Duncton Tales (48 page)

Tired though she was she went steadily on, keeping to the surface and as clear as she could of rocks and boulders where moles might be lying in wait for her. On and on she went, with only one more mole seen — again a female, this one bald and so ulcerous her appearance was a blotchy red — until she gained the slopes and was able to relax a little, for she found no more evidence of mole.

The place was dark and damp, and so steep that the soil was scattered in pockets among the boulders and rock fragments that had fallen from the cliffs above, whilst in one cranny directly beneath the cliff a pocket of snow remained in a spot where the sun never shone.

The tunnels she made over the next few days were convoluted and most strange, running at odd angles among the jags of buried rocks before petering out on to the surface for the lack of an underground route to other soil. She did her best to give these overground runs protection by taking them under the lee of fallen rocks, but with the ravens watching above, and the continual threat of further rockfall — the sudden sounds of which she heard sporadically both day and night — it was in truth no place to rear a pup; but it was all she had.

It seemed that others must have thought so too, for apart from occasional sightings of those same terrible hulking females she had seen on her way across the Charnel, who came snouting the slopes below her sometimes — though at dusk when she could barely see them — she was left alone.

Gradually, as Samphire became absorbed in the hard work of raising her pup and she remained undisturbed, she put worries about these other moles behind her and concentrated on the task in paw. The weather was inclement, the tunnels liable to slippage and damage from the frequent rockfalls, the wind continual and often ferocious.

All these factors meant that the first moleyears of Rooster’s puphood, right up to the end of April indeed, were spent solely in the company of his mother. She was not at first much encouraged by his appearance and seeming stupidity. She had hoped that the growth of fur might mask somewhat the grotesqueness of his paws and wrinkled massive head, but it did not. He was certainly large, certainly powerful, and in that he took after his father. But his head seemed over-size for his body, and his paws were deformed in the sense that one — the right — was larger, much larger than the other, though neither was small. His fur was hopelessly awry, and however much she strove to groom it, it remained so, becoming thicker, more wiry, less manageable with each day that passed. His tail was askew, twisting awkwardly to the left and to this she attributed his clumsiness, for tails help moles know where they are. Poor Rooster was for ever tumbling this way or that, or veering off from the direction in which his awkward paws sought to take him.

All this she might have borne with equanimity if he had shown an alertness of mind, or ability to learn, or even speak, but he did not. Nor was there much sign that he would do so from his expression, which once his eyes opened remained deep and dark beneath his heavy furrowed brow. Yet love him she could not fail to do, for in his ungainly silent way he would run to the safety of her flanks when danger seemed to threaten, such as the rumble of a rockfall, or the scuttering of raven on the surface above.

Then, too, he would stare up at her with his black eyes, and if the light caught them she fancied she saw trust in her there, and perhaps even love. From that deep instinct mothers have, which seeks no reward from a task that seems fruitless, she talked to him, telling him stories of moledom and the Stone, and as time went by and his attention on what she said seemed more sustained, about her own upbringing in Chieveley Dale. Indeed, the very fact that he did not, or could not, respond, seemed to give her courage and space to speak out her heart’s old longings for her home system and lost family, the memories of which for so long she had found it easier to suppress.

That same maternal instinct began, too, to tell her that slow though he was to speak, and ungainly and awkward though he was in all he did, he had positive qualities which she did not remember any pup in her earlier broods displaying so young, or at all. For one thing he grew so fast that he weaned himself on to the solid food of worms and other scraps she found very early for a pup, and developed an encouraging ability to find the living worm — a talent most pups develop late.

Not Rooster. He seemed to know when and where to find the poor thin things that the Charnel soil supported, and in this they found their first real communion, for when she praised him for what he did he chucked and purred and made those sounds she had thought he might never make, sounds that are the precursors of speech.

Soon after this he developed a second, perhaps related ability, though one so strange to her that for a long time she thought it mere coincidence. It seemed that Rooster knew when and where rockfalls from the cliffs above would occur, long before they happened. More than that, this knowledge gave him the confidence to judge when to flee or not — and, finally, to her alarm, when to go out on to the surface and watch! It seemed then that for all his clumsiness he had his own sensitivities, and in that she found strange and wondering comfort.

With the warmer weather of mid-April she began to allow him out on to the surface, and there the rocks, the emergent green-white flowers of lady’s-mantle and saxifrage, became his friends. While the ravens above, stooping, turning, croaking, became … well, not his enemies. As with the worms, and the rockfalls, he seemed to sense their movements before they ever made them, and learnt that a mole who turns to face a stooping raven, raising his talons before it comes too near, will cause it to swerve aside. Ravens prey on carrion, or on injured things, and fear life that confronts their beaks and claws.

This much Samphire knew herself, though like most moles she avoided exposure to ravens and any bird too big, but she knew as well that moles like Red Ratcher disdained to cower from ravens, and went about their business unafraid of them, heaping invective on them when they came near, and raising their talons at them as Rooster, so young, had taught himself to do.

With these excursions on the surface, in which Samphire was forced to learn to trust that Rooster could defend himself, the youngster’s speech began to develop. His voice was rough and husky, his speech slow, qualities that he never lost. He talked more to himself or to the rocks and tunnels among which he played than to her, prattling and speaking to them as if they were alive, as solitary youngsters sometimes will. And, too, early again, he began to delve little tunnels and half-chambers of his own, slowly and deliberately, and she was glad to see that his large ungainly paws were, if anything, an advantage in doing this.

Throughout this time they saw no other moles, and nor did Samphire hear any, though sometimes it seemed as if Rooster did — a fact which, in view of his percipience with worms and rockfalls, would not have surprised her. It was always at dusk, and always in the direction of the slopes below, and Rooster’s squat and wrinkled snout would whiffle at the air, and his dark eyes narrow, and he would mount up in mock aggression as if to defend their territory against all comers. The all comers never came, and always such occasions ended with Rooster looking curious, and taking a few steps out of their family chamber in a friendly way as if he half hoped other moles would come.

That they
were
moles Samphire had no doubt, and to confirm it Rooster asked what moles they were and when they would come. His defensive stance was one instinct, his fearlessness was another deeper one, and Samphire was wise enough not to seek to damage it.

She had told him in various ways of the Reapside, and the Charnel, and that the moles in each were different. He knew that his father lived in the Reapside, but having no other experience Rooster had no expectation, nor much curiosity, to see him. Since the Charnel moles had not molested her, and seemed, if anything, somewhat afraid, she did not yet warn Rooster against them, or even say what she already knew, that they were sometimes deformed, and perhaps diseased. He would find out in his own way, and if need be she would be there to help and defend him; though, as the days of April went by and he grew bolder and stronger, she began to think that if the Stone continue to bless them both with this solitude and lack of interference, then by the time that contact with other moles was made he would be very near to being able to defend himself.

But this was not to be. Towards the end of April the weather suddenly warmed and for a time their tunnels were wet as the great patch of snow above them and beneath the cliff finally thawed, sending rivulets of water down the slopes. There were, too, a number of rockfalls uncomfortably close to their tunnels, and one which destroyed part of them, though such was Rooster’s ability to sense their coming that he had long since warned her and removed her to safety, muttering in his laconic way, “Coming, rocks. Get downslope.”

The rocks did come, and the cliffs echoed with the fall, and that same evening came one of Rooster’s observations of the silent, unseen moles downslope from them. For the first time, and with only a brief, “Will see,” to his mother, he ventured out into the tunnel, and then on to the surface.

Samphire called after him to stay near, and followed, watching his progress downslope to the shadows of the boulders there. She watched as any mother might, resolving that if there were a sudden movement, or a call, or anything untoward at all, she would rush down there to his defence; until then, she must let him begin to discover something of the world beyond the little one she had reared him to.

But there seemed no cause for alarm, and nor did he even disappear from view, though it was plain he met and talked to a mole or moles in the shadows, for she heard his young husky voice, and some kind of a reply. But whatmole it was he saw she knew not, and nor, being a youngster, did he say when he returned, except that the mole was a ‘they’. He said no more than that, and seemed to accept what he had done, and the moles he had met, with that same calm boldness with which he had met all else in his so-far restricted life.

It was only two days later, in the fading light of late afternoon, that Samphire saw the moles her son had met. Or rather, turned a corner, surfaced, and to her astonishment and alarm, found herself face to face with them.

“Rooster!” she called urgently, as much for support as from any certain knowledge that these were moles he already knew. “Rooster, come here!”

For the first time in her life Samphire experienced a new and very different quality in her strange and slowly-revealing son, and one that in time would endear him not only to herself but to many other moles, and in a way to all moledom. For Rooster came running, ungainly, awkward, but massively protective in the gentlest of ways. Indeed, her second calling of his name was barely made before he was there, a little in front of her, his great paws before him, his huge head making his young body seem bigger than it was. It was as if one of the great dark boulders that lay about that surface had come alive and taken the comforting form of a huge benign mole.

Rooster saw the moles she had come across, and Rooster laughed.

“Friends!” he said. Even as he said it, he went forward and touched one of the moles with his big right paw, and nodded at the other, and the three of them moved off among the scree as youngsters will who wish to be free of the adult world to explore and journey into those discoveries of place and community which are such moles’ challenge and delight.

Yet moved as she was, Samphire watched with a grave concern tinged with horror. For though the two moles that Rooster had made companions of were youngsters like himself, born no doubt at much the same time, they were anything but normal moles and by going with them as he now did it was as if she were watching him take a turning into alienation and abnormality for life; as if, in fact, her son Rooster had declared that he too was abnormal and deformed, he too would always be an outcast.

What was it that Samphire saw first? First, and only slightly the less strange, was the bigger of the two, a mole already larger than Rooster, a hulking thing, its reddish fur patchy and in places so thin that pink-grey bald areas mottled its body. Its protuberant eyes were milky-white and blind, and its great head hung down beneath hunched shoulders. Its reactions seemed so slow and strange that Samphire rightly guessed the mole was stone-deaf; she could not know that it was dumb as well.

“It’. Such might well have been its name, so alien did it seem to her. But the mole was male. Even as she watched, Rooster put his left paw to this seemingly helpless mole’s flank and spoke. The lumbering male raised its slow head, stared out of its blind eyes, and reached out to touch Rooster’s face and snout with surprising gentleness. Its paws at least were good strong things, their talons shining black, all well-formed. So the two moles greeted one another, and life, of a kind, came to the blind mole.

This brief, touching, and to Samphire, tragic proceeding was watched by the second of the moles, a female. That much at least could be said for her. For the rest … Samphire stared in horror despite herself, for she had never seen such a thing, such a mole, in all her life, or imagined it, though from time to time she had heard that such things had been born and quickly destroyed, for they have little hope of survival into adulthood.

She was thin and small, and most strangely shaped, more like rat or mouse than mole, her snout barely formed, her paws extenuated and weak. And she was pink-white.

“Albino,” whispered Samphire to herself.

Indeed she was, and with it went pale white talons, and such snout as she had was pink-white. But her fur was more yellow than white.

“But her eyes …” whispered Samphire again, for she knew enough to know that albinos’ eyes are pale and the fur about them white. Yet her eyes were shining black, alert, amused, sharp, intelligent. But that was not all, nor what made the two of them so compelling to watch. No, it was that those intelligent black eyes, so alive, so aware, seemed all the time upon the hulking male, and filled with care, concern and … adoration. An alien pair, perhaps, but the more Samphire stared and got used to them in those moments, the more she thought they were a striking pair as well.