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 towards 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 grey 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 on 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, Mekkins sensed the pup in his mouth stir feebly and then he 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 made desperately, without pause, for the distant isolated place where Rebecca lay dying.
Never had the smell of decaying wood and rotting leaf mould—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, she 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 began to suckle, the noise of it filling the burrow like the sound of soft spring rain falling among dry grass.
