‘What mole is there, and why?’ he demanded, getting up from where he was and approaching through the moonlight towards the impenetrable shadows around and beyond the tree roots.
A rustle. The sneak of a talon. A whisper again.
‘I said what mole is there!’ Bracken said again, his talons tensing and his body angry beyond his mind.
A movement, a scurry, an intake of breath and as a snout pushed out from the blackness half into the shadow, a voice accompanied it saying, ‘’Ello, Bracken. It’s me, Mekkins. You know! We met…’
‘What do you want?’ demanded Bracken, tensing even more. Mekkins’ friendliness upset him more than if he had been hostile. He wanted no part in friendliness.
‘I’m Mekkins. I met you in Rue’s burrows…’
Bracken was getting more angry by the second, an irrational anger born out of despair. At that moment he would probably have been angry at anything that moved. Bracken could feel anger overtaking him and was almost enjoying the feeling, even though the anger was absolutely real.
‘Look, Bracken,’ said Mekkins, advancing towards him in a conciliatory way, ‘it’s Longest Night and a time for celebration, not…’
‘I don’t care if it’s Longest Minute,’ shouted Bracken. ‘I don’t want you here. There’s been enough moles up here disturbing me…’ He was shaking with anger and began the ritual advance on Mekkins that prefaced a fight—paws stiff, tail high, snout pointed stiffly forward.
At this, Mekkins, no slouch when it came to combat, narrowed his eyes and protracted his talons—he might have been asked to watch over Bracken, but there was absolutely no way he was going to allow himself to be assaulted just like that.
Then, a voice came hesitantly out of the shadows. ‘Bracken?’—and there stood Rebecca in the moonlight. She immediately moved in front of Mekkins towards him.
‘Bracken?’ she said again, touching him with her paw as she had once touched him before. Only this time it was as if she did not believe that he could be Bracken. She spoke as if she was in a terrible nightmare; the frailty and fear in her voice seemed to hang over them all.
He turned his eyes away from Mekkins to Rebecca and looked at her. He was shaking with anger and tension but it slowly died away as he seemed to wake from some nightmare of his own and saw before him a mole so hurt in spirit that his anger and pain was nothing. He thought slowly, ‘Is this Rebecca?’
He was appalled by how thin she was, how stooped. Was this Cairn’s Rebecca? The same he had met here by the Stone? There was puzzled entreaty in her eyes and he saw with utter clarity that she had been so hurt in some way that she could not stand his anger with Mekkins, or the threat in his voice. Words formed very slowly in his mind and when they were ready he said them.
‘It’s all right.’ Then, more softly, ‘It’s all right.’ He paused and then said, as if he were calling out from some depth in which he was trapped: ‘Rebecca?’ He advanced just a fraction and reached out a paw towards her. ‘Rebecca?’ Mekkins crouched quite still. It seemed to him that he could hear two moles calling out to each other from some lost place of their own and, more important, they seemed to hear each other. The Stone rose high above them all, most of it black with shadow, but with a thin line of moonlight delineating one plunging edge of it. When he looked again at Bracken and Rebecca, they were even closer together, Rebecca speaking to him as if he were Comfrey, which in a way he was; while he spoke to her with a gentleness Mekkins had never heard an adult male speak with before, except to a pup, a tiny lost daughter perhaps. Rebecca seemed to be crying, or sobbing, or was she laughing? She was doing something, at least. Then they were nuzzling each other, snouting softly at each other and whether the sounds they made were of tears or joy, sobs or laughter, Mekkins could not tell. They were the sounds of discovered love.
‘It’s Longest Night!’ thought Mekkins to himself, filled suddenly with a sense of its joyous mystery and witnessing for himself the power of the Stone to make moles see each other. ‘It’s Longest Night!’ Involuntarily he began to sing a little song to himself and wander around the clearing to get a view of the Stone on the side that was lit by the moon.
Beneath it, Rebecca and Bracken seemed almost still, for Rebecca’s nuzzlings were of the gentlest, quietest sort, while Bracken’s paw caresses were of the softest and most tender. ‘It’s Longest Night!’ said Bracken to her. ‘Do you realise?’
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes, I do! Mekkins,’ she called across the clearing, ‘do you know what tonight is?’
He answered with a Marsh End ditty, and Rebecca started to laugh with a hint of the old freedom Mekkins had thought he would never hear again, the laughter that put hope into a mole’s heart. But it was deeper and quieter than it had once been. She stopped suddenly and turned again to Bracken and just looked at him. And he looked at her. ‘Why, she understands!’ he was thinking.
‘He knows!’ she said to herself.
