They stayed for several weeks near the field to which Boswell had led them. Not only were they all tired and in need of rest and food to regain their strength, but February was just starting and with it the worst of the winter. The thaw was soon followed by more snow, which gave way to freezing rain that finally slunk into miserable cold days when the nights dragged on and on and the days were so gloomy they barely got started before they were finished.
Mullion, being a Pasture mole and used to open ground, stayed out in the field, quickly taking the opportunity of the thaw to create a simple but extensive system deep enough underground to avoid the frost, which, when it came again, drove worms and grubs down into his tunnels. His lines of freshly dug molehills began to poke out of the snow for a wide area over the field.
Bracken hunted around along the edge of the field until he found a small copse just beyond the fence furthest from where they had first come, where he created a more complex Duncton Wood-style of system, with subtly connecting tunnels and secret entrances concealed by long grass or leaf mould.
As for Boswell, he refused Bracken’s offer to help him build tunnels and worked slowly on his own to create his own system—starting it from inside an abandoned rabbit tunnel. Bracken was surprised at how big Boswell insisted on burrowing his tunnels and it was several days before he realised that the feeling of familiarity they gave him, as if he had been there before, came from the fact that they were not unlike some of the tunnels in the Ancient System.
But it did not need this to prompt him to satisfy his curiosity about Uffington. Indeed, he could hardly wait for Boswell to recover from their ordeal before asking him a dozen questions. His curiosity was matched by Boswell’s about Duncton. But asking questions is one thing, giving answers quite another. The fact was that Bracken was not very eager to talk about it in detail. So he merely outlined the system’s geography, described its personality, explained where he had come from, but affected vagueness about the Ancient System and never even mentioned Rebecca.
These glimpses scarcely satisfied Boswell, whose eagerness after so many moleyears to talk to the one mole he had met who knew anything about Duncton was only tempered by Bracken’s almost painful inability to talk in detail about it. He guessed its causes and, with a compassion and wisdom that Bracken did not sense, eventually stopped seeking the information he felt he needed to pursue his quest for Duncton.
In fact, his self-denial in not pressing Bracken surprised Boswell, for if there was one vice of which he was aware in himself it was impatience. Again and again he had caused annoyance and trouble with other moles he had met since leaving Uffington with his habit of saying too directly what he thought, and his habit of jumping five paces ahead of anymole talking to him.
His fault lay in his own quick intelligence, which made it almost painful for him to have to sit and listen to somemole prattling on towards a point that was perfectly obvious the moment he had opened his mouth.
With Bracken he found he did not feel this frustration—not that Bracken’s thinking was so swift and clear that he never wandered in talk; he did, but there was a quality in Bracken that aroused in Boswell feelings he had not known before and swamped any impatience he might have felt. It was as if Bracken had unknowingly opened a tunnel for Boswell into a world of suffering and joy he had never entered before.
The books he had read, the writing he had learned to scribe and interpret, the two works he himself had worked on all seemed quite irrelevant beside the unfamiliar breathless feeling of being on the brink of something when talking with Bracken.
He saw, too, that Bracken himself was not aware that he had this effect—perhaps not even aware of the sufferings and joys whose power was revealed so well in the way he sometimes talked and by the way his eyes would seem to seek out, even in the burrow where they crouched, the moles he mentioned or the places he described so reluctantly, all of which he had so recently left behind.
He mentioned a mole called Hulver, for example, with a tremble in his voice, as if he had not got used to the fact that Hulver had died long before, violently it seemed. Yet when Boswell asked a little more about him, Bracken avoided the subject, saying, ‘He was only an old mole I knew who talked too much!’ But the look in his eyes betrayed how much more Hulver meant to him than that.
