‘Who’s that?’ asked Bracken, amazed.
But she continued her train of thought, piling on the mystery for her own delight: ‘Yes, he can huff and puff all he likes, but I don’t think he can do a thing.’
‘But who is it?’ asked Bracken, eaten up with curiosity.
‘Why, Miss Stuck-up-Rebecca, that’s who. His darling daughter. Twists him round her talons she does. Mind you, dear,’ his confidante placed her snout close to his ear and affected to look down the communal tunnel in the direction of Barrow Vale, ‘mind you, all that won’t last much longer, if you know what I mean,’ digging him in the ribs.
Bracken didn’t know what she meant and wanted very much to know. ‘Do you mean…?’ He hesitated encouragingly, and she obligingly continued.
‘Yes, you know I do. We all know she was an autumn-litter mole, which means she’ll be nearly ready to leave her home burrow by now. What’s more, it wouldn’t surprise anymole if Sarah, Mandrake’s so-called mate, had another litter this summer. Mandrake’s not one to hang about, is he? And Sarah isn’t going to want Rebecca around with another litter of her own to bring up.’
So, piece by piece, Bracken built up a picture of the system and its leading moles. He learned about Rune—‘cunning as a stoat’; he heard about Bindle—‘sulking over on the Eastside now’; he delighted in the stories about Dogwood and Mekkins; they told him about Hulver, about how the owls were most dangerous on the edge of the wood, and about how dangerous the Pasture moles were.
He often heard about Rebecca as well, especially from the males, who revelled in the scrapes she got herself into, causing Mandrake to tear a strip off her again and again, so they said.
She was, so he was variously told, wild, nearly as big as a male of her age, an autumn mole (which meant that she was tough), obstinate, always laughing, inclined to dance about Barrow Vale on the surface, the bane of her brothers’ lives, and frequently punished by Mandrake.
Bracken, who naturally grew increasingly curious about Rebecca, might have been tempted to go and find her had she been any other mole’s daughter and had he himself been more sociable. But despite his ability to wheedle his way into other moles’ tunnels and occasionally even their burrows, he was rather shy of his own generation. Talking with adults was one thing, consorting with his peers was another, and much more difficult. Still, for a while he looked out for her in the communal tunnels and ventured once or twice on to the surface at Barrow Vale, thinking he might see Rebecca there, but nothing ever came of it.
Soon, other things about the system caught his interest. The stories Aspen had told him about the Ancient System, and the occasional mentions it got as a long-unvisited place, fascinated him. Also, there was something about the way moles talked about the Duncton Stone, and the mystery of why they mentioned, as something separate from it, ‘The Stone,’ which was powerful and held all moles’ lives in its power. Was there, then, a Stone a mole could never see?
‘Where is it?’ he would ask. ‘What is it?’ But nomole gave him an answer. He thought he might find it if he went to the Ancient System, but as yet he didn’t actually want to try to go there—it was far too dangerous—but he did want to meet a mole, apart from Burrhead, who had been there.
It was this interest and the fact that he had exhausted the exploration possibilities of Westside and Barrow Vale that led him to strike out towards the slopes one day.
There were far fewer moles on the slopes, and after several visits, getting higher each time, Bracken began to see that he would have to explore in a different way. For one thing, the higher he got, the more he found the mixed oaks and elms and safe undergrowth he had been used to giving way to open beech wood with its disconcerting layer of rustling beech leaves, which gave away every movement if a mole wanted to travel fast. The burrows and tunnels in this borderland had a curious, derelict air that, at first, Bracken found depressing. Tunnel after tunnel would be abandoned and dusty, or taken over by weasels or voles, though only for a short way past their entrances. Or he would find a system that had recently been lived in, for scraps of worms remained, or the entrances weren’t grown over, or he could smell the demarcation marks left by their occupants, faint but discernible. But rarely any moles.
Then there were large areas where nomole seemed to have burrowed, though quite why, he couldn’t work out. When he was there, he began to feel he would never see anymole here at all, and even found himself talking to himself on occasion, almost as if he missed company.
