any other mole’s daughter and had he himself been more sociable. But despite his ability to wheedle his way into other moles’ tunnels and occasionally even their burrows, he was rather shy of his own generation. Talking with adults was one thing, consorting with his peers was another, and much more difficult. Still, for a while he looked out for her in the communal tunnels and ventured once or twice on to the surface at Barrow Vale, thinking he might see Rebecca there, but nothing ever came of it.
Soon, other things about the system caught his interest. The stories Aspen had told him about the Ancient System, and the occasional mentions it got as a long-unvisited place, fascinated him. Also, there was something about the way moles talked about the Duncton Stone, and the mystery of why they mentioned, as something separate from it, ‘The Stone,’ which was powerful and held all moles’ lives in its power. Was there, then, a Stone a mole could never see?
‘Where is it?’ he would ask. ‘What is it?’ But nomole gave him an answer. He thought he might find it if he went to the Ancient System, but as yet he didn’t actually want to try to go there—it was far too dangerous—but he did want to meet a mole, apart from Burrhead, who had been there.
It was this interest and the fact that he had exhausted the exploration possibilities of Westside and Barrow Vale that led him to strike out towards the slopes one day.
Chapter Six
There were far fewer moles on the slopes, and after several visits, getting higher each time, Bracken began to see that he would have to explore in a different way. For one thing, the higher he got, the more he found the mixed oaks and elms and safe undergrowth he had been used to giving way to open beech wood with its disconcerting layer of rustling beech leaves, which gave away every movement if a mole wanted to travel fast. The burrows and tunnels in this borderland had a curious, derelict air that, at first, Bracken found depressing. Tunnel after tunnel would be abandoned and dusty, or taken over by weasels or voles, though only for a short way past their entrances. Or he would find a system that had recently been lived in, for scraps of worms remained, or the entrances weren’t grown over, or he could smell the demarcation marks left by their occupants, faint but discernible. But rarely any moles.
Then there were large areas where nomole seemed to have burrowed, though quite why, he couldn’t work out. When he was there, he began to feel he would never see anymole here at all, and even found himself talking to himself on occasion, almost as if he missed company.
All this meant that he found the slopes wearing and at first could only take a short while of them, scampering back to the Westside as quickly as he could—running down communal tunnels where they helped him and over the surface if a tunnel route meant a confrontation he preferred to avoid. It was so tiring placating moles!
May slid into June and he was no longer a pup. Root and Wheatear were nearly adult in size and tried more and more to behave like adults, too, which meant they would ignore him totally, attack him, or push him out of the way. If he found worms when they had none, for example, they would simply take them from him, talons raised above his vulnerable snout as a warning that they meant business.
He sensed that his time in the burrow was running out, so to try to extend it he exaggerated yet further his juvenile pose, going about in the defensive stance of a timid, placatory mole. Burrhead began to call him ‘young Bracken,’ as a way of differentiating him from Root and Wheatear, who seemed in his terms to be growing up normally. Bracken, he was beginning to think, was in some way backward and hardly worth getting into a lather about any more. He obviously wasn’t going to last long once the summer came and the new generation started its search for territory.
‘He won’t stand a chance against this spring’s lot,’ Burrhead told Aspen one day at the end of May. ‘But every litter has its wrong ’uns.’ Aspen nodded, but she was not so sure. Bracken was a disappointment and yet, well, ‘He’s not so stupid as he sometimes seems, you know—he knows much more about the system than either of the other two—in fact he knows more than I do.’ But this was just a disguise for her true feelings about Bracken, which were those of many a female for the weakest of her litter: compassion mixed with hope that they might turn out better in the end. And he did like her stories, which was more than she could say for Root and Wheatear, for all their stolid, moleworthy qualities.
But she didn’t say any of this to Burrhead because it just wasn’t worth it, and she was losing interest in them all. The litter would be gone soon and they had the summer to get through, when she’d be on her own much more, and she was looking forward to it. Sensing these things, Bracken spent more and more time away from the home burrow and began to consider carefully where he might go when he finally left it. He had no desire to compete with the likes of Root for a place in the Westside. He wasn’t crazy!
Nor did he know enough about the north or the Eastside yet to make plans in that direction. So increasingly he began to think the slopes were a possibility—they might be wormscarce but they were also mole-scarce, which was a major attraction. He had seen enough to think he might make a living there, giving himself breathing space to consider what to do next.
With these ideas in his mind, he decided to make a trek to the slopes one day and explore them further, perhaps staying away from his home burrow for a day or two. He slipped away one quiet June morning, when everymole was asleep or preoccupied, and took a mainly surface route up towards the slopes. He didn’t know it, but he was never to live in the Westside again.
It took him until late in the morning to reach his first beech tree, at a point he already knew where he could find some worms. Then he pressed on along what he called the beech-oak borderland until at last he was into new territory. And then on and on eastwards, progressing along a contour line for a while, and then up for a bit.
He saw a lot of life—birds, a couple of voles, several squirrels, a possible fox—but no moles. By the early afternoon he was tired and stopped for food. He had never been so far in one day and knew he would be spending the night in a strange burrow, or perhaps one he must make for himself.
In search of worms, he found an old, disused tunnel and went down it, snout aquiver, but not a whiff or sign of a mole. So he blocked one end of it to make a temporary burrow and, putting his back against it, crouched facing the entrance above and the continuation of the tunnel beyond. Safe, snug and just the place to crunch the worms he had found. He closed his eyes and settled down, heart thumping from the day’s journey. But he was not asleep, and when there was a scratching at the earth block he had made and a warning vibration along the tunnel wall, he was awake
and ready, still as a root. Moles feel safe in their own tunnels and make quite a lot of noise, and this one was no exception.
Indeed, he was chatting to himself in a busy kind of way, interspersing it with snatches of a familiar worming song:
‘Now we dig and we scratch and we wedge and we pull,
Now we wedge and we dig and…’
‘Mmm. This shouldn’t have happened, not in my tunnel. Mind you, it’s a long time since I was here. Too long. I’m hungry. Worms, that’s what I want.
‘Worms, worms, worms,
Lots of lovely worms.’
Bracken relaxed when he heard all this, for the mole sounded old and good-humoured and unlikely to cause him harm. Still, feeling it is better to be safe than sorry, he took advantage of the noise the mole was making to sneak out quietly on to the surface again to wait and see who would come.
The muttering and humming continued and an occasionally heavy breathing of exertion, as the mole burrowed his way through Bracken’s block, until finally a snout appeared at the entrance, sniffing about the warm evening air.
‘Somemole’s here,’ he said loudly. ‘I can smell it.’ At which the snout disappeared back into the tunnel and there fell a deep silence. Bracken held his breath, waited for several minutes, and finally could stand it no longer. ‘Hello, I’m here,’ he said in as cheerful a tone as he could muster, ‘a youngster from the Westside.’ Silence.
‘I got lost.’ Silence. ‘I’m very sorry, really I am, but I thought your tunnel was deserted.’ Snuffling. Finally the mole spoke out from the dark tunnel.
‘It was deserted. I’ve not had time to come here for months. It’s merest chance’ (at this point the snout poked out of the tunnel again) ‘that I happened along at this particular moment.’
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