Mekkins awoke restless and worried. It was late morning and the tunnels of the pastures were light with warm air and the soft smell of summer wafting down from the surface. Then a curious, distant rumbling slowly filled the tunnels as he woke up, quite unlike any sound he had ever heard, and it brought him wide awake out into the communal tunnel before he could blink twice more. A passing Pasture mole must have seen his concern, for he said the single word ‘cows’ as he went by. The rumbling stopped and started, passing overhead like a summer day’s cloud that hides the sun for a while in its passing. ‘Cows!’ muttered Mekkins in a grumbling voice, finding a tunnel to the surface, and going to see them close to. He smelt them before he got there, heavy and sweet, and then watched their black and white flanks swaying and stalling above his gaze against a blue sky, the tearing sound of the grass they grazed filling the tunnels and mixing with the slow sound of their chewing and breathing and the chomping and thumping of their hooves. All harmless and sad. ‘Bloody cows!’
The wood was too distant for Mekkins to see, but the sun was high enough to have caught its western edge billowing green above the pasture, dark at its base where the trunks and shadows were and then bright-lit greens of great branches of leaves, thousands on millions; and a shimmer of the lightest blue haze covering them all as soft flaps and sounds of lazing birds, mainly wood pigeon and magpie, broke out through the haze and drifted over the pasture towards him. A couple of young thistle plants, spikes still soft with youth, cast a shadow on the entrance where he crouched.
He would lead them to the Stone, for it was Midsummer, and tonight, surely, that was where they should be. They would wait for the safety of dusk and then start the trek towards the high wood, into the rustling shade of the beeches as the day drew in, and then over to the Stone. He was restless and worried, but never had he had so much faith in the Stone.
Brome joined him, snouted out into the air, and said ‘It’s the kind of day Pasture moles love, when the young can play and us adults can find a bit of food early and then laze around doing nothing!’
‘We ain’t no different,’ said Mekkins. ‘Pasture, wood… moles don’t change. Not really.’ He told Brome his plan and Brome nodded: he knew it would be hard to persuade his own forces to follow Mekkins so soon into Duncton Wood, but if he had to kick them all the way there he would see they went. And anyway, wasn’t this what they needed—access to the Stone? They would see when they got there, just as he had. There was nothing worthwhile in the world—or nothing he knew—that a mole didn’t have to fight for.
As the warm day slid imperceptibly into the evening of Midsummer Night, Rebecca moved silently among the sleeping mothers and youngsters where they lay hiding and resting in an old tunnel she had found for them.
The mothers dozed rather than slept, looking anxiously over the young who snuggled against them to see that they were safe. Some of the youngsters lay separately, paws out and snouts stretched, like the young adults they almost were. As Rebecca passed them by, she was aware that they looked at her with mute concern, just to see if she was really confident that where she was leading them was all right and that she knew they would be safe. She could sense that panic was not far below their seeming calm, and knew that if it broke out they would all be lost. So she went by calmly, deliberately slowly, saying a word here, pushing a youngster out of the main tunnel there, every second seeming an hour to her.
She was almost reluctant to leave, for once they got to the Stone, what then? It was like leading them to the edge of a void with the enemy behind and wondering how, exactly, they were going to fly to safety when they got there. She had no wings for them.
Henchmoles were about. Earlier she had met one, scurrying busily down towards Barrow Vale, and with the rest of them freezing into the wood’s floor, he had questioned her briefly and she had lied that she was from the Eastside. ‘Well, get on back there now, you know the rules. If I weren’t in a hurry, you’d feel the strength of my paw!’ Big and mindless his voice was, and the youngsters from the Marsh End shivered when they heard it, their mothers’ eyes silent on them, imploring them to keep quite still.
