Duncton Wood полностью

Bracken was born on an April night in a warm dark burrow deep in the historic system of Duncton Wood, six moleyears after Rebecca. This is the story of their love, and their epic struggle to find it. It is a true story drawn from many sources, and the fact that it can be told at all is as great a miracle as the history it relates. But without one other mole, Blessed Boswell of Uffington, Bracken and Rebecca would have died the death of legend, their tale declining into the darkness of time as a simple story of love. It was much more than that, as the records kept by Boswell show, and it is these that form the bulk of the material on which this history is based. There are other sources, some in the libraries of the Holy Burrows, others hewn in solitary stone or carried still in the legends of each system whose tunnels life made these three moles enter. But these are mere shadows when set against the work of Boswell himself. But for his love and enterprise there would be no Bracken now. Yet without Bracken, Boswell could never have found his great task. And without Rebecca, there would be nothing at all to tell. So link their three names together in a blessing on their memory, and on the troubled time in which they had to make their lives…

  September. A great grey storm swept its pelting rain up the pastures of Duncton Hill and then on into the depths of the oaks and beeches of Duncton Wood itself. At first the wind lashed the trees, which swayed and whipped each other in the wet. But then the wind died and solid rain poured down, running in rivulets down the tree trunks and turning the leaf mould of the wood into a sodden carpet, cold and wet.

  And the noise! The endless random drumming of the rain drowning every other sound—not a scurrying fox or a scampering rabbit or a scuffling mole could be heard above the noise. Until, when all had found their burrows, the wood was as still in the endless eternal rain as a lost and forgotten tunnel.

  All the moles but one were deep in the ground, hiding themselves from the wet and noise: safe and sound in the warmth of their dark burrows.

  Only solitary Bracken stayed out, crouching up on top of the hill among the great beeches that had swayed in the wind and at the coming of the rain and now stood in sullen surrender to it, dripping and grey.

  He had left the fighting and the talons of the tunnels far behind below the hill and found himself now in the shadow of the great Stone, the curious isolated standing stone that stood silent and huge at the highest point of the wood. It was tens of millions of years old and it looked its age—hard, gnarled and grey. There were others like it scattered across the Downs of southern England, remnants of the mass that once covered all the chalk. As heartstones of the old mass they retained its rhythm, and this gave them a life and mystery that every creature sensed. Until some, like the moles, learned to turn to them at times of thanksgiving or wonder, suffering or pain. Or change, as Bracken did now.

  He had been there since the early afternoon when the shifting September sky, now blue and clear, now white and cloudy, had given way to the deep mauve-greys of storm-clouds. He had crouched, enthralled, sensing the rain lash the country far away in great sweeps of wet, and in awe of the white lightning whose bright flashes his eyes only dimly saw, and the strong shakings of the thunder that entered his body. He felt the storm coming closer and closer, looming towards and above him, and then finally all around, the wind ruffling his fur before the rain turned it shiny black.

  Now he was absolutely lost in it, his paws seeming part of the ancient ground on which they rested, his fur seeming the sky itself, his face the wind and rain. Bracken was lost, no longer conscious of what he thought he was. Not a mole, but a part of everything. As the rain beat down upon him it finally washed away a hopeless desire he had long struggled with—to be a mole like so many of the others, with talons flashing, fighting, rough and tough and eating worms with a hungry crunch.

  When he laughed they didn’t laugh, but in the rain it no longer mattered. When he lay still as surface roots they fought and strove, and as the rain ran off his shining black fur into the leaves, he knew it would always be like that. When he made for a shaft of sun among the ferns they pointed, nervous, to the owl heights above, and always would. He had lived three moleyears alone and in silence, struggling with his desire to run down and back to try to start again with them, but now that desire was being washed away forever in a storm. There was nomole, not in the Duncton system at least or that he knew of, to share his love of the sun and his hatred of talons.