As dusk began to fall, Rebecca led them off on the trek again, cutting straight up the slopes to the Ancient System. There, the massive grey trunks of the beech trees soared above as the last light of the sun died in the highest leaves against the sky, turning in seconds from pinks and greens to the rustling warm grey that would soon be a thousand tiny black silhouettes. Nearer the wood’s floor great beech branches looped down from the main trunks and hung still and low, the leaves getting a lighter green as darkness fell, for they were set against darkening shadows rather than a lighter evening sky as the leaves high above were.
Occasionally a youngster would stop, from tiredness or plain awe, and look up and around into the massed depths of the trees, like nothing ever seen in the danker closed-in Marsh End. The bleak hooting of a tawny owl cut suddenly through the night from somewhere on the slopes below them, and as they froze to a halt, a distant echoing answer came back from somewhere higher up the hill towards the Stone.
‘Ssh!’ hushed Rebecca softly; ‘hussh,’ for she was used to the sound and in a way it gave her confidence. It was the sound of her wood and it was a long time since she had heard it. ‘They’re no more dangerous to us here than those eerie birdcalls you get from off the marshes,’ she said reassuringly, though it wasn’t quite true. But if an owl came, well, that was that! But she could feel the Stone getting nearer and trusted in its protection.
She ran ahead in the dark, having made them spread out among the roots of two adjacent beech trees, so that she could see if the Stone was clear of mole. When she got there, the light was just as it had been the night before, with a moon beginning to show and cast a thin, milky glare in the Stone clearing. At first she could not see the Stone, but then it was there, stretched up into the dark of the sky, the leaves of the beech tree that stood so near it rustling in the night above. It was the start of Midsummer Night, and the full cycle of seasons had run since the last Midsummer, when Hulver had died. Mandrake. Rune. Bracken. Curlew. The image of them rushed and mixed in her mind—so many moleyears had passed! Why, she was an adult; many of the mothers with young whom she had led up here were younger than she was.
There was an air of expectation in the clearing before her. It seemed to wait as she remembered Barrow Vale had sometimes waited for some old storyteller to set the place alive with the action of a tale of old.
She ran back and brought the Marshenders forward to the edge of the clearing, hiding them in the shadows by its edge on the safer side, away from the slopes. They were glad to rest but were hungry, and Rebecca let them go into the darkness to seek some food, litter by litter, telling them to be quiet and quick about it. In such a place, and with so much heavy expectation in the air, they did not need much telling. Most of them just stared from the shadows across the clearing at the Stone, and waited.
The night air cooled slowly as the full moon rose behind the trees, its light filtering down into the clearing and making it seem almost bright against the shadows of the wood around, which grew blacker and more impenetrable. None of them knew what they were waiting for and all Rebecca could do was look up at the Stone in the centre of the clearing, now rugged and grey in the moonlight, and pray that in its depths it would find protection for these young. She felt that it was their life that was in her charge, rather than their personalities, and, indeed, she was indifferent to them individually. She comforted them, or touched them, if need be, but it was their force for life that she cherished.
To their left, through the wood and by the pastures at the wood’s edge, the wind stirred high in the branches, running lightly through the trees towards them. Then again, stronger. Then stillness. Then wind rippled away over the slopes, disappeared into the night across the wood to the vales and silent places of the Eastside. A youngster rustled and was hushed. Another snuggled closer to its mother, half its face lost in her fur, eyes opening and closing towards sleep.
It was Midsummer Night, and bit by bit the wood was beginning to be alive with the rustles of movement. Wind? Moles? Predator? It was the night the Stone gave its traditional blessing to the young.
If there was one mole who knew what Midsummer meant better than any other, it was Bracken, who had been the fearful witness to the terrible death of Hulver in this very spot twelve moleyears before on the last Midsummer Night. Then he had spoken the words of the Midsummer blessing, moving himself towards adulthood as he said them. Now, Bracken was nearly back, rustling into the long grass and the old year’s leaves at the wood’s edge as he re-entered Duncton Wood.
