On he went into a fearful day, with whispers of wind in the reeds above his head, the frozen debris of an alien world at his paws. And hunger bearing down on him. A long day of fear, a night of rustling ahead. Another dawn came, a day of gnawing at dry grass stems and snouting out the dangers that seemed to wait at every turn. Another afternoon. A sudden spell of bright, cold sun that made him feel as vulnerable as a flea on an open paw. Night and cold. Day and fear. A starting up of blustering winds as hunger weakened him step by step. The carcass of a dead and frozen bird, torn by other scavengers more used to the marsh than he. A tearing of teeth at it, something to eat, a frozen survival, and then black crows wheeling from the sky and down at him, and he was off again, shaken by the cawings and wheelings of blacksheen wings.
Then the worst horror, the ultimate fear of everymole in nightmare straits: oozing mud. The wind brought a thaw and that brought a softening to the grasses, and a heaving to the ground. Where it had been solid to his tired paws, it now squelched wet. Where it had supported his weight, it now let him sink. His belly was covered in the slime of mud as finally, and desperately, he dragged himself on. Everything gone, why cling to life? But what makes a mole fight death? What force drags one tired paw before the other?
His progress—to where? he wondered—grew slower. If he stopped, he sank. If he went on, he grew more and more in need of sleep. A great crow dived from the white sky again, wheeling and calling about him. On and on, with talons ready, Bracken tried his best.
His best was just good enough, for as the marsh thawed out behind him, the frost quite gone, and pockets of water appeared again where ice had been, Bracken neared a wall that skirted its northern edge. The grass adjacent to it was a little drier and he was on it, and up to the wall, and suddenly alive for a moment more as the crows wheeled about and he looked for cover. The smell of a hole, damp and cool, and he was chasing to it… along the wall to a great round drainage pipe set into it, and into its dank shelter. Behind, against the white sky, there was the flutter of a black wing, the hang of a dark grey claw, the tap of a death beak. He turned away in fear into the strange round tunnel and started down it, only trying to stop himself when it was too late. For it sloped down steeply, its bottom was slimy with mud and as the sides were too wide for him to reach to grip, he could not stop himself sliding faster and faster down it, a tired anger mounting in him at falling to his death like this.
Then, slipping helplessly towards a bright light where the tunnel ended in a void, he fell tumbling in a shower of mud and water into a stone drainage way, beyond the marsh and the wall.
He opened his eyes into a waking nightmare. For fighting and clawing at each other in the mud and slime that had fallen with him on to the hard ground of the drainage channel were two moles, both intent, it seemed, on finding any worms or other food that had come from the pipe in his fall. There was something wild and desperate about each of them—their fur was unkempt and their flanks thin from starvation—and one of them was rapidly losing the fight. Indeed, so unequal was the struggle that the smaller of the two was simply retreating from the other by the time Bracken first fully realised what was happening.
With one final clout, the bigger one turned back to where Bracken lay, to search for food in peace, the other watching from a distance, hoping, perhaps, to pick up a scrap or two.
All this Bracken took in very quickly, and as he did so he felt himself suddenly lifted on to his paws by a sense of anger and outrage. Had he run and run and run from fighting in Duncton only to find himself landing straight into more fighting even in this evil-smelling place?
It was as if his frustration with Rune and Mandrake, at Cairn’s death and the henchmoles, even back to Root and Wheatear—all moles who had faced him in one way or another with fighting from which he had run—had finally boiled over into rage. He snarled, his talons extended, and without any more ado he attacked the bigger mole viciously. There was no fear in what he was doing, and little thought. He simply crashed down his paws and talons, grunting and snarling with each lunge, encouraged to even greater violence by each successful contact with his surprised, and then frightened, adversary. For a moment, the mole fought back, but then, lowering his snout in a gesture of defeat, he turned tail and ran off down the channel, out of the range of Bracken’s sight.
