Duncton Wood (41 page)

But still the Stone stood silent, its cold height rising above and beyond Mekkins’ vision to the nearly leafless branches of beech trees high above, which made an interlocking craze of silhouettes against the bleak white clouds of the October dusk.

He crouched by the Stone for a long time saying nothing. He had nothing to say. He looked around at the trees, then at his own strong paws, and then out across the lower wood in the direction of Marsh End. Then he got angry and started shouting at the Stone, almost attacking it in his anger: “What the ‘ell are you anyway?” he shouted. “I come all the way ’ere to ask for your help and I ain’t never asked for your ‘elp before and all you do is nothing at all. Just stand there silent. Silent as the stone you are. You know what? You’re nothing, that’s what you are, nothing!”

Wild anger flowed through Mekkins, feelings of a power and rage he had never felt before. They were the more powerful for the sense he felt of the Stone’s betrayal of the feeling of grace and hope that had inspired him to come so far in the first place. He turned away from the Stone and half hit, half collapsed on the ground, his movements as restless as the roots that ran this way and that around the Stone and formed the dark shadows at its base.

He half sobbed, half shouted in his rage until, slowly, the hatred for what was happening to Rebecca and his anger at the Stone began to fade into weariness and helplessness, so that even his strong shoulders and sturdy body could not stop wilting and sagging into a posture of defeat. He turned back to the Stone, his snout low and his anger quite gone.

“‘Elp her,” he whispered finally to the Stone. “’Elp her for my sake,” he said simply.

Mekkins finally left the Stone as dawn was rising the next morning. His spirits were too low for him to want to face the chatter of westside or Barrow Vale, so he turned east, taking a route by the central slopes and contouring his way round, and slowly down toward tunnels that would eventually lead to the Marsh End.

His route took him by Hulver’s old system and it was as he passed near it that he felt the faintest of vibrations and smelled the faintest of cheerful scents. He stopped and snouted about, glad to know there was life here again and then, finding an entrance, he went down into it, careful to make plenty of noise so as not to take anymole by surprise.

Anymole? Moles more like! The place was alive with the sound of pups, bleating and mewing and stirring, and the sound of a mother shushing them still.

Pups on the slopes! It was the first time he had ever heard of such a thing and if there was one thing in the world to raise his spirits a little at that moment, it was their sound.

There was a scurrying and muttering somewhere in the tunnels ahead where the litter was. Then a mole came running aggressively down the tunnel at him, stopping ready with her talons raised.

“It’s all right,” he said gently, “I’m not here for harm, just to pass the time of day like. I’m Mekkins the elder, from the Marsh End.”

“What are you doing here?” asked Rue.

“I’ve been to the Stone.”

“Oh!” She sounded surprised and came closer and snouted at him.

“Sounds like you got yourself a litter,” said Mekkins cheerfully. “Can I look?”

She nodded. She knew of Mekkins. He Was all right, played fair, they said.

“Got a worm or two to spare?” asked Mekkins, pressing his luck.

“You’ve got a nerve,” said Rue. “But as it happens I have.”

She turned round and ran on before him, back to her litter, and he followed very slowly, knowing how sensitive mothers can be.

Her burrow was a joy to look into. There she was, curled up with four pups suckling at her teats, bleating occasionally when they lost their grip, wrestling with each other for the best place, and milk spattering their pink snouts and pale young whiskers. Their eyes were blind and their paws as floppy as wet grass. Rue twittered and whiffled at them, guiding their mouths to her nipples and cooing love sounds at their feeble antics. One of the pups did a mewing cartwheel backward and Rue laughed fondly, saying “Come on, my sweet,” pulling him back. It was only as she lifted him up to her nipples that Mekkins saw that there was a fifth pup there, smaller than the rest, lost among the melee of the paws and questing snouts. He was feeble and lacked the vigor of the others, seeming unable even to suck.

“The runt,” said Rue matter-of-factly. “I’ve tried to make him feed but he only manages when the rest take a break and that isn’t often. He’s growing weaker by the hour. There’s always a weak one in a litter of five. Of course, he’s a male – they’re always the ones.”

But Mekkins wasn’t listening. He was thinking, his mind was racing, and an idea was forming in his mind swifter than lightning. An idea so ridiculous that he might make it work.

He took a tentative step into the burrow, at which Rue immediately tensed. “There’s a female I know,” he said at last, “who lost her litter. She’s ill from want of suck. That’s why I went to the Stone – to ask it to help her.” He looked meaningfully at the little feeble pup being climbed all over by the other four. Its mews were too weak for him to hear them above their noise, but he could see its mouth desperately forming the sounds.

Rue looked at him. “What you’re saying is that he might survive with her, whereas he definitely won’t with me. You may be right and you may be wrong.” Slowly Rue relaxed.

She went back to tending the more vigorous four and somehow shifted a bit so the fifth fell away and got lost by itself in the nesting material between Rue and Mekkins. Slowly, with great care, he eased himself toward the little thing. Rue studiously ignored them both.

Then Mekkins gently bent down to the tiny pup, took it up in his mouth by the scruff of the neck, and lifted it off the ground. It swung loose from his mouth, eyes blind and paws waving weakly. Mekkins hesitated for only a moment before turning to the entrance and going back into the tunnel and then, as fast as he could go, down to its entrance. Rue did not even look up after he had gone. “My sweet things,” she whispered to the healthy four, “my loves.”

As Mekkins was about to exit on the surface, he heard sounds behind him and thinking that Rue had, after all, changed her mind, turned round to face her and found himself looking into the face of a young adult male, with gray fur and wary eyes. The pup hung in the air between them.

“Take care of him,” said the young male. His voice was strong but strangely haunting, and it made Mekkins stop quite still, for surely he had heard it before. Before high summer he had heard it... coming out of the dark oh Midsummer Night, coming from the Stone clearing. The voice of Bracken. Feeling suddenly that he and the system were in the grip of forces whose power and destiny were beyond imagining, the pup in his mouth stirred feebly and Mekkins was gone, up into the light of early morning, racing down the slopes, running with the little pup swinging helplessly in front of him, as he ran desperately, without pause, to the distant isolated place where Rebecca lay dying.

Never had the smell of decaying wood and rotting leaf mold – the smell of the most forsaken part of Duncton Wood – felt so good to Mekkins. It meant that he was back.

Down then into Curlew’s dark tunnels, along to her burrow, desperate eyes at its entrance looking to see if Rebecca... if Rebecca was..., and a gasp from Curlew that had a thousand different feelings in it.

Mekkins placed the pup at Rebecca’s belly, nudging it to her hard and swollen nipples, pushing it forward almost clumsily in his desperation to see it take suck. And when it did not, whispering to Rebecca, whose eyes were closed and whose breathing was shallow, “Rebecca! Rebecca! I’ve brought you a pup!”

“They’ve all gone,” she moaned in a dead voice. “All gone.”

“He’s here. Look at him.
Look
at him,” whispered Mekkins gently, his eyes looking hopelessly to Curlew as the pup, too feeble to suck on its own, fell back to the shadows of her belly, its own tiny belly hurrying in and out, in and out, as if its life were being gasped away.

“Just look at him, my dear,” said Curlew, her snout caressing Rebecca’s face. “Just try.”

But Rebecca was not even interested, and try as they did, the pup could not seem to suck at her nipples, though it mewed softly and its mouth opened to try.

“Rebecca,” said Mekkins, again desperately, “please listen, my love. Try to help him. Try to give him your love. He needs you.”

But still she only stirred slightly and though she looked round at the pup for a moment, seemed to have no interest.

Mekkins sought for something to say, just as he had searched for something to say at the Stone. His eyes were wild, his mind distraught, and he searched desperately about until, suddenly, the words of Bracken came to him again. “Take care of him,” he had said and he saw an image of Bracken’s face, looking at him so deeply.

Mekkins turned back to Rebecca once more, put his snout to her ear, and said urgently: “You must try. You must try. The pup is Bracken’s young. He’s
Bracken’s
pup!”

What mole can say how soon a pup knows that its mother is gone? However it is, and will always be, the pup suddenly bleated out its sense of eternal loss. Not the quiet mewing that had been too soft to hear in Rue’s burrow, nor the feeble bleats he had made while trying to reach Rebecca’s teats. But the loud cry into the wilderness of loss, so that as Mekkins said “He’s Bracken’s pup” Rebecca seemed to hear the pup’s cry as if it was her own.

Her snout slowly turned round and down to the bleating thing, ran gently over its body, sniffled at its tiny paws; her tongue ran softly over its dry snout and she curled the protection of her body around it and guided it to one of her teats. The pup fell away, but she tried again. And again. Beginning to whisper words of encouragement as soft as its gentle mews, nudging it to her, pushing her teat to its mouth, moistening her own teat with her tongue to help, giving it her love. Until at last, before the breathless gaze of Curlew and Mekkins, the pup at last began to suckle, the noise of it filling the burrow like the sound of soft spring rain falling among dry grass.

While behind them, unnoticed in the shadows of the tunnel outside the burrow, Bracken crept silently away. He had used all his skills to follow Mekkins’ desperate race to Curlew’s burrow so that he might watch over the safety of his son. Had danger loomed, had a badger come by, had Mandrake himself come like a black cloud out of the night. Bracken would surely have given fight, so that his son, carried on by Mekkins, might be safe.

So, unnoticed, he had watched over the safety of his son. He had crept into the tunnel after Mekkins and watched unobserved, only realizing, because she was so changed, that it was Rebecca who was lying there when Mekkins said her name. He watched as the pup faltered and weakened, willing him to try again. Until the pup had bleated his heart out in one last cry and Rebecca had at last turned her face gently to him and, unknowingly, taken his son for her own.

Only then did Bracken creep softly away. Out again onto the surface of this dark and wet part of the wood, back up south to the hill and toward the Ancient System, to which he seemed forever enchained.

   21  

T
HEY
called the pup Comfrey, after the healing herb that grew by the wood’s edge near Curlew’s tunnels and which, she said, had kept Rebecca alive in the two days Mekkins was away at the Stone.

For many long days they worried over him, all three nurturing and cherishing life into him until he was able to suckle of his own accord, and his sounds were those of the eagerness of a growing mole rather than the desperation of a dying one.

But though Rebecca tended to him, whispering her love to him, it still seemed to Mekkins that some light in her had gone out and that there was a weariness with, or lack of belief in, the very life of which she had once been the greatest celebrant.

When November came, Mekkins could stay no longer and left to attend to Marsh End affairs and, though he did not say so, to see what he could find out about any search that might be being made for Rebecca.

“I’ll take good care of her Mekkins, so don’t you go fretting,” said Curlew as he left. “Comfrey will be all right now, & little weak perhaps but even the slightest plants bear flowers. And as for Rebecca, she’ll take time to recover, but recover she will, you’ll see.”