Duncton Found

by William Horwood

  She picked him up and took him into the echoing tunnels there, huge places, tall and regularly arched, all made by twofoots. They were larger than most of the tunnels of Whern, and seemed to lead a long way into the hillside.

  But Henbane did not explore that far, for the air was cold inside and dank, and the ground wet and filled with puddles. There were several of these tunnels and she chose to stay near the one whose entrance faced south and would catch the sun.

  Here, in contrast to the fells over which they had come, the ground had been openly delved long since, and a rich variety of plants had come. The rough ground before it was already covered in creeping stonecrop, and where brambles ran there were violets and some primrose. On the sunny banks were all manner of things – tormentil, sweet woodruff and lower down the spread leaves of herb robert whose flowers had not yet come.

  It was a gentle spot, a safe spot, and there was evidence of only vole to disturb them. Before them, in an area long since churned flat by roaring owls, the ground was waterlogged and not a place a mole would happily cross. While behind them the banks of the place rose steep and they could not be easily attacked.

  “Besieged, perhaps, my dear, but not attacked. There’s the tunnel to escape into, and places in there to hide I’m sure, and plenty of worms hereabout. A good enough place for us.”

  She made tunnels into the bank, using some old vole ways and even, in one place, a broken rabbit burrow. It was rough but obscure and good, and to find it a mole would have to have come a long way looking.

  “It feels safe here,” she told him, speaking to him as if he understood. It was here, a few days after they arrived, that his eyes opened and it seemed to her they were the most beautiful she had ever seen.

  “You are beautiful,” she whispered to him, “the most beautiful mole that ever was!” He supped her spit and worm, and soon after his eyes opened he began to crunch in a feeble way at the parts of unchewed worm she gave him.

  “You will survive, my dear, you will, and so I must find a name for you.”

  For days she pondered it, speaking out all the names she knew, and some she made up, and wondering if they suited him. Tryfan, she tried, of course. And Bracken, too. Even Mayweed of whom Sleekit had spoken, and Wharfe, and all the names she knew.

  Then one day, the pup well fed and wandering gently here and there and then running back to her, she lay in the sudden warm sun that comes sometimes in May and marks the first of many summer days. Her snout was along her paws, her eyes were closed, the pup was busy, and her snout twitched and scented the small pleasurable scents of spring.

  The very pleasant scents; the sweet scents.

  She opened her eyes, peered to her side and saw that the woodruff was out, its petals white and fragrant, and beneath it the pup snouted up as well, as if he too scented it.

  “Sweet woodruff,” she sighed, remembering a time when she was young and her mother Charlock had left her alone and she too had scented at such flowers and her mother had not known their name. It was one of the few happy memories she had.

  “Sweet woodruff,” she said once more, and then, looking at the pup, she knew his name at last: “Woodruff, that’s what it must be.” She watched him with great pleasure, and when he came near she encircled him in her paws and whispered again and again, “Woodruff,” until his darkening cheeks wrinkled, his growing paws scrabbled and he struggled free and went to the puddle’s edge and surveyed it as if it was a mighty lake.

  That place was where Woodruffs puphood passed, and where he first spoke words, and learnt that tunnels have echoes, and rain hurts when it falls hard, and live beetles are near impossible to catch, and adults are warm things to run to when things hurt.

  That place, it might be said, was where Henbane grew young again, as she tried to give Woodruff a puphood and security she never had herself.

  In that place they saw the weather warm, and the puddle that had been Woodruffs lake, in which he learnt to play, turn dry. There they saw the brambles flower, there Woodruff watched his first bumble bee; and there, one never-forgotten evening, they watched a fox pass through.

  Grikes came twice, and once quite close, but so careful had Henbane been about not leaving signs, so marginal did the little place they lived seem, that they were not found. The first time was when Woodruff was too young to care, but the second was more fraught....

  “There’s two moles here,” was the simple and chilling way he announced their arrival. He had been playing out in the open when suddenly he had seen them and dashed back to her.

  She had grabbed him and pressed him in among the grass and stared around and saw them over by one of the twofoot tunnel entrances. They were great dark guard-moles with thick talons and heavy snouts who snuffled and peered about the place, and then moved nearer where they lay.

  Henbane and Woodruff watched them, absolutely still, the youngster’s eyes wide with fear. The guardmoles laughed deeply and tussled with one another and their strength was obvious and unlike anything he had ever seen before.

  Then they turned and came straight towards them, and Woodruff felt Henbane tensing ready to fight and she whispered, “If they come you must run, run anywhere.”

  For the first time he had realised it was possible that one day he might lose her, and he was still as death.

  But the guardmoles stopped, were distracted by rock and water sounds down in the nearer twofoot tunnel, and after an interminable wait in which they shuffled and peered here and there, they turned and left.

  There was nothing Henbane could do to stop the nightmares that came after that but be there and offer comfort. The image of the grikes stayed with the young mole, and he lost a little confidence and stayed close to her for days. Woodruff had discovered fear, and it did not easily leave him.

  It was some time then, in the molemonths of early May, in an effort to combat this first and seemingly disastrous sight of other moles, that Henbane decided to tell him stories of the real moles and moledom that she had known.

  “Other moles have siblings, and neighbours, fathers and all sorts of moles,” she said “and there are....”

  “And big moles,” he said.

  “Yes, there are some of those....”

  “Who are not nice....”

  “Some of them aren’t, but most of them are, my dear. Your grandfather Tryfan, for example, was a big mole, much bigger than the ones who came here, and he was not one to hurt others at all even though he could have done if he wanted.”

  “What did he look like? What did he do?”

  Woodruff saw Henbane’s eyes soften, he heard her voice go gentle, he felt her paw reach out to him, and he was lost in the tale she told and began to learn about moles other than grikes.

  In this way, as the summer days passed by, Henbane discovered in herself stories that she barely knew she knew, and gave them willingly to Woodruff, as if to make up for the family and life his puphood and youth did not have.

  At first these tales were light and simple things, but gradually, as the moleweeks and months went by and Woodruff grew a little older, her tales became more fulsome, richer, and told of the light and dark that had been Henbane’s life.

  In the telling of them her old passion returned, she seemed to live the characters she portrayed for him and in but a few words could turn the twofoot tunnel that loomed nearby into the darkest parts of Whern; and transform the pretty bank in which they lived into the warmest, quietest glade in Duncton Wood.

  It was perhaps inevitable that in this world she made for Woodruff, Whern should be the dark place and Duncton the place of light. Inevitable that names like Scirpus and Rune, Weed and Charlock should be names he was made to doubt and fear, while others, like Tryfan and Spindle and a few of the Duncton moles she remembered Tryfan telling her about – Comfrey was one, old Maundy another – became in the world she made for him moles to whom in imagination he ran and found love and safety.

  A few there were who were not so dark or light as these – mol
es like Wrekin, her commander in the south, and others that she knew.

  But there was one whose role in the stories that she told evolved and changed as those precious, loving, mole-months went by, and that was Boswell, whom she had known in Whern, and observed.

  “Is Boswell in this one?” the youngster would ask eagerly as she began a new tale, for he always liked a tale that ended (if it had not begun) with some account of the old White Mole who limped and had gentle eyes, and who, though often impatient, was always there and would always be.

  “Yes, my love, I think somehow he’ll be in this one today... “she would say. Or, sometimes, just to be mischievous, “I don’t think he is, but you never know with Boswell, do you?”

  “No!” Woodruff would say excitedly. Adding a little later, as the tale drew ominously near its close without Boswell having made an appearance, “He will be there, won’t he? At the end?”

  How Henbane loved her Woodruff then, and how impossible for her imagination to deny him the appearance of that strange White Mole of whom her own memory was so strong.

  Had she not herself taken him into custody at Uffington? Had she not, through him, begun to discover that slow and painful yet infinitely rich other way of being which her rearing in the Word so long denied her: the way of truth? Had not knowledge of him at Providence Fall in Whern, where her father kept him, made her heart open to the love that Tryfan finally brought?

  How then could she deny Woodruff the gift that Boswell gave her? Boswell was part of her history, part of what she was.

  In this way, and barely knowing what she did, Henbane gave to Woodruff the father that life itself had denied him, and as time went by she found that in the games that Woodruff played with the characters she described, Boswell was the arbiter and final recourse when all seemed confused, all lost; all still to be found. Boswell was the strength and safety in his world.

  As Woodruff had begun to mature, he would come and ask Henbane to tell him a story she had told before and as it unfolded once again would ask for details she had not previously given.

  How high were the highest tunnels of Whern? Is a White Mole’s fur really white? What were the names of Bracken’s siblings? (She remembered Tryfan naming only one of them.) How far is Uffington from Duncton Wood? What sound does a mole make when he dies?

  Darkness came to the questions, and sometimes prurience, and sometimes mere morbid curiosity. But most of all there was what Henbane came to see as a kind of determination for detail, for fact, for knowing that one thing which nomole can ever know – all that had happened.

  Of the Word and the Stone Henbane naturally had to talk, but feeling absolute trust in neither, she did not make him believe in one against the other. The tales she told, the facts she gave, surely revealed as much to him of the Word and of scrivening as they did of the Stone and scribing.

  Yet it was of scrivening that one day she began to teach him, since that was her better art; and of the rituals and rites of the Word in Whern he inevitably knew more than of the Stone, since she knew more of them herself.

  Yet again and again she would say, “I cannot tell you all I would like since I do not know it, and you must do as other moles do and seek out the answers for yourself. You must do it in what I heard the Stone Mole describe as a warriorlike way, but if you ask me what that is I can only tell you to remember all I have told you of Tryfan, for he was surely a warrior among moles.”

  When June came and after much persuasion on his part (and despite her fears), she agreed to take him out from the place they had hidden in for so long and on to the fells. For him that climb up through heather and grass towards the sky was the beginning of an exploration of moledom that could never stop; for her it was the discovery that she had aged, and was slow, and her balance was not what it had been.

  It was he who turned them back, he who slowed for her, he who helped her down the final slopes. She knew then that her days with him were numbered now, and that one last thing she might do was take him on his first real journey into moledom.

  By now his fur was thickening fast, and his body was sturdy. He was not as large as Tryfan had been but strong enough, with well-made paws. His eyes were good, yet cautious too, as if he knew there were dangers in the world; his look was a little earnest.

  “Where shall we go?” he asked with all the eagerness and innocence of youth when she told him what she had decided.

  “Somewhere not too far to be daunting, but not so near that we will not have adventures on the way,” she said. “You’ll learn much and we may meet other moles.”

  “But where?”

  She pondered it for several days before she decided.

  “Did I ever tell you about my journey south from Whern?”

  “The first or second time?” he asked. “When you were leading the moles of the Word south, or when you were fleeing from Lucerne?”

  “It was both times, really. Wrekin showed me a place that first time which was a haven to me on the second, much as this place has been. I think I would like to go there now. I wonder why I have never mentioned it to you.”

  He looked at her and settled down for what sounded like the beginning of a tale, but she shook her head and said, “Woodruff, I think our time for tales is over now. We must go from here and you must begin learning about moledom as it really is. This journey shall be the start of that.”

  His brow furrowed.

  “It’s because you felt old when we went on the fell, isn’t it?”

  She nodded and sighed.

  “I shall have to let you go one day, my love. Before I do I want to share a journey with you so that you remember me in a different way than... this!” She waved a paw around at the place that had been their only home and suddenly it seemed small and inconsequential to her. It was certainly time to go.

  “What’s the name of the place we’re going to?” he asked.

  “It’s a place called Arbor Low. It’s a circle of white and fallen Stones. It’s... a very ancient place, a good place for a mole to journey to. We’ll set off early tomorrow.”

  “Arbor Low,” he repeated, “Arbor Low.”

  That night he came to her and looked at her in a way she knew followed much thought and usually preceded a question he found difficult to ask, “How did my mother die?”

  He stared at her, resolute, and in one so young there was something so touching about his purposefulness that she almost wanted to weep.

  She stared back at him, and she saw the blood and terror of Harebell’s awful death. Her body tensed again, she saw pup after pup die, those of Mallice and those of Harebell, and she heard the screams and her eyes were fixed on one pup, instinctively cowering, the one she had protected, the mole that stanced before her now.

  Henbane stared at memory and wept, and Woodruff stared at Henbane, still resolute.

  “Why did she die?” he whispered.

  Then Henbane knew what to say.

  “My dear, when you have made the journey we will make, and seen at least a little of moledom, if you ask me that question again I shall answer it as truthfully as I can.”

  “All right,” he said. And that, for now, was that.

  Arbor Low lies north of Beechenhill and Tissington, on the way towards the Dark Peak. Some say that the north starts here, for after it the ground begins to rise, and worms grow scarce.

  Many a legend attaches to the pale Stones of Arbor Low, which lie in a circle in pleasant rolling ground some way to the west of the deep valley of the Higher Dove. They are limestone, and all but one Stone on the western side of the circle lie fiat and white, half buried in the pasture there.

  Here, the scribemoles used to say, the powers of the scribemoles ended; and the influence, if not always the full power, of the Word began. To Henbane, whose heritage was of the Word, but whose heart had been stolen by the spirit if not the ritual of the Stone, it was a natural place to come.

  The ground undulates hereabout, but round the fallen Stones themselves there is a
bank of earth, quite steep in parts but flat and broken in the north, with a narrower, less distinct entrance to the south.

  It was to here that Henbane brought Woodruff in early June, as evening fell and the flat sides of the fallen Stones caught the light of the sky and seemed like a circle of lights in the dusk across the ground. These were the first Stones the youngster had seen, and he was as excited as a mole could be to see and touch such Stones at last, after hearing so many descriptions and tales about them from Henbane.

  Naturally it was the solitary one that was still upright in the west that awed him most, and to a mole who had never seen a Stone before it was awesome indeed.

  “Why are they all fallen but this one?” he asked.

  “My mother Charlock told me that here a great scribemole of the past was defeated by one of the early Masters and the Stones lay flat. But this last one stayed upright against the day when the Stone prevails here once more and the Word begins to die.”

  With such tales as these in his mind, Woodruff helped Henbane make a tunnel and burrows in Arbor Low, and though he was not yet as skilled as her, what he lacked in experience he made up for in enthusiasm. There were worms enough, and a few troublesome rooks that flew over from their roosts in the great stands of trees that rose on adjacent hills, the highest of which, Gib Hill, was across a shallow valley to the south-west.

  There was no question but that Woodruff had matured on the journey they had made, and that Henbane had aged more. But of that journey they had much to share and talk about – the meeting with moles at Alstonefleld, the attack of the tawny owl at Steep Low when Woodruff had raised his talons against another living creature for the first time, and found they worked! There had been the failure to cross the Dove at Wolfscotedale and the trek to the north to find a better crossing point. Much else besides, but grimmest of all the roaring owls at Parsley Hay that had nearly crushed them both before, finally, they came within sight of Gib Hill and Henbane knew they were nearly there.