They very soon found they had good cause to fear, for as the path took them nearer to the stark rock face at the end of Cwmoer, leaving the lake now some way behind and below them, they moved straight into the terrible smell again, this time finding as well the awesome tracks of the creature that had made it. Each impression was at least half the size of a mole and comprised the five padmarks like a dog’s, which at their forward edge had an additional deep gashline in the snow where a claw had left its mark. The space between each print was three or four times wider than they had seen in any other creature’s tracks and bigger by far than the tracks of even the biggest fox or badger, while the weight of the creature was such that, whereas their own tracks in the snow just broke the surface, these pressed right through to the black slate beneath. They looked like dog, but a monstrous dog, and one whose size would block out the very sky.
They now took a path that prudently meandered from side to side of the track to seek out a route ahead that went as near as possible to growths of matgrass or slate crevices in case quick refuge was needed.
The pawmarks they had seen crossed their track and rose impossibly in great, leaping bounds up the steep side of the slate tip and over its distant top. Here and there, though the two moles could not see it, the heaviness of the creature had been too much for the sometimes delicately balanced slates, and the tracks were marked by slidings of snow and slate that had avalanched down the face of the tip with its passing.
A hovering kestrel might have seen, in the wastes of Cwmoer below, how the tracks dropped down on the far side of the tip, bounded up another, wandered here and there after the smell of sheep, and then dropped back lower down the valley, padding across the snow-layered grass and rocks until they cut back on to the very same track up which Bracken and Boswell had laboured an hour or so before.
A kestrel might have left it at that, but a carrion crow, who knows how to seek out death and feed off it, might have seen that the tracks then ran clumsily back and forth across the fresh moletracks, the snow beside them stirred and messed by the sniffing and slobbering of some great maw, until finally and inexorably they began to follow back up the track after the scent the moles had left behind.
Meanwhile, Bracken and Boswell were beginning to get tired. They seemed to have climbed and climbed all day, with never a sniff of food before them. The walls of the valley had closed in and now forced the track, and them, round to the left, past a bluff that cut off any view of the lake below and then up a much steeper incline on the right-hand side of the now narrowing valley. Below them the head stream of the cwm rushed icily down in the direction they had come. They began to regret not following it up because, as Celyn had suggested, they might have found food somewhere along it. Now it was too late, for the route down the valley side to it would be too steep and slippery, and so they pushed on up the track, hoping that finally it would reach the head of the valley and rejoin the river again.
As they went on, the sound of the river below became slowly muffled by the infilling of yet another ugly tip of slate, far bigger than any they had passed so far, that looked as if the very head of the valley itself had slumped forward in one massive, loose mound that rose higher and higher up the valley side, the river issuing forth at its foot, until the tip was level with the track on their left and soon rising above it. With this on their left and the final stages of the valley wall proper on their right, they were hemmed in on both sides so that if danger should come, they had little hope of moving to right or left unless to hide among the looser slates at the side of the tip.
But for the half-hearted snow about them, all was black and oppressive, and even the afternoon sky seemed to have turned the colour of slate. There was no colour left in the world at all, and the only sound was that of the stream, rushing below them somewhere through the depths of the tip, and other streamlets coursing their eternal way down the steep, echoing walls of the cwm that now, finally, had the two moles in the depth of its savage grip.
They grew fearful, with danger all around them—from shifting slate, from diving predator, from polecat and from monstrous hound—and never in all their travels had they felt a greater sense of foreboding.
