Above him the Stone was running with rain, leaning away from the beech tree whose roots entwined its base, towards the furthest hills and vales his weak eyes could never see. Towards the west where Uffington lay. But he could feel the world beyond like sun upon his face and it was greater, far greater, than the system in which he had been born and which, in a storm, he now shed.
He crouched surrendered like this for a long time before he became even dimly aware that another mole was near him, watching him from a clump of green sanicle. He didn’t move; he wasn’t afraid. Indeed, after he realised that somemole was there, he started thinking of something different—how strange it was that as evening fell the sky grew lighter. Perhaps it had something to do with the softening rhythm of the rain…
He was right, for high above the hill the swirling masses of the stormclouds gave way to cliffs of whiter cloud and the rain’s noise became a patter as the irregular drip of individual droplets from the trees that surrounded the clearing around the Stone could be heard once more.
Then, as the mantle of rain dropped from him, he turned to face the watching mole with no fear and little interest. The mole was a little older than he, and female. From the great distance he felt himself to be in, he sensed rather than watched her, feeling her to be perplexed, anxious, lost. To his surprise he sensed no aggression at all towards him, none whatsoever, though she was as big as he was. Almost an adult, but not quite. Finally she came forward into the open by the Stone.
‘I’m lost. How do I get back into the system?’ she asked. He didn’t answer immediately, so she added, ‘I’m a Duncton mole, you know.’
He knew all right; he could tell by the way she was, the woody scent. His silence was not suspicion, as she seemed to think, but pleasant surprise—nomole had ever asked him a favour like this in the days when he had lived in the main system.
‘It’s easy,’ he said, ‘very easy.’ She seemed happy at this, relaxing in his calm as she rubbed her head with one of her paws and waited. Suddenly he scurried past her down the hill, by a track she had crossed a dozen times in her journey up the hill: one of the ancient forgotten tracks up to the Stone.
‘Come on,’ he called. ‘I’ll show you.’ They twisted and turned down the wet track, the great evening clouds swirling between the treetops high above, while the wet fronds of the undergrowth tumbled rainwater on to their fur. He darted this way and that, down and down the hill, until she was quite out of breath following him. Suddenly, by a fallen oak branch, he stopped at an entrance she knew, dark, warm and inviting.
‘There you are!’ he said. ‘I told you it was easy. You know where you are now, don’t you?’ Yes, yes she did, and she nodded, but she was thinking of him, looking right into him it seemed. He remembered no other mole ever looking at him like this: curious, compassionate, friendly. Suddenly she came forward and touched him with her paw, or rather caressed him on his shoulder, for a second that he remembered a lifetime.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘I’m Bracken,’ he said after a moment, and then suddenly turned and scurried off up the track and into the evening light. And light dawned on her. She gasped and reached out after him and started to run back the way he had gone. Bracken! So he was Bracken! So hunched, so small, so defenceless.
‘I’m Rebecca,’ she called. ‘My name is Rebecca.’ But he was gone long before the words were out. Then she stopped and turned back to the tunnel he had led her to and ran with relief back into the depths of the main system.
At the spot by the entrance to the tunnel where she had touched him so briefly the air was very still and quiet, with just the drip, drip, drip of the last of the rain from the trees, while far away the heart of the storm moved on across country, leaving Duncton Wood to the silence of the evening and its higher deserted part to the silence of the Stone.
The entrance down which Rebecca ran so thankfully was the highest of those leading into the main Duncton system. Above it the wood narrowed to the summit of the hill, flanked on one side, the southeast, by the steep, rough face of the chalk escarpment and to the west by rolling pastures that fell gently away to clay vales in the distance.
Up there the chalk reached nearly to the surface of the ground, yielding only a thin, worm-scarce soil, but supporting tall grey beech trees whose fall of leaves formed a dry, brown rustling carpet in the wood. The roots of the trees twisted like torn flank muscles among the leaves, while here and there a patch of shiny chalk reflected the sky.
