So, as Boswell ran on, Bracken turned back towards the great shining muzzle of Gelert and with all his body and spirit thrust out his talons at it as Medlar had so long before taught him. His talons were sharp and the lunge was very powerful. It caught the hound and caused him such surprise and sudden pain that he pulled massively back and growled for the first time with genuine anger.
With one great sweep of his paw he sought to catch both moles at once, the one who had struck out at him and the other who was fleeing. As Boswell dived beneath the massive slate towards which Bracken had pushed him, Gelert’s claws, or one of them, ran searingly down Boswell’s back, bringing an immediate rush of blood to it. This was sufficient to halt the swing of Gelert’s paw enough for Bracken instinctively to sidestep its nearly fatal sweep, to snarl in his turn and to run under Gelert’s gaping jaws after Boswell into the safety of the slate. A smaller adversary has some advantages. There was a great growling and snarling from above them as Gelert, angry but delightfully excited now, smelt the blood on his paw and hungrily thrust it under the slate, the claws scratching noisily at its edge. Getting a purchase on it, he strained to pull it aside, but though it rocked and Bracken felt its weight lift and slide above him, it did not shift sufficiently to give Gelert access to the moles.
The slate was piled against another even bigger one, and it was to the shelter of this that Bracken now crawled, pulling the half-conscious Boswell with him. The hound lunged and thrust and barked about them, growling at his quarry, smelling the blood from Boswell’s wound, hungry for the living flesh.
Then, as suddenly as his attack had begun, he fell silent, crouching down by the pile of slates where the moles were hiding, head on one side, paws stretched forward as he tried his next and often successful ploy—to wait for them to make a dash for it.
As the silence started, Bracken dared to breathe and turned to Boswell, whose wound he saw was deep and serious.
‘Boswell! Can you hear me? Boswell! How much does it hurt?’ Boswell only moaned, his eyes closed, and a curtain of blood from the long wound running down his left flank and turning his fur into a shiny, congealing bog.
The hound above them, whose odour was now all about their retreat, next tried scrabbling at the ground by the slates, great claws pumping up and down as he tried to dig them out. But the ground was hard with sharp fragments of slate and they gave as good as they got from Gelert’s paws.
He sat down on his haunches once more and waited, pale eyes never leaving the slates, only a sullen twitch of his tail betraying the excited impatience he felt. He had sat like this before, for rabbit and weasel and vole, even for shrew. He had the patience to wait for mole.
The afternoon wore down into sullen gloomy skies as the same drift of weather that had brought wet snow the night before now carried thunderous rain towards the hills and mountain of Siabod. It came from the west in a great swath of lightning and noise, with a rolling of thunder and yellow, sudden light, into the darkest cwms or deeps of the dark mountains west of Siabod. Until, at last, it reached Siabod itself, and as rain fell upon its peaks, lightning picked out its jagged summit against the dark evening clouds. Then, with a crack and a roar and flickering flashes of light, the storm began to roar around the great deep of Cwmoer, flattening the wavelets on the lake with pelting rain, breaking up the snow on the sullen slates, turning the streams all around them into torrents.
Like the rocky bluffs that stuck out of the valley’s sides, Gelert’s head stayed motionless in the rain, water running through his rough, tawny fur and dripping off the blue-black skin that hung from his lower jaw. His eyes stayed fixed on the two slates where the moles were still hiding as a thin run of surface water began to slide under them.
Its cold wetness at first seeped under the slate, wetting Bracken’s belly as he tried unsuccessfully to move himself and the now unconscious Boswell out of its way. But soon water dripped and poured all around him, running through the cracks between the slates and along the impervious ground under them until everything was wet and cold.
