‘It is hard to imagine that she deliberately decided to sacrifice one of the litter after another in the hope that one at least might survive. But everymole knows that, faced by acute danger, a littering mother will kill and sometimes eat her young. Perhaps what happened was that the weakest of the litter died from lack of milk and exposure and rather than let it lie there to be lost for nothing in the cold, she ate it, hoping that it might give her the nourishment she and the rest of the litter needed. One by one her litter died, exposed in the worst Siabod blizzard in mole memory. One by one she must have eaten them, their blood mingling with the snow and ice. One by one her nipples and teats dried up as the nourishment from the food stored in her body, and from the cannibalism of her own young, gave out.
‘Until at last only Mandrake remained, struggling among her cold teats to find one that would yield milk to his desperate suckling. By now his eyes were open, but all he could have seen was the dark of his mother’s fur, the pink of her teats, and the racing, grey blizzard all around. So, from the start, his world was one of extremes. How he must have struggled to keep his place! Not for him the peace and comfort of safe suckling; never for him the unremembered memory of a relaxed mother holding him warm and close. Fighting for life from the very start.
‘Did his mother wonder if he must be sacrificed for her own survival? Or did she leave it to the elements, herself finally falling asleep, the freezing wind at her back taking a seeping hold on her body, her last memory being Mandrake trying to suckle her cold teats?
‘If that was her last memory, then his first sight might well have been the discovery that his mother was dead. And though he would never know it, she had died to give Mandrake the chance to live, to fight, and to mate. But for him then, there was nothing left but the wind, and the freezing flank of his dead mother. He was too young to think. But think what he must have felt: desolate loneliness, loss, abandonment.
‘It was almost certainly on the eighth day of the storm that this moment came, for shortly after, it began to clear, and it is unthinkable that Mandrake could have survived these conditions for more than a few hours. The freak weather conditions that had nearly killed him now reversed to save him. The sun broke out through the stormcast sky and the freezing wet was replaced by thawing warmth. Steam began to rise from the rocks and peat as it does sometimes after a storm in summer. Creature after creature came out from shelter, stretching into the warm, moist air and feeling themselves back into the light. Here a mole, there a vole, above the larks tilting into the breeze with their song hanging again above the flanks of Siabod. And buzzards and ravens.
‘Mandrake could easily have died then, taken by one of the predators whose eyes now searched the mountain’s sides again. But perhaps his mother’s instinct to return home when the blizzard broke had been right, for where she had finally lain to litter was not so far from one of the outlying entrances to the Siabod system. And the wind was in the right direction to carry his cries to a mole by the entrance, and a female at that. She was very young and yet she climbed across the slope towards the cries and found Mandrake crying and nestling into the cold body of his mother, surrounded by the pathetic remains of the rest of the litter. She comforted him, warmed him and nudged him down the wet slope into the system. Anymole who saw him that day or in the days following will not forget the sight: eyes open, fur barely grown, head big, paws scrabbling and flailing—lost and untrusting and wild. So he always remained, wild and aggressive.
‘As he grew, he took to roaming Siabod’s sides for food. I have seen him myself, the great, fierce Mandrake, silent and evil, leaving the system to search on the surface, fearless of weather or birds. One day he left like that and he has never come back.’
Such is the record in Uffington as told to Boswell himself so long ago. No more is said about how Mandrake came to leave Siabod and make his way to Duncton Wood. Perhaps he thought he might find something he had once lost in a storm. Who can say?
Nor can we say how much of this Sarah knew. But if she had but a tiny fraction of the compassion that her daughter Rebecca was to have—and where else would Rebecca have found it?—then in the mating burrow with Mandrake she must have felt his loss and tried to cherish him as, in other circumstances, he might have been cherished at birth: to help him escape the world of blackness into which he had been born and in which he believed he lived.
