‘Come on!’ urged Bracken, giving Mullion a final heave from behind to help him stretch blindly into the darkness and fight his way up to the first hold. He got to it just as his back paws began to slide away from under him and hung there gasping for a few moments before bringing his other paw forward and getting a secure grip. The gap between the two sections of pipe was quite wide and the hold was good enough to let him rest for a little as his back paws found a better grip and he distributed his weight evenly. There was a thin trickle of muddy water running down the bottom of the pipe, getting into his snout and fur. The smell in the pipe went to his snout so powerfully that it disorientated him and made him feel nauseous. But he hung on—he wasn’t going to let a Duncton mole think Pasture moles were always quite so nervous as he had been before. Behind him he felt Boswell pulling tentatively at his back paw and then somehow levering himself along him with gasps and pants.
‘Just in time,’ said Boswell, joining him at the first hold. ‘The water was getting so dangerous that Bracken virtually threw me up.’
Behind them they heard Bracken working his way up and then calling out: ‘On you go, Mullion, so I can come on up.’
And on Mullion went, inch by slippery inch, paws constantly seeming about to slip out of control. Then up struggled Boswell again, even finding time to comment: ‘Not a nice place to live, this!’ The round tunnel was cold, wet and dark about them. Behind them they could hear Bracken talking himself on: ‘Now, if I put this one there, and this one here, then I’ll get a better grip and…’, a habit he had acquired from so many months alone in the Ancient System and one that, in moments of crisis, he was never to lose.
The higher they went the steeper the pipe seemed to get and the more nervous each became as the consequences of a slip became increasingly serious. A mole slipping from this height would probably be so stunned in the fall that he would drown in the swirling water at the foot of the pipe.
Here and there the gap between the pipes was quite wide and gave them points at which they could rest—for lying outstretched in the steep tunnel, hanging on only by talons, was very tiring.
It was when they reached about the fifteenth stretch of pipe that Mullion suddenly, and without warning, slipped. He fell back on to Boswell without even getting a chance to cry out, and Boswell slipped back on to Bracken under his weight. For a moment Bracken felt his own grip going, the slimy, odorous tunnel suddenly witness to a desperate struggle to maintain a hold on life—but above him, Mullion managed to get a grip again and Boswell, his back paws bouncing all over Bracken’s snout, recovered himself as well.
‘Thank you,’ said Bracken acidly.
‘Sorry,’ shouted Mullion down the pipe. He was feeling very weak, but really his performance so far was extraordinary for a mole who had been so weakened by starvation.
A short while later, the pipe levelled off to a less steep slope and they were all able to have a rest. The water flow down it, however, was cold and dank and Boswell was beginning to shiver.
‘Well! Well!’ said Bracken, trying to keep up morale. ‘I wonder where we go from here!’ From the darkness far below them they could hear a splashing and rushing of water as if the channel where they had been was now as flooded as the ones at its end had been. It sounded a long way away, and nearer at hand they could hear the occasional drip of water, hollow and ringing through the pipe.
‘I don’t think this tunnel goes anywhere, but we can try,’ said Bracken. The next few sections were easy, though Bracken stayed carefully behind, watching over their progress—he knew how weak they both were. But then there was a hopeless shout from Mullion: ‘I can’t go on—it’s almost vertical now.’ And it was. The pipes twisted upwards and offered no further holds.
‘We’ll just have to burrow out from here, then,’ said Boswell, picking with his good paw at the earth and grit that lay between two sections of the pipe near which they were crouched. But it was Bracken who had to do it and it proved a long, slow job, partly because the embankment was made of hard-packed soil with all sorts of obstacles like pieces of square rock which he had to burrow round, but also because he was so very tired. He seemed barely to have stopped moving since his escape from the Ancient System back in Duncton four days before. But he tried to put that out of his mind, for he knew his chances of ever returning to Duncton were now slim, even supposing he wanted to.
It took him over two hours before a pawthrust broke through the surface of the embankment. He emerged tentatively; Boswell had warned him of the steepness of the slope, and there were the roaring owls to beware of.
