Duncton Wood (18 page)

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R
EBECCA
’
S
bleak mateless spring had become an early summer of delights. When Sarah’s litter by Mandrake arrived in April, Rebecca had the excuse she wanted to leave the home burrow to scrape a living for herself in her own tunnels. She had wondered whether to leave Barrow Vale altogether, to get away from Mandrake, but when it came to that, she had no real desire to do so. Perhaps she sensed that beneath his brutal hostility to her he loved her, the very viciousness of his assaults a sign of how deep his feelings ran.

Certainly she was pleased when he gruffly took her aside at the end of April to say “You’ll be leaving the home burrow now, but you’ll not go far, Rebecca – I want to keep an eye on you. There’s a burrow not far from here which I’ll show you...”

She was surprised that one should be so conveniently free, and only long afterward found out that Mandrake had driven away the mole who occupied it – an older female called Rue – threatening her with death if she tried to win it back. Not knowing this and flattered by Mandrake’s sudden interest in her wellbeing, she settled down happily to wait for summer. She cleared out the runs and burrows in her new tunnels, replacing the nesting material with sweet-smelling grasses and leaves she found on the wood’s floor. She opened up a new entrance which caught the morning sun, and another which threw light and fresh, cool air into her burrows toward the end of day.

All this occupied her so much that she hardly missed not seeing Sarah during May and early June, by which time Sarah’s second litter was beginning to roam, and the two became friends again. They would talk of flowers and trees, and Sarah would tell her the ways of shrews and voles, laughing at their fights and antics. She warned of weasels and owls.

The flowers that had carpeted the wood’s floor in spring died away as the trees above began to leaf, blocking the sun so that a heavier, duller undergrowth took their place. Rebecca, growing bolder as each summer
day advanced, took to seeking out flowers and sunlight on the pasture edge, and in one or two more open places toward the Marsh End. She would have liked to explore deeper into the Marsh End itself, among the danker darkness of its trees, but there was a musty smell about the place, which she did not like on a summer’s day, created by the moss and fungi that grew about the one or two rotting trees and many fallen branches.

But these herbal forays were interspersed by long periods of simply sitting still in her own tunnels or at their entrances, learning about the wood nearest to her. Its summer noises were less frenetic than the spring’s, but fuller and richer. Very near one of her tunnel entrances were a couple of small oaks with patches of bramble and ground ivy nearby, and here, just before she herself arrived, a pair of nightingales settled to breed and raise their young. As the summer moved into July, she grew to love their ferreting busyness as they grubbed among the undergrowth for spiders and worms, an activity often followed by the rich
jug-jug-chooc-chooc
of song, ascending to a powerful crescendo
pioo-pioo
which she could hear in her deepest burrow. A night was blessed that began with their song.

Often “her” nightingales joined the chorus that woke with her at dawn as a colorful medley from a blackbird or two joined the sounds of nuthatch and wren, tit and the soft, distant cooing of a wood pigeon over on the wood’s edge. The birds scurried about the dead leaves on the wood’s floor or flittered among living leaves above. And the smells of fresh growth! She loved that best of all as she and the woods grew into the season together.

In this summer period she grew used to sounds that had frightened her at first – the scurrying of a hedgehog, often blindly running right past her snout, or the sudden buzz in her face of a flying beetle or searching wasp.

One reason she tended to keep near her own tunnels was that if she was caught too far away by hunger or tiredness, she had to make a temporary burrow in a place whose noises were strange and threatening. It was a long time before she revisited the eastside, for example, because when she stayed
there
overnight, she happened on a mating fight between a couple of badgers who sounded, in their thumping rushes and shrill, eerie screams, as if they were about to fall through the burrow roof onto her. They were, in fact, many moleyards away in the slopes of a bank where they had dug their own massive burrows, but how was she to know, never having heard them before? Worse than their terrible sounds was their rank smell, which wafted sickeningly into the tiny burrow and made her tremble and sweat with fear in the darkness.

But far, far worse were the chilling sounds of tawny owls hooting at night. They cast a terrible fear into her. She knew little of them beyond that they were the mole’s most terrible enemy in Duncton in summer and were the taloned death that came with silent suddenness out of the darkness above. There were one or two moles in Duncton – and Rebecca had heard one of them tell his tale – who had been caught by an owl but by some freak chance escaped, talon-torn but alive. Some of the older moles said that to touch such a mole brought you luck, but Rebecca had been too shy to seek that privilege.

Mandrake came to visit her two or three times in June and July. He always claimed to be just passing and pretended to have no interest in her doings. He sat about for a while, asked her a few monosyllabic questions, cast his glowering glance about her system, and was off as suddenly as he had come. She sensed that in his own gruff way he was keeping an eye on her, and that gave her pleasure as well.

One hot July evening, when every insect in the wood seemed busy, Mekkins passed her way and she heard for the first time of the deaths of Hulver and Bindle. On Mandrake’s orders the story had been kept dark for weeks past, but the idle summer months are a time for gossip and chatter and such a tale must eventually come out.

Mekkins, who felt the whole sorry story to be a shadow on Duncton, would have preferred to keep silent about it with Rebecca. She was so young, so innocent, so full of the joy of the season, that telling her seemed as shameful as trampling on a wood anemone. But she was so overjoyed to see him, though he knew her only passingly, and fixed him with such an open gaze that he found it impossible to tell a lie when she suddenly asked “Where can I find Hulver, the elder?”

He hesitated to answer, playing for time with “Why?”

She told him how Hulver had talked to her before the June elder meeting and told him the legend of Rebecca the Healer, and about a mole called Bracken who was somewhere up on the slopes. Hulver had told her about Bracken with such a curious passion that she had taken to heart his odd suggestion that she should make sure that Bracken was all right.

As Mekkins looked at her, free from the threat of Mandrake – with whom she had been the last time he saw her – he felt he had never seen such light radiance in a female before. He tried to say that he didn’t know about Hulver or Bracken, that perhaps they were up on the slopes, that he was old now and... but one by one the lies dried up before her simple gaze. Mekkins was clever, a survivor, one well used to telling half truths to get his way. But, well, there are times when a mole wearies of the effort of not telling the truth, and he admired the stand Hulver had made too much to want to tell any lies about him. And he remembered the strong adult voice of that strange mole. Bracken, whom none of them had ever quite seen, who had cried out from the clearing those ritual words of the Midsummer blessing, words that had often come back to him:

The grace of whole-souled loveliness...

and now, before the radiant Rebecca he could tell nothing but the truth. As she gazed happily at him, with joy in her movements and life radiating from her, Mekkins felt a poverty in his own spirit about the murders by the Stone, and his snout lowered as his gaze fell to the wood’s floor.

Slowly, and with a low voice, he told her exactly what had happened on Midsummer Night – as far as he understood it. He ended finally with a description of the shock that had run through the elders when, en route back to Barrow Vale, they were stopped short by the voice of an unknown mole uttering the sevenfold blessing loud and clear through the wood after them. “The grace... the grace.. He could hear the words now.

“Whatmole said them?” asked Rebecca, who crouched by him, listening, still and somber.

“Bracken, Burrhead’s son, we think it must have been him.” Rebecca’s heart seemed to stop when he said

Bracken’s name, and every word Mekkins spoke seemed to be of great importance. Mekkins described the chase Bracken had led them on, describing the bravery of one so young as if it were a legend and not something that had happened only a short time before.

“Who is he?” whispered Rebecca, almost to herself. “Who is he?”

Mekkins repeated that he was Burrhead’s son, one of Aspen’s spring litter: but that was not what Rebecca meant. She explained that Hulver had said of Bracken that Rebecca the Healer had led them to one another. Now here he was again, the only mole in Duncton, so it seemed, who could lead Mandrake on a chase and get away with it.

“Oh, but ‘e didn’t!” exclaimed Mekkins. “‘E was killed. He ran clean over the chalk cliff edge trying to escape from Mandrake.”

The hot July sun was suddenly cold. Every insect in the wood froze to its spot. The evening breeze ceased. The air was loud with anger.

Rebecca had listened in silence to Mekkins’ miserable tale. She had heard him out in peace as he described the hunt for the most venerable mole in the system and his subsequent murder with Bindle. But now, with the news of Bracken’s death in her ears, she reared up in terrible anger and for the first time attacked, really attacked, another mole, and her talons descended on Mekkins. She tore at him as if he were evil itself. And as she did so, she began to weep, striking out blindly through her tears.

Mekkins fell back before her assault, unable to strike Rebecca, even though he was bigger and more powerful and could almost have killed her with one blow. Instead, he warded off her blows, or dodged the wilder ones, until her rage was spent and she was stooped and sobbing before him.

“So much killing in the system,” she cried. “He hates every mole and every living thing. I tried... to show him how much I love him, but he can’t hear me...” She sighed deeply and looked out into the evening.

Then, to Mekkins’ amazement, for he was just beginning to think he felt the depths of her sudden grief, she laughed in a tearful way: “Of course,” she said, “this mole Bracken’s not dead. He couldn’t be, you see. He couldn’t be.”

She turned to Mekkins inquisitorially and said, “Did you
see
him dead?” And Mekkins, who could not keep up with. Rebecca’s changes of mood or understand them, had to admit that he hadn’t. But then, how could you see if a mole who had gone over a cliff was dead?

“No, no,” said Rebecca, “he’s not dead. Or
if
he is, he’s not.”

With this mysterious comment Rebecca fell silent, and Mekkins fell to thinking that the Duncton system was going mad.

“Bloody ‘ell,” he thought to himself,
“I’m
going mad.”

He told himself this because he felt a peculiar sense of escape coming over him that his commonsense character could do nothing at all to hold back. It was as if after weeks of misery his body could again feel the space and trees about him, and his paws feel the firm soil he loved so much. And just as Rebecca had asked “Who is he?” of Bracken, he now found himself asking “Who is
she?’’
of Rebecca.

For, faced by Rebecca’s absolute conviction that Bracken was alive, Mekkins found himself delightfully able to believe that this impossibility was, in fact, true. At the same time, in the space of this short conversation, Mekkins had shed, like last year’s winter, whatever loyalty he may have had left to Mandrake. Duncton Wood could go and jump over the cliff as far as he was concerned. He was a marshender first, foremost and forever, and that was all he wanted to be.