Time was as obscured as place, and neither mole could have said whether it was ten minutes or two hours before the mist began to clear as suddenly as it had come. First they were able to see a greater distance along the ground as one patch moved off and was not so quickly replaced by another. Then the swirls above them parted for a moment to reveal, quite unexpectedly, a hint of a blue sky. The light brightened around them, and soon they were able to make out the direction of the sun itself, though it was too diffused to show its shape. The mist suddenly cleared to their right, bringing the sound of the river clearly to them once more, and there it lay, quite a way below them; without realising it, they had moved across the valley and a little way up its side in their wandering. They were about to start off towards the river when a voice sang out of the light mist that still lay ahead of them: ‘It’s lost you are, is it?’
Bracken tensed and stepped a pace or two in front of Boswell, squinting to see if he could make out from the dark rocky shapes and shadows ahead where the mole was hidden. He felt angry and frustrated enough for a fight.
The mist rolled away and there were four moles ranged on the slope a little above them, the one they had seen and three others, all equally stunted and mean-looking.
‘Siabod moles,’ murmured Boswell.
‘Yes, we are lost, as a matter of fact,’ said Bracken boldly, ‘and we’d be obliged if you’d tell us where Siabod is.’
There was a rapid crossfire of talk among the four moles which they could not understand before the smaller one, who had met them already, approached and said, ‘And what would you be wanting with Siabod? It’s not a place you just go to, you know.’
‘If you hadn’t scarpered when you saw us before, we wouldn’t have been mucking about in that bloody mess,’ said Bracken, waving a paw at the retreating mist and deciding that a bit of aggression wouldn’t go amiss.
It went very amiss indeed. One of the other moles stepped forward and said in a high, angry voice, ‘Now don’t you go talking to Bran like that, or you’ll have something else to talk about, see?’
Bran smirked and stepped cockily forward in a way he had not dared to do when he was alone.
‘Well?’ he asked.
Bracken did not reply because he was engaged in a snout confrontation with the other mole, who did not impress him one bit. He had learned a great deal about aggression over the moleyears and could tell a phoney when he saw one. Also, he was hungry and he was itching for a fight.
Boswell tried to defuse the situation by crouching down and beginning to explain why they were there by saying, ‘We’ve come from Capel Garmon and are seeking to find Siabod and…’ But it was no use. Bran foolishly darted forward, outraged at Bracken’s apparent ignoring of him, and dared to cuff Bracken lightly on the snout.
Bracken did not hesitate. With a backsweep of his right paw he knocked Bran off his paws, while with a forward thrust of his left he lunged his talons into the other mole’s shoulder and then swept him to the left with a powerful smack of his right paw. Then, facing the two big moles and rearing up before them, he said between angry gulps of breath: ‘Don’t any of you try anything like that again. Now, where’s Siabod?’
As he spoke, the answer soared high above him, behind the silent Siabod moles. Beyond the rim of the valley side the mist slowly cleared and rolled back out of the valley, revealing in the distance the cruel mass of a mountain whose shape was streaked with more and more snow the higher the eye travelled, between which rose steep masses of bare, black rock whose details were obscured by distance. Its size and impregnability seemed absolute. Angry grey clouds kissed at its highest peak, a sharp point that made a mole feel very small and distant.
‘That’s Siabod,’ spat Bran in a high, shaken voice.
‘Good,’ said Boswell quietly, ‘and now that we’ve found it and got to know each other’s strength, why don’t we find a nice safe burrow somewhere and we’ll try and explain why we’re here.’
‘What’s your names, then?’ asked one of the bigger moles.
‘Bracken of Duncton,’ said Bracken.
‘Boswell of Uffington,’ said Boswell, a little wearily because the mention of Uffington rarely failed to have an effect on other moles. It was one of the few systems everymole seemed to have heard of. This time was no exception.
‘Why didn’t you say so before, mole?’ said one of them after a long, respectful pause.
‘Now there’s a fine thing!’ said Bran, his crafty face cracking suddenly into what was for him a smile. ‘A mole from Uffington! An honour. A great honour.’
And the four of them clustered around Boswell and led him up the valley side, leaving Bracken to trail along behind, feeling quite forgotten and a little foolish for having been so aggressive.
