All this meant that he found the slopes wearing and at first could only take a short while of them, scampering back to the Westside as quickly as he could—running down communal tunnels where they helped him and over the surface if a tunnel route meant a confrontation he preferred to avoid. It was so tiring placating moles!
May slid into June and he was no longer a pup. Root and Wheatear were nearly adult in size and tried more and more to behave like adults, too, which meant they would ignore him totally, attack him, or push him out of the way. If he found worms when they had none, for example, they would simply take them from him, talons raised above his vulnerable snout as a warning that they meant business.
He sensed that his time in the burrow was running out, so to try to extend it he exaggerated yet further his juvenile pose, going about in the defensive stance of a timid, placatory mole. Burrhead began to call him ‘young Bracken,’ as a way of differentiating him from Root and Wheatear, who seemed in his terms to be growing up normally. Bracken, he was beginning to think, was in some way backward and hardly worth getting into a lather about any more. He obviously wasn’t going to last long once the summer came and the new generation started its search for territory.
‘He won’t stand a chance against this spring’s lot,’ Burrhead told Aspen one day at the end of May. ‘But every litter has its wrong ’uns.’ Aspen nodded, but she was not so sure. Bracken was a disappointment and yet, well, ‘He’s not so stupid as he sometimes seems, you know—he knows much more about the system than either of the other two—in fact he knows more than I do.’ But this was just a disguise for her true feelings about Bracken, which were those of many a female for the weakest of her litter: compassion mixed with hope that they might turn out better in the end. And he did like her stories, which was more than she could say for Root and Wheatear, for all their stolid, moleworthy qualities.
But she didn’t say any of this to Burrhead because it just wasn’t worth it, and she was losing interest in them all. The litter would be gone soon and they had the summer to get through, when she’d be on her own much more, and she was looking forward to it. Sensing these things, Bracken spent more and more time away from the home burrow and began to consider carefully where he might go when he finally left it. He had no desire to compete with the likes of Root for a place in the Westside. He wasn’t crazy!
Nor did he know enough about the north or the Eastside yet to make plans in that direction. So increasingly he began to think the slopes were a possibility—they might be wormscarce but they were also mole-scarce, which was a major attraction. He had seen enough to think he might make a living there, giving himself breathing space to consider what to do next.
With these ideas in his mind, he decided to make a trek to the slopes one day and explore them further, perhaps staying away from his home burrow for a day or two. He slipped away one quiet June morning, when everymole was asleep or preoccupied, and took a mainly surface route up towards the slopes. He didn’t know it, but he was never to live in the Westside again.
It took him until late in the morning to reach his first beech tree, at a point he already knew where he could find some worms. Then he pressed on along what he called the beech-oak borderland until at last he was into new territory. And then on and on eastwards, progressing along a contour line for a while, and then up for a bit.
He saw a lot of life—birds, a couple of voles, several squirrels, a possible fox—but no moles. By the early afternoon he was tired and stopped for food. He had never been so far in one day and knew he would be spending the night in a strange burrow, or perhaps one he must make for himself.
In search of worms, he found an old, disused tunnel and went down it, snout aquiver, but not a whiff or sign of a mole. So he blocked one end of it to make a temporary burrow and, putting his back against it, crouched facing the entrance above and the continuation of the tunnel beyond. Safe, snug and just the place to crunch the worms he had found. He closed his eyes and settled down, heart thumping from the day’s journey. But he was not asleep, and when there was a scratching at the earth block he had made and a warning vibration along the tunnel wall, he was awake and ready, still as a root. Moles feel safe in their own tunnels and make quite a lot of noise, and this one was no exception.
Indeed, he was chatting to himself in a busy kind of way, interspersing it with snatches of a familiar worming song:
‘Now we dig and we scratch and we wedge and we pull,
Now we wedge and we dig and…’
‘Mmm. This shouldn’t have happened, not in my tunnel. Mind you, it’s a long time since I was here. Too long. I’m hungry. Worms, that’s what I want.
‘Worms, worms, worms,
Lots of lovely worms.’
